Review: No One Gets Out alive

No One Gets Out Alive
Adam Nevill
Pan, 23 October 2015
Paperback, 627 pages

I'm grateful to the published for an advance copy of this book.

This is a dark book - very dark indeed.

As with Nevill's previous book, House of Small Shadows, and some of his short stories, the book is a masterclass in creating a creepy atmosphere by layering ordinary, everyday seediness - that flyblown shop you avoid going into, the dodgy looking flat you decide not to rent (if you have a choice) - with a sense of roiling evil.  It's all damp plaster, clinging smells, scuzzy bathrooms and tacky lino.  And dust, lots of dust - but not clean, bookish dust: no, it's sticky dust, the kind the collects behind the cooker like a kind of growth, perhaps.

Stephanie Booth is down on her luck, poor, almost homeless, struggling to survive on bits and pieces of temporary work, having left home because of a violent (and possibly abusive?) stepmother.  She has no choice but to take what's offered at 82 Edgehill Road, Birmingham, even though it comes with a leering, sneaking landlord, Knacker McGuire, who seems to have his own plans for her.  Once Stephanie has handed over her deposit money she's basically trapped, unless she wants to sleep on the streets, and has to put up with the filth, the strange night time noises and bad dreams.

Stephanie's plight is authentic and convincing: this isn't one of those books where the protagonist ignores all the warnings and still visits the old, empty house to be haunted and driven out of their wits. There's no artificiality here, and the book gets very dark even leaving aside the supernatural, exploring misogyny, human trafficking and abuse, and even the antics of a twisting and distorting media.

Indeed, it gets so dark, and Stephanie is in such jeopardy in this respect, that I worried halfway through at the way that the author seemed to be following a rather well worn trope here.  However Nevill successfully avoids this, immediately by keeping his supernatural threat in play even as we are see very harrowing levels of actual violence and ultimately by tracing the origin of the McGuires and their predecessors to that supernatural angle.

It's a fairly long book, at over 600 pages, and while it begins as apparently a conventional ghost story (those noises in the night) which is frightening enough, it soon develops into both a mystery (what are the McGuires really doing, and why?) and a fight for survival - a fight which lasts right up to the final page.

The story is engaging - you'll really need to know how it ends up - though harrowing and difficult in places. In the McGuires, Nevill has created a couple of the most brutish villains I've read for a long time, although even then he remembers they are people, and the eventual revelation of what is behind them almost makes one pity them.

This is a book that will stick in my mind for some time, I think...

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Station Eleven
Emily St John Mandel
Picador, 10 September 2014
Hardback, 384 pages

I received a copy of this book through the Amazon Vine programme. Although I got a proof copy  free to review, I liked it so much that I went out and bought a copy.  Although the hardback comes with a little bit extra, this isn't something I'd normally do...

I really like it when an author messes with the template.  In this case, the collapse of civilization: how does a representative cross section of humanity (well, Western, technological humanity) cope?  This kind of thing is often the excuse for dog-eat-dog survivalist posturing; for showing off deep learning about how to service a generator or bootstrap agriculture; even for setting out theories about society or religion.

The master of that kind of thing was of course John Wyndham - indeed he was so good at it that, for all the datedness of his books, more recent attempts always seem to fall short.  But Emily St. John Mandel takes this hoary old idea and.. kind of.. rotates it out of the page.  So, while her flu-borne plague is credible, her aftermath compelling and its reality certainly gritty, we don't get a lot about exactly how people survive. Instead we get (for example) a beautifully told account of a bunch of travellers caught in an airport as things fail.  They start as bored, stranded passengers.  They emerges as survivors.  How does this happen?  What chnages does it cause in them?  At what point do they stop following instructions, leave the lounge, and start poking around in the off-limits areas? How long does that take?

Perhaps the book has its flaws: it might be nice to know a little more about how people survive. But, frankly, you can work that stuff out for yourself if you really want to.  what makes this story work is people - the marvellous characters who fill the book.  It is, in the end, about people.

An excellent book which has been well praised but, for once, deserves the hype.

