While it takes a book like this to remind us how cutting-edge and accurate Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar really was, author Kip S. Thorne (predictaWhile it takes a book like this to remind us how cutting-edge and accurate Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar really was, author Kip S. Thorne (predictably) ignores what is perhaps the biggest idea of the movie.
This idea has also proved the most polarising, with a range of critics and viewers labelling Nolan as sentimental, goofy and on a New Age trip as a result. I am, of course, referring to Dr Amelia Brand’s Big Speech near the end (played with deadpan earnestness by Anne Hathaway):
Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something... Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.
Many critics have commented that the strong father-daughter relationship that drives the emotional engine of Interstellar is a vestige of the script/story when Steven Spielberg was still on board to direct it, as far back as 2006.
The only time that Thorne refers to the human elements of the movie is when he talks about Mann’s planet and the explosion of Endurance, adding (apologetically) that Dr Mann’s murderous actions lie outside the remit of science (instead of a mad robot as in 2001, Nolan presents us with a ... mad scientist. Gee, how original.) Thorne then launches into a detailed, gleeful account of the Endurance explosion and how accurate it is, as enamoured as a Boy Scout with a ball of string.
Of course, the first time that Hollywood tried to depict a black hole was Disney’s 1979 movie, prosaically entitled The Black Hole. Thorne gives a compact account of how much our knowledge has changed in the interim.
The first time that the concept of a wormhole entered Hollywood as an SF staple of time/space travel was Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey (John Lithgow in Interstellar was also in 2010), based on the book by Carl Sagan (Thorne worked with both Sagan and Zemeckis on the science).
Flash-forward to 2014 and Nolan’s answer to Stanley Kubrick: a rigorously scientific and accurate SF movie, based upon (and extrapolated from) the latest research and data. Everything from Dr Brand’s equations on the blackboard to what Cooper sees within Gargantua, from the crop blight which decimates the earth at the beginning to the space colonies at the end, is either plausible or completely accurate.
Apart from Thorne himself, a crop of eminent scientists, theoreticians and academics were called upon for their two cents’ worth (though the final decision always lay with Nolan, Thorne points out constantly, especially when he has a quibble or two with the director’s artistic licence).
Needless to say, you should only read this book after you have seen the movie. If you attempt to read this first, I think you will have no desire whatsoever to see the movie, because it sounds like a graduate-level quantum physics lecture.
If you have seen the movie and then read a book like this, you will be amazed (as I was) at the amount of science you would have absorbed. And quite painlessly, all with state-of-the-art CGI and a truly thunderous Hans Zimmer score to boot.
My only quibble is that Thorne is a much better teacher than he is a writer – there are some wince-inducing instances here that could have used an editor’s cudgel. Apart from that, Thorne’s enthusiasm for his subject matter shines through every page, making this a truly memorable companion piece to a great movie.
Is it the greatest SF movie ever made? I would have to say it is probably the best American SF movie ever made, as the idea that the whole concept of space travel is simply to replicate the American Dream among the stars is singularly depressing.
There is no inkling here that base-line humanity will have to change; that evolution and transformation go hand in hand. One only has to look to great SF writers like Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter to read what lies in store for us; hopefully Hollywood catches up soon....more
This is hands-down the weirdest, and curiously one of the most affecting, books I have had the privilege to read in 2014. Impressive and incendiary. OThis is hands-down the weirdest, and curiously one of the most affecting, books I have had the privilege to read in 2014. Impressive and incendiary. Overall the structure and tone reminded me of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: a series of loosely connected and intertwined stories/tales/visions set in a mythical world of the imagination.
That world is either modern suburbia, a virtual reality simulation, a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by giant tsunamis, an old age home/convent, a future utopia where robots are ubiquitous … there is even mention of a Space Drift near the end, that is able to fold time and space, which reminded me of M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (instead of a cat here we have a red dachshund).
A vital clue is provided towards the end, where a hinge is described as “not only being the place where a real scallop attached itself to its shell, but also the place where you could go forward and back with equal ease”.
There is a lot of mention of doors, openings, even wormholes, and neologisms like ‘dactilo ports’, while the titular duplex is described at the beginning as having properties “that are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.”
What I loved about Duplex is how it reminded me of a time when I was much younger and I perceived reading as a dangerous, even illicit, activity that was anti-social and took me out of the world as I knew it.
It reminded me of the thrill of ordering books from storage in our home town’s legal-deposit library that had not been taken out in years, feeling that not only had I rediscovered these lost books, but that by reading them, somehow activating their magic...
Duplex also reminded me of the brain freeze I would often encounter in reading new authors, and attempting a book that I knew was beyond my teenage comprehension (elastic as it may have been at that time), and being dimly aware of a vast realm of ideas and feelings just beyond my grasp.
If you read a lot of SF and po-mo or contemporary fiction, you are likely to take to Duplex like a duck to water, if you have not discovered Davis already (this is my first time reading her).
This book really reinvigorated my sense of wonder in reading: as a process of discovery (and rediscovery); as a contract with the author to educate and entertain me in equal measure; and as an emotional and cathartic journey, where the heartbeat of the story is much more valuable than the narrative footprint....more
A couple on honeymoon at a Caribbean resort get roped into helping a marine biologist when she discovers mermaids in the coral reefs, setting off a coA couple on honeymoon at a Caribbean resort get roped into helping a marine biologist when she discovers mermaids in the coral reefs, setting off a comedic chain of events – not least of which is the apparent death of the biologist by drowning in her bathtub. I am unsure if I was supposed to find this funny or not, which is an indication of the problematic tone of this novel.
