The Sand Men by Christopher Fowler

The Sand Men
Christopher Fowler
Solaris, 2015
PB, 320pp

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

It's safe to say The Sand Men book won't end up being recommended by the Dubai Tourist Board. It is a work of fiction with at its heart an (obviously) fantastical plot device which no-one is going to confuse with reality.

No offence there then. But in its more mundane aspects it is implicitly scathing about the treatment of migrant workers, the double standards of a state prepared to look the other way from the antics of expat Westerners (until some line is crossed) and the environmental hubris of building an artificial ski slope in the burning desert. Above all, it paints a deeply depressing picture of life among those well-paid expat engineers, architects and managers and their wives. (The spouses are generally wives: a deeply conservative culture seems to obtain where it's the men who are employed on the construction projects while wives endure an almost Colonial style of life in the walled compound - generally bored out of their minds and skewered by that double standard I mentioned above). So, if you knew you disliked the whole idea of Dubai but weren't quite sure why, this book might sharpen up your views. 

In other words, while this is basically a thriller, Fowler is also engaging with the society he depicts, and a very peculiar one it is.

Lea, Cara and Roy are newcomers to Dubai, innocents stepping off the plane into a new world. For Roy, his position on the luxurious Dream World resort project is the last chance, after he's been out of work for months, of making it as an architect. Dream World is behind schedule and must catch up. or the mysterious Chinese/ Russian backers of the project will not be pleased. For daughter Cara, the move is an unwelcome wrench from her London school and friends - yet possibly an opportunity to grow up, live a bit, and widen her horizons. For Lea, a journalist who supported the family though lean times, it's pretty much a prison sentence - more of less confined to the company compound and constrained, as a wife, by a set of conventions right out of the 50s - the 1850s, that is: Fowler describes the way of life you might get crossing Stepford with a hill station under the Raj ("...as if she had been stationed in some doomed and distant fort owned by the East India Company...")

Most of the story indeed focuses on Lea (after a gruesome introductory scene in which an Indian engineer dies horribly) with a few episodes from Cara's or Roy's point of view. We see Lea's optimism that she might find some local role writing for a magazine fade (investigative journalism is not encouraged, what's wanted are pieces on the joys of water skiing or shopping) to be replaced by a growing paranoia and a quest to discover why there are so many deaths and disappearances among the expats and their families. Meanwhile Cara makes those new friends ("Cara was unsure whether Norah meant good-sick or bad-sick") and Roy works longer and longer shifts, rising in Dream World Group and changing, demanding that Lea fulfil that alien wifely role ("The women around here are throwbacks. it's as if feminism never happened. And I think the men all secretly like it that way...")

The family seems to be fracturing.  Do they even need Lea any longer? Nominally a housewife she doesn't even have much to do at home as there is a frighteningly efficient and apparently compulsory maid to take care of things (the maids are rumoured to be spies for Dream World Group). Just what is her role? What will she do? Lea tries to reach out and make friends, but only seems to get on with those already marked down as trouble-makers. As events in the compound - and at Dream World - begin to go awry, Lea sets out to discover what's behind them. Is it just normal slapdash, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, or is there more going on? And in either case, who can she trust?

Replete with references to the Emerald City of Oz ("look behind the curtain") and to Kubla Khan's Xanada and introduced with a quote from JG Ballard (who else?) this is an excellent story, contrasting the gaudy neon excess of the hotels, bars and shopping malls with the timeless darkness of the desert - which was there first, and will be there after:

"...Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/

The lone and level sands stretch far away." (PB Shelley, Ozymandias).

A Cold Silence by Alison Littlewood

A Cold Silence
Alison Littlewood
Jo Fletcher Books, 3 September 2015
PB, 368pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have an advance copy of this book.

I think A Cold Silence is best read as a coda to Littlewood's first novel, A Cold Season, which appeared in 2012. If you haven't read the earlier book - which in my view is superb - then go and get it and read it before starting A Cold Silence - and before reading any further in this review because there are, inevitably, spoilers for the earlier book below.

And I will now give you a little space to do that.

If you're still following me - A Cold Season ends with Cass escaping from Darnshaw, driving away from that cold, haunted place with her returned husband Pete and son Ben. She believes she has lost her soul to the sinister Remick, but that she somehow may be able to bargain for it using her unborn child - his child - as some kind of leverage.  Remick will, she believes, come back - a day she fears but also looks to with a strange kind of hope.