In other places, the book is reticent.  We are told, for example, that eight year old Kirsten, who is on stage as a child actor when the crisis occurs, doesn't remember the first year travelling with her brother.  It's implied that the memory was too awful for her: but Emily St John Mandel isn't interested in dwelling on that (no doubt dramatic, no doubt compelling) awfulness.  Instead she shows what kind of person Kirsten has become, how resourceful and confident she is - but for Kirsten it's more important that she continues to act, with the "Travelling Symphony", that she searches for further installments of the comic book, Doctor Eleven, that she obsesses over the famous actors, Arthur Leander, who died that first night.

Though he doesn't survive in the new era, Leander's life frames and guides the story.Many of those we follow knew him, or were his family or associates.  Some of them survive, some don't, but their paths continue to cross (in credible ways).  St John Mandel uses this connectedness as a device to pan from character to character, back and forward in time, using (but not commenting) on the connectedness of the world - which is both a strength (most people don't collapse into savagery and violence but try to make lives amid the ruin) and a weakness (all those links are brittle).

Again, this genre is often cursory about the backstory, just telling you enough to make it plausible who's going to be the heroic leader, who the weak traitor.  But more than half - I think - of this book takes place before the disaster.  It's not just establishing life histories: it's part of the narrative, telling you about the survivors (and some of the non-survivors).  Because in the end it's a story about real (fallible) people.

Review: Rooms by Lauren Oliver

Rooms
Lauren Oliver
Hodder & Stoughton, 25/9/14
Hardback, 339 pages

I was sent this book for review by the Amazon Vine programme.

There is a house.  It is haunted.  Someone inherits and comes to the house and is scared...

I don't know how many times I've read this story.  Sometimes the story is scary, sometimes it's not.  Sometimes the focus is on the mystery - where did the ghost come from? - and how the protagonist can solve (and save himself or herself).  Sometimes, it's more of an excuse for a frightfest.

So I had some reservations about this book.  Lauren Oliver triumphantly inverts the template in "Rooms".

Yes, there is a haunted house.

Yes, people arrive.  Richard Walker has died, and his estranged family (mother - alcoholic Caroline. Daughter - Minna. Son - tortured teen Trenton. Granddaughter - oblivious Amy) come to Coral River settle up.  But rather than being terrorized by the ghosts (needy, prim Alice: blowsy Sandra) the Walkers bring their own issues, their own histories with them and catalyse a healthy dose of self-reflection by the house's occupants.

The story is told in a rather lovely counterpoint, in the voices of successive characters both living and departed, focused in turn on each of the rooms in the house.  As well as exploring it in space, we also go backwards and forwards in time, to see both the earlier lives of the Walkers, and the origin of the ghosts themselves.  This is a haunting told, at least in part, from the Other Side: we see the shock of Alice and Sandra as they recognise the children, grown up and gauche, no longer the little angels they knew. There's a great deal of sadness - both Alice and Sandra have their secrets, their regrets, and some of these emerge as the Walkers explore the house, turning up evidence of this and that.

We also see the family - especially Caroline - trying to come to terms with their own past.  The ghosts are trapped by their history, with no possibility of escape: will the newcomers escape that fate?  Will Caroline be able to put aside her drinking, Trenton... just grow up (I liked Trenton, he's a wonderful evocation of a moody, uncertain teenager, but oh is he annoying at times!), Minna stop chasing anything in trousers (the mailman; the funeral director; even the policeman who calls in to ask about a missing girl)?

It's a marvellous way to explore a web of family relationships, all made flesh in the substance of the house itself, the same house which gives reality and form to the two ghosts.

A completely different take on the ghost story,  and a great read.

Review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Transworld, 15/1/15
316 pages

I am grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of this book.  It is though going to be tricky to review - much of the information is hinted at, inferred and only emerges after a degree of teasing.  There’s a lot of potential for spoilers.

If, like me, you commute by train I'm sure you will have gazed out of the carriage window into the back gardens of houses beside the line. Often, the track is raised up, and you can see right into the garden, or even the house.  Though people are protective of their privacy at the front, nobody seems to realise just how much you can see from the train - the weed choked gardens, of course, the neat gardens, those with trampolines and sandpits... the house with a pair of deck chairs on a flat roof, the bike stored on a fire escape, posters in the bedrooms… what Hawkins has done is to imagine how much you might see if you really looked, if you saw the people as well (which, to be honest, you generally don't at eight in the morning, as they're probably also on their way to work too).

That idea of peering into someone else’s life is very powerful. 