A Cold Silence answers the dangerous question, "What happened next?". I say dangerous because, when a book ends in as open a way as Cold Season does, there is a risk that any follow-up will disappoint, that it will not chime with how readers expect it to be. And indeed, Cold Silence is a very different kind of book. I think it may divide readers of the earlier story, but that, taking the two together, we do get a much more rounded view of what happened.

The story opens nearly twenty years on. Cass, Ben, and his sister, Gaila, have lived together as a family most of that time, albeit scarred by earlier events, but the children have now moved out. Ben's father, Pete, is absent again from this book. Cass, so active - at least eventually - in the previous book, has retreated into her home, where the consequences of what she did - of what Remick and his coven did - play out. She draws pictures of bleak moorlands and dark churches and insists that there is bad in Gaila: she is less hopeful, more damaged and more introspective than the Cass of Cold Season - which may, I'm afraid, disappoint some readers.

But that has to be the case, doesn't it? There is unfinished business here. Remick never, it seems, came back. Cass battled on, raised her kids, did her best - but nothing has been resolved and this has poisoned relationships, raising questions about the nature of family loyalty, about love and about motivation. (And as we saw at the end of Cold Season, Cass's motivations weren't exactly pure). Much of the book is, one way or the other, a meditation on these questions - so in that respect, too, this book is very different. There is little of the brooding sense of approaching horror that we get in Cold Season (and in Littlewood's subsequent two novels) - although having said that there are some effective scenes early on where Ben, who is the central character here, recalls how Cass would never visit Darnshaw and notes that, when approaching the valley, it was as if winter lurked close even on a summer's day. (Ben is mourning his friend Jessica - one of the characters who appeared as a child in the earlier book - who has killed herself, and he goes back to Darnshaw for the funeral - breaking an old promise to his mother).

Instead, the book signposts early on where the battleground will be: an online game called Archeron which has become notorious for its occult overtones and apparently Satanic aspects. You can ask things of it, but it will name its prices (Jessica's suicide followed immersion in the game). There is a scene in Gaila's London flat where the city is seen through a window, all ready for the taking: all this can be yours...

Archeron itself is a clever device to surface the presence of ancient, brooding evil - the Devil has modernised, come out of the shadows: CS Lewis's Screwtape would I suppose approve - but I have to admit that modern offices and online interaction can lack atmosphere compared to remote moorlands and standing stones, and much of the weight of this book is therefore carried instead by the shifts and compromises between Ben and the other central characters and the gradual revelation of the dynamics of the Cassidy family. It's much more character led, and in that respect a more subtle book (and this is where a reader of the earlier book will be much better prepared to understand what's going on - another reason to see these books as a whole).

The writing is great, there are surprises and shocks and this book still delivers the chills. Like Cold Season, Littlewood has fun dealing with a menace that's rooted in traditional Christianity but using characters who have a very modern ignorance and misunderstanding of the concepts. And we may be being primed for another sequel (please?)

So - a rather different read from the earlier book - still an enthralling and chilling horror story but more cerebral: food for (rather disturbing) thought.

The Killing Kind by Chris Holm

The Killing Kind
Chris Holm
Mulholland (Hodder), 27 August 2015

HB, 320pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have a copy of this book through Bookbridgr.

At first sight, this book was surprisingly different from previous books of Holm's I'd read - his Collector series was a noir-tinged fantasy trilogy featuring an operative who stopped up souls as their owners died - think a smoother, wise-cracking version of Terry Pratchett's Death.

The central character of The Killing Kind is Hendricks, who doesn't collect the souls he sends to - wherever they go - but simply bumps off their owners. Hendricks is a very particular sort of hitman, focussing exclusively on other hitmen. Somehow he's got a line on who the organised crime gangs want killed, and, amazingly, it turns out the intended victims will pay a pretty penny to avoid ending up dead.

There are Reasons for Hendricks' taking up this particular line in crime: guilt after surviving when the rest of his US Army unit died, guilt at what they'd done before that, a desire to atone - but to be honest, for me, that didn't really matter, what matters in this book is the relentless action, Hendricks' ingenuity at doing what he does, and above all, the dramatic hunt that ensues when the Mob discover someone is messing with their plans. Of course they buy in another legendary assassin and of course we end up with a full-blooded duel - and of course there is plenty of carnage along the way.  There isn't much more to the plot than that, although there are plenty of twists and turns along the way.