But of course lives seen like could be very deceptive.

Rachel travels into London every day, looking out of the window, observing the gardens, the couple she calls "Jason" and "Jess", weaving happy little daydreams about them.  We sense something a little strange about Rachel: but what it is, the book only reveals slowly. Likewise, only gradually do we learn why she is paying such close attention as the train passes that particular row of houses

Hawkins shows great delicacy and skill as she hints at Rachel's problems.  The focus is on the situation she's looking into, not on her.  But drawn into that situation she is: there are natural comparisons with Hitchcock, perhaps.  "Stranger on a train seeing what she takes to be evidence of a crime" is an obvious one, but there are others, too (spoilers!) as the book digs deeper into the relationships between the various couples who live beside the railway track.

I loved the way here that Hawkins makes it oh so plausible for Rachel to be trying to find out about what has happened.  She comes to believe she is involved, and that only by filling gaps in her own past (if there are gaps) will she solve the crime (if there was a crime) and only by solving the crime will she fill those gaps. So far, so logical, but Rachel is damaged, blundering, both a threat (so some) and, perhaps, herself in danger.  While she is not immediately sympathetic, Rachel is a complex and engaging character who wins over the reader, especially as it becomes clearer what has happened to her.  By the end I guarantee you'll be cheering on (though perhaps cringing at what she may do next).

It is an absorbing read, perhaps a little slow to get moving - but if you commute regularly you'll be used to sitting waiting.  It's all part of the journey, and can be put to good use. 

I once lived in a house by the railway, in a town an hour from London.  We could hear the station announcements from our back garden.  We could see the garden from the train, just for a moment.  I don't travel that way now but sometimes I take the train from Paddington and I spot that garden, wonder who lives there now, are they happy… perhaps I should take that train more often, and watch more closely, get to know them better...

Review: City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

City of Stairs
Robert Jackson Bennett
Jo Fletcher Books, 2/10/14
Hardcover, 400 pages

My copy was bought (yes, it was ahead of UK publication date: I think I got lucky...)

Sometimes, as I approach the end of a book, my reading slows. I don't want the experience to end. I want to stay immersed in the world, accompanying the characters. I just want it go on. This was such a book, such a world; these were such characters. Robert Jackson Bennett has created a wholly believable yet utterly strange setting, peopled by diverse, interesting, maddening yet - above all - credible individuals.

The action takes place in the city of Bulikov, on the Continent (the names of people and places on the Continent are vaguely East European: Vohannes Votrov, Vasily Yaroslav, Pitry...) Bulikov was the chief city of the Continent, location of the Seat of the World where the Divinities would meet together. But it - and much of the Continent - was ruined when enslaved Saypur rose up, slaughtered the gods and enforced the Worldly Regulations, which ban even the mention of a divinity, miracle or other supernatural thing. So the Saypuri are hated by the Continentals for erasing their history: and the Saypuri hate and fear the Continentals for their cruel enslavement before the revolt.

This isn't a mouldering, legendary background.  It all happened within living memory: the events that almost every looks back to - from different perspectives - are as real to them (gods included) as Western colonialism or the Cold War to us.  It's a powerful background, which naturally motivates a story of murder, spying and revenge.

A Saypuri historian, resented by the locals for his explorations of Continental history (history forbidden to those who should own it) is murdered. Shara Thivani, secret operative - spy - for the Ministry of Foreign affairs, arrives to investigate. From that moment, the story become a blend of a Le Carré-esque thriller, a theological meditation on human and divine nature, and a techo-thriller (for certain, miraculous values of tech). If that sounds like a jumble, it really isn't.  The story is compelling: Thivani is a marvellous protagonist, experienced, successful, cynical (she exposed corruption at home and has been exiled from Saypur for sixteen years) - and torn. Torn between justice for Saypur and justice for the Continent. Between duty to her illustrious family and to her country. Between her faithless ex-lover and her murder investigation. She's just wonderful, as is her sparring partner, Governor Turyin Mulaghesh, military ruler of the city. Together the two women grumble and clash and work together to face down plots, violence and nameless horrors. It's great fun, moving, and frankly unputdownable.