In some respects, perhaps, it's not so different from the Collector books. The main distinction is perhaps less the lack of supernatural stuff than the simpler plot - here we don't have the complicated eschatological battle lines of the earlier trilogy.  

Not a deep character study - they are mostly lightly sketched - but the writing has great pace and, once begun, this book demands to be finished (actually it doesn't so much demand as grab you by lapels and make you read it). There is peril. There is a scary body count scary (so much so that it's entirely feasible no one will survive by the end) with ingenious deaths. There is a world weary, disillusioned hero who has to learn again what he will fight. 

Very satisfying.

What I Did In My Holidays

Well, it looks like Summer's just about over - Son got his GCSEs the other week, our few days being rained on in Dorset have come to an end and it's a rainy Bank Holiday Monday. I start back at the Circumlocution Office tomorrow (boo!) so I thought I'd look back to sunnier days in July when I took a week off and went digging. 

I'd spotted that, fairly near us, there was an actual archaeological dig going on: at Dorchester-onThames aimed at understanding what happened there at the end of the Roman period. This is a period that interests me, and and they were encouraging local volunteers to join in so I bought myself a trowel and went all Time Team.

I've been interested in archaeology for ages, but done very little. When I was 15 or 16 I did a teeny bit at Norton Priory near where I grew up, but that's about all. And that was 30ish (very ish) years ago. So I was a little apprehensive. Bring waterproofs, they said, sunscreen, stout boots, gloves, a sunhat, a water bottle and - most importantly, of course - the trowel. So I collected all that and turned up at 8.30 on the Sunday morning. There was a very mixed collection of people on the dig - apart from the supervisors and the director and assistant director, the team included know-nothings like me, more skilled amateurs (of varying ages) who were doing extra-mural courses, and archaeology undergrads.

After a safety briefing - where to walk and not walk, avoiding dehydration (it was very hot and dusty), proper use of tools, precautions in the wet when the ramp into the trench would become slippery - we were assigned to different groups and allocated areas. Within an hour I was actually digging.

The picture on the right shows how the site looked while I was there. Our area was the left hand corner at the far end, just in front of the spoil heap. (When the wheelbarrow was full, it had to be run up out of the trench and tipped on top of that heap). North is to the left, as is modern Dorchester. The Roman road from Silchester to Alcester (near Bicester) crosses the far end of the site.

I was allocated an area to clear - the aim was to remove darker, post Roman material overlying a lighter, sandier level which was believed to be the top of the Roman levels. This is my area in progress (after a couple of days) with some of the darker material gone. You can see my finds tray, containing - mostly - bits of animal bone and pottery. Not having dug before, I was amazed by the quantity of this. At the top of the picture is a ditch, which was slowly being excavated by one member of the team a proper archaeology undergrad, who was working in more and more cramped conditions as he dug down - I hadn't appreciated the contortions required by archaeology: as it was it's taken several weeks for my knees to recover (I think they've recovered...) and I was working in fairly simple areas.

As I said above, it was very hot and dusty in the trench, so I was relieved when, mid-morning, the digging stopped for tea. I soon learned that archeaelogy works on tea: there were morning and afternoon breaks and tea was also supplied at lunchtime.

As well as digging, we were given lectures/ talks by the experts running the dig as well as others who came in specifically to talk to us: we heard about the Roman pottery of Oxfordshire, basic archaeological surveying, identifying bones, the sequence of sites in the Thames valley, the history of landscapes and about use of photography in archaeology. It's years since I attended any kind of non work-related lecture and I found all this simply fascinating.

What was also interesting was seeing the struggles that go on to identify the various layers and levels as you dig - with numbers attached to each and debates over whether this layer of greeny sand was the same as that, I was often left looking on in amazement as the supervisors settled an issue. Basically I was waiting to be told what to do: also actually quite nice when I spend the rest of my work life having to decide what the answer is (of course I make it up as I go along but don't tell anyone).

The picture above shows my bit a couple of days on and records a pause during one of those debates - the difference in levels was because the darker, later material had been deeper on the left and once removed it left a ridge which eventually had to be surveyed and mapped. I actually took the picture because I'd found a nail (you can see the white tag where it was) and was quite impressed with myself for that. (I was even more impressed that I'd managed not to prick myself on it: it was sharp end up - be warned!)

This picture shows most of one day's finds (and my bike) just so you can see the amounts of stuff that was there. This is pottery and bone, which was just collected up in trays - metal bits like coins and nails had their location recorded more accurately (hence the white labels).