Confidently, unselfconsciously, the book challenges the whiff of gender and racial prejudice that still haunts corners of the science fiction and fantasy universe. The setting isn't the stereotyped proto-European fantasy world: Saypur's people are brown, not white.  Unremarked on, women fill central roles: the closest we get to an acknowledgement that some may find this strange is the occasional aside (Shara and Sigurd meeting in an alley to hunt for an elusive piece of magic: "Does it only work for men, not women? No, of course not, don't be absurd", or Mulaghesh, grinning as Sigurd strips naked and covers himself in lard before plunging into icy water: "There are times", she says "when I kind of like my job").

The book has a vein of wayward humour. Under its Divinities, the Continent ran by "miracles" - magical tricks and artifacts created by the gods. With no gods left, many of these have stopped working. The rest are outlawed - but by a bureaucratic quirk this means they weren't destroyed, but rather confiscated, catalogued, and stored in vast warehouses (think of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) So we have lists of items, reading a bit like a handbook for Dungeons and Dragons:

"356. Shelf C4-145. Travertine's boots: Footwear that somehow makes the wearer's strides miles long...

357. Shelf C4-146. Kolkan's carpet: Small rug that MOST DEFINITELY possesses the ability to fly...

358. Shelf C4-146. Glass window. Originally was the holding place of numerous Ahanashanti prisoners, trapped inside the glass. When Ahanas perished, the panes bled for two months - prisoners were never found or recovered. No longer miraculous..."

The book also has darkness. The vision of the "knuckle-man", the "voice under the cloth" with its many jointedness, mockery and voicelessness, was disturbing, as were the visions and actions of some of the fanatics, devotees of dead gods.

The dark centre of the book is, perhaps, the theme of lost history. The Saypuris suppress anything divine (for fear that the gods may return? from a desire to forget their oppression? simply for revenge?) But to do this, they need to know what they're suppressing. So we have the catalogues, the warehouses, the historians.  Shara knows more about the divinities than most Continentals are allowed to. She can say things they're forbidden. In turn, the Continental resistance movements, the religions fanatics, have gaps in their knowledge, so they are effectively following a faith they have made up rather than inherited. This spiritual hole echoes the messed-up geography of Bulikov, broken when the gods died (but unremarked, lived with, because to comment on or recognise it would be to mention the divine, and that's forbidden).  The book is a bit Nineteen Eighty-Four in the way history has been rewritten. And we eventually see that this... contagion, this loss of facts, of truth, doesn't just affect the Continentals - there are things the Saypuri conquerors would rather not know as well.

It's a terrific read, compulsive, persuasive and thought provoking. One of my favourites, so far, this year.  And there's a sequel coming!

Review: Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

Acceptance

Jeff Vandermeer

Fourth Estate, 2/9/14

Hardback, 352 pages

Warning: this review has mild spoilers for the earlier books "Annihilation" and "Authority" - if you haven't read those yet (and why haven't you?) don't read any further.

In the third part of the Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer seemed to have set himself an impossible task, both to match the standard of the previous books and to draw the narrative to a close despite having pretty well established his "other" - that baffling Area X - as unknowable, ineffable. It's a sign of just how good the writing is that he manages the latter at all, let alone, as he does, giving new insights into his characters, creating a pacey, gripping story and leaving the reader with a LOT to think about.

This is a more complex book (structurally and thematically) than the other two. "Annihilation" followed a single, disastrous expedition into Area X, a mysterious, impenetrable region somewhere on the southern flank of the US. "Authority" was apparently a more conventional (...for some value of "conventional"...) story of administration and espionage set in the Southern Reach, the organisation overseeing Area X, which documented the attempts by a new Director ("Control") to grasp what exactly was happening. "Acceptance" dots backwards and forwards, now following Control and Ghost Bird returning to Area X after the events of "Authority", now now following the former Director, now going back to Saul, the lighthouse keeper, before the creation of Area X or to the previous Director and her dangerous plan to... well, that would be telling.

All these are enthralling narratives, sparely told. Though much remains baffling and unclear, we learn a lot about what has been happening - Central's brutal attempts to manage the expeditions, to manage the Southern Reach, even, one suspects, to manage reality itself ("[she] has been operated on, reconditioned, broken down, brainwashed, fed false information that runs counter to her own safety, built back up again...") Control's family and their links to Area X are explained as is the role of the "Seance & Science Brigade", even, at one level, the nature of Area X itself. We learn enough to close the narrative as a story, if that's waht we want to do. 