It was an incredible week which I really enjoyed - meeting new people, learning stuff and being outdoors. While it got sweltering in the trench and was very dusty, we were carefully looked after and there were all those teabreaks.

Then on the last day we had torrential rain and, basically, the work stopped in mid morning. The site was too slippy, there was a danger of trampling things down, and pushing the barrows up the ramp became too risky. I was pretty pleased with myself though because, almost at the last moment, i found my final coin, right in that far corner - it seemed like an excellent and to a great week.

A few days later, and everything was covered over again, as you can see below. I hope, though, to be back next year, if they'll have me.

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

Karen Memory

Elizabeth Bear
Tor, February 2015 (US edition)
HB, 346pp

I bought my copy of this book.

Karen Memory is an enjoyable romp of a book.  Set in the mid 19th century, while it has steampunk pretensions - mind control gloves, airships, medical robots and steam-powered sewing machines - on which the plot depends, to a degree, it avoids the trap that so much steampunk falls into of glorifying that time.

There's plenty wrong with the Rapid City in which Karen (surname Memery in the book) finds herself  working in Madame Damnable's brothel, amidst the anarchy of a strike-it-rich gold rush in the US northwest. In particular, there's Peter Bantle and the ghastly cells in which he keeps women trafficked from India and China. Madame's establishment is far removed from these, even if the two serve the same appetites. The book doesn't shy from such realities, any more than it ignores the fact that Karen can't vote because she is a woman, or that the US Marshall Reeves is illiterate because he's a black ex-slave or that he and his postman, Native American Tamoatooah, need to tread carefully since those they are pursuing may be villains but also have the privilege of being white, male and "respectable".

Bear blends all this, and more, to create a seat-of-your-pants adventure full of scrapes, jeopardy and derring-do. The action barely lets up throughout the book. Karen's a confident hero, happy to take the fight to the villains when she needs to defend those she loves, especially Priya, one of Bantle's girls who has escaped a life in his "cribs", and reckless of the danger she places herself in.  But there is more to her than kick-assery and fighting spirit. We learn how she came to be at Madame's, and what she wants from life. Both aspects - her courage and her history - make her a deeply sympathetic protagonist, this was only slightly undermined for me by the dialect Bear employs which comes over a bit Tom Sawyer. (But then, a standard steampunk set in Victorian London cam come over a bit sub Sam Weller, so at least it's a change!)

A fun book, essentially steampunk-with-a-twist (and sensibly not going all out for the brass-goggles-and-corsets thing).  Definitely recommended.

Blogtour Review: Murder in Malmö

Murder in Malmö

Torquil MacLeod

McNidder & Grace Crime, 2015

PB, 316pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review as part of the Murder in Malmö blog tour - for details of which see below.

I was especially intrigued by the book as it seemed to me to represent a crossover - Scandi crime written by a "foreign" author.  Macleod was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Durham - although he notes that his family originated from the Isle of Skye, where his Viking ancestors settled "after one of their many raids.  Hence the name Torquil, which is Scandinavian."

So perhaps not that foreign - but still, how would it work? I think one of the big attractions of these books for the UK reader has been getting an insider's view of what we tend to regard as perhaps not idyllic, but well behaved, orderly, socially contended nations close at hand. And generally in a crime novel that insider's view will show up the side the Tourist Board doesn't want to dwell on, so the clash of viewpoints should bring an interesting tension.

It's one thing, though, to skewer your own country like this: another perhaps when writing about another. So I was also slightly anxious.

This is the second novel about Inspector Anita Sundström, following from Meet Me In Malmö and I should warm you immediately to read the earlier book first because while Murder in Malmö is self-contained - you don't need to read anything else to enjoy it - it does give away pretty much the entire plot of the other book including some surprised elements.  That's because it directly follows earlier events: Sundström appears here in the aftermath of some pretty traumatic stuff, she's on shaky ground with her detective team (one of whom in particular has been making trouble and profiting from the earlier events) and a character from Meet Me In Malmö appears with whom she has continuing dealings. 

I thought that character development worked very well: with Sundström's self-belief and standning undermined, she has to work pretty hard to reestablish herself and it's not helped by the fact that her relations with her student son are strained, or by being given a "baby" policeman, Hakim, to oversee (and he's an immigrant to Sweden (as some would see it - having come from Iraq as a child he sees himself as a Swede). She is fearful of Westermark, a monstrous sexist and indeed the office sex pest (see how that picture of egalitarian, progressive Sweden crumbles?) and of her boss, Moberg who she needs to protect her from the fallout of events in the earlier book. So she's got little scope to go out on a limb when the simple art theft to which she's been assigned seems linked to the high-profile murder of a businessman the rest of the team are working on.

At the same time, a gunman begins to target Malmö's immigrant population.  As the body counts from the different crimes rise, and more paintings go missing, the team seem stretched to the limit - and will they, undermined by internal squabbles and recrimination, be able to put all the pieces together?

This is a fine mystery and a compelling read. MacLeod brings together the threads very deftly and the book concludes in a nail-biting chase which is done very well indeed.  Sundström herself is a great creation: pig-headed and far from likeable, and with personal problems (but NOT the cliched burned out detective) while very much the conscience of her squad.

And - to answer the question I raised above - Macleod really brings off the trick of writing a novel about another country that does delve into the dark side, without coming across as being critical or (even worse) gleeful that all isn't perfect. 

 So - if you like what you hear, go back and read Meet Me In Malmö but get this book at the same time: you'll want to read them together in short order. 

Review: The Settling Earth by Rebecca Burns, with Shelly Davies

The Settling Earth
Rebecca Burns, with Shelly Davies
Odyssey Books, 2014
e-book

I'm grateful to the publisher and author for letting me have an e-copy of this book via Netgalley.

Not far from where I work in London, at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall, is a plaque

commemorating a meeting held in 1848 which led to the founding of Canterbury Province, New Zealand.  I've often been past and pictured the Victorian worthies - probably male worthies - gathered solemnly. Clearly somebody saw great significance in that event and ensured it  would be recorded on what is - for London - a fairly colourful and eye-catching monument.

But it doesn't tell you anything abut what happened next.

This book does.

Billed as a collection of short stories, The Settling Earth is perhaps more of a story cycle, exploring the reality of settler life (and with some perspective from the original Maori people) through the lives of a number of, mostly, women. The stories are loosely linked, featuring many of the same characters and with later stories filling out aspects of the earlier ones. Burns is good, especially, at capturing the lives of her characters through telling details: a baby's rattle delivered in a parcel, a woman yearning for pickled eggs, a treasured memento brought on that three month voyage from Britain.

In the first story, A Pickled Egg, Sarah waits alone in her house on a remote farm for her husband to return from town. She's been getting forgetful lately. Perhaps it's the weather? In the next story, Mr William Sanderson Strikes for Home, we learn what the husband has been doing all the while in a "boarding house" and then in Miss Swainson's Girl, we meet one of the women who works in that house, to support her child, passed on to live with a stranger. There is a sense of desperation in Phoebe's life, with all the hopes and dreams of a new life on the other side of the world betrayed.  Later we will meet Miss Swainson and her son, in Port and Oranges.

With Dottie, the focus shifts to a woman doing "The Lord's Work" caring for orphans: but "it was harder to convince herself of the Lord's grace at night". This is a story full of guilt and self-deception, beautifully paced and with a shattering conclusion, introducing Mrs Ellis who, amidst ghastly events discovers "small moments of tenderness". Like most of the characters in these stories, she has her own sadness, a background hinted at but never stated as she walks among graves, reading inscriptions to a child, a husband.  "The tramping of Auckland's streets stretched the cord of remembrance. Small wooden crosses, resting silently under a dappled oak tree. A paced kitchen floor and an empty cradle."

Mrs Ellis is, seemingly, a widow: the main character in the next story, Dressed for the Funeral, is a newly married woman, married to an older man and regretting it: and she learns some home truths from an unlikely source before discovering a shattering piece of news and being faced with a choice.

The final two stories, Ink and Red Lace, The Beast and Balance, return to the farm where Sarah is waiting. Her husband returns accompanies by a Maori man, Haimona, but all is not well with the family of Hans, the farm manager. It's Haimona in the final story - written by Shelly Davies, a native New Zealander - who brings some perspective, some balance, to the whole cycle and it closes where it began.

These are wonderful stories, describing the lives of women coming to terms - in different ways - with a radical break to their previous lives. They are women who relive the desperate circumstances that led them to emigrate even as they face new problems and see the dream of a new life fade. They are all strong characters and one senses that the Victorian conventions which came with them on the emigrant ships won't last long in the New Zealand climate.

This is simply an excellent, absorbing collection of of stories and an excellent, absorbing story overall.