But on another level, these books aren't - at least I don't think they are - so much about "what happens" that as about the challenge of Area X. 

 Faced with this impossible anomaly, this utterly alien infestation, how do we respond? What do we do? How do we cope with the unstated threat, the uncertainty?  In VanderMeer's trilogy, the guiding hand behind much of the "official" response turns out to be Lowry, portayed almost as an evil genius, with his underground bunker, manipulating, hypnotising, seeking, almost, a way to smuggle a weapon into Area X. he is a spymaster, a planner, a bureaucrat using Cold War tools.  Define the tools, perhaps, and define the threat?  But we saw in Authority how that ended. (Or perhaps not - at the end of this book it's far from clear what really happened).

But there are other responses to Area X. We see Saul's, developing even before Area X's existence. We see that of "the biologist" Annihilation (the account of which I found truly moving). And Control's. In the end, I think they do all - differently - find acceptance (except Lowry, we never learn what becomes of him).  That is the point of the story - not how Area X came about (we find out, but I don't think it is particularly significant).  There is a sense in which the "story", the expeditions, are secondary to this group of characters and their responses.  It is, in the end, all a "long con" - VanderMeer writes of "grifters" and "marks", there is an implication that the Southern Reach, the attempts to understand, contain and control Area X are an elaborate deception - even a self deception - on the part of those involved.

This is a haunting book, a laden book, to be read and thought about. It shouldn't be read quickly and will, I think repay rereading (as would the previous volumes). At first I wished all three had been published together - they are a whole - but I'm now glad they weren't, as for me the tempation to read them in one go would have been too great to resist. And they do need to be read slowly and carefully.

This trilogy and deserves to be recognised as a classic.

Review: Extinction Game by Gary Gibson

Extinction Game

Gary Gibson

Tor 11/9/14

Hardcover, 400 pages

I’m grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book.

Life is fragile.  In a many-worlds universe, where everything that can happen, does happen, there are so many ways to end civilization

Volcanoes can lob billions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, triggering an ice age.  Asteroids or rogue moons can set the world on fire.  Disease can rage, whether natural or created by humans.

Sometimes, the people just seem to disappear.

Jerry Beche has seen all this, and more. It wasn't enough that he was left alive, the last man in the world. He was then recruited by a shadowy Authority as a “pathfinder”, employed to loot those myriad, desolate alternate Earths for weapons, technology and data.  This book is his story, and that of his colleagues, survivors like him, who have proved themselves up to the task. But people like that don’t just do as they’re told, they aren’t good team players.

Gibson is scarily good at conjuring up apocalypses, ways for the world to die, whether natural or the result of human tampering.  As Beche explores these, we gradually learn what happened to his own – our own? How would you tell? – world, what he went through, and what he lost. I’m impressed that Gibson uses Beche's history mainly as backstory - there is enough there to make a novel in itself.  But he is reaching further than just-another-apocalypse.  While the interplay between multiply-iterated global disaster and the rivalries and squabbles of the pathfinders is also striking, there is still much more going on here than there seems at first.  

The pathfinders are a ragged group, truly diverse in ways that science fiction and fantasy are often accused of overlooking (again, Gibson is good at delineating their personalities and backgrounds). This brings conflict with the Authority, which is revealed to have pretty bigoted, narrow-minded views.  The core of the book, then, is a cross between a spy thriller (who is on which side? What even are the sides? Who can Beche trust? Why do they react so strangely to him?) and a kind of John Wyndhamesque, survivalist nightmare.

Exactly what the Authority is up to, where it came from and how it threatens the future of Jerry and the others - all this does becomes clear, slowly.  It is a compelling story, difficult to put down and pretty much action packed throughout. Gibson evokes a deep sense of unease.  Not only is Jerry alone, amongst strangers who – while human – literally come from different worlds to him, but the very premise of the story emphasises the fragility of the Earth and of life on it. 

That’s backed up by what we’re not told.  Mysteries abound.  Why are so many Earths empty, with no sign of what happened to the people?  Is there something out there even more horrible than artificial diseases, than global winter, than the beebrains?  Lots of ends are left loose, and I hope this means Gibson will follow up with more - even though after reading this I'll see all those routine news stories about spreading disease, global warming and possible asteroid strikes in a different light...