It is billed as a satire, and I was sort of expecting something along the lines of Carl Hiaasen. However, the book is way too frothy and loses its buoyancy when it segues into a rather fumbling ‘whodunnit’.
Surprisingly, the titular mermaids only make their appearance quite late, with the first section dissecting the life of the newlyweds. By then it is quite apparent that the mermaids are just a McGuffin, with Millet giving short shrift to any serious consideration of such a potential discovery.
The ‘whodunnit’ section is totally implausible, with a lot of bad plotting and even worse characterisation. Also, Millet attempts to be mock serious at this point, which simply does not work. I also found the lead female character to be extremely fatuous and irritating; her Labrador-like ‘jock’ husband is equally annoying.
The scene where she accidentally plays footsie with a hick from the American Heartland at the dinner table, and then feels guilty when he presumes her attention was that of a fellow foot fetishist – it cannot be cheating if it is foot-genital contact, says the hick, apparently borrowing a cigar from Bill Clinton – is enough to set the feminist movement back a couple of centuries.
Of course, our heroine then spends the entire fucking book worrying about whether or not she actually is a foot fetishist, by which stage the long-suffering reader just wants to kick her in the face and throw her to the mermaids as fish bait.
There is quite an awe-inducing moment towards the end when Millet pulls a Peter Jackson ‘more is bigger and better’ move on the mermaids ... but then she ruins the effect totally by having our heroine ruminate on an impending asteroid strike on the planet. WTF?
Thus the book limps towards its watery conclusion. Satire is one of the most difficult things to write, as it requires a fine balance between incredulity and believability. It does not mean that commonsense and logic can be thrown out of the window. Millet tries to set the bar higher than a light and undemanding beach read, but scuppers her own best intentions....more
There are many problems with The Wolf Gift – the dreary exposition, the sophomoric philosophising, the lack of any real bite in terms of horror or eroThere are many problems with The Wolf Gift – the dreary exposition, the sophomoric philosophising, the lack of any real bite in terms of horror or eroticism, the purple prose – but perhaps the biggest problem, which gives rise to all the others, is that Anne Rice attempts to transfer the template of Interview with the Vampire onto a new mythology.
Werewolves are not the same as vampires, and simply to treat them as interchangeable supernatural creatures, both with great insight and wisdom, refined taste and impeccable Old Word credentials, immortality and insatiable carnal and venal appetites, inflicts as grave an injustice on these tropes as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight sequence has done.
In fact, I would say the damage is greater, because Rice at least should know what she is doing. This, of course, is the writer who modernised vampires for a new generation, paving the way for everything from Meyer (the Gods help us all) to True Blood.
However, the big mistake here is that, instead of reinventing the werewolf story, she cranks out all the beats of Interview with the Vampire (we even have an older werewolf accidentally creating a young protégé, who in this version is a gay boy wolf – this is so laughable as to be completely unbelievable).
It has been years since I have read Rice – I gave up round about the Egyptian phase, and was quite oblivious to the Roman Catholic phase – but I do remember being quite enamoured with Interview with the Vampire. I think the great secret of that book was that we all wanted to be that young reporter interviewing Lestat in that room, gaining access to a world of unimaginable terror and beauty.
There is no comparable narrative hook in The Wolf Gift. At 23 years’ old, Reuben is an even bigger stuffed shirt than Little Lord Fauntleroy. His acceptance of the said ‘gift’ of werewolfhood – in the initial attack at Nideck House – is preceded by such a bungled attempt at writing about an older woman seducing a much younger man that the subsequent violence makes no impression whatsoever.
Just when the reader thinks he is dreaming, that no modern writer can possibly write with the prudishness or squeamishness of a Victorian school teacher, that Man Wolf Reuben stumbles upon the conveniently separated, and accepting, Laura in the big bad forest, and promptly deflowers her.
You would think that Rice has never seen an erect cock in her life before, the way she writes:
Something had happened to his entire body that was very much like what happens to the erectile tissue of his organ when a man is sexually aroused. It increases marvellously in size, no matter what the man wants to happen. It goes from something flaccid and secret to becoming a kind of weapon.
Rice’s take on the werewolf mythos is that it represents an evolutionary offshoot of prehistoric man in response to predation by more powerful species. Thus the ‘wolf gift’ evolved as a kind of defense mechanism. Not content to leave it there in the realm of pseudo-speculation, she then posits that her werewolves can ‘smell’ evil, and are driven to destroy it wherever it appears.
Rice hints heavily that this compulsion reveals the hand of God in nature. Reuben even visits his priest brother to receive absolution; Rice queasily conflates theology and morality by signposting the ‘superhero’ aspects of her werewolves.
Surprisingly little happens in this quite long novel. Much of it seems to take place in the drawing rooms of Nideck House and its surrounding forest. Indeed, the novel even ends with the kind of mega info dump that made The Witching Hour such torture to read.
As a horror novel, this scores absolute zero. The plotting and pacing are non-existent; Rice commits such obvious technical blunders as having Man Wolf Reuben being able to take selfies with his iPhone during his transformation.
Said transformation scenes are punctuated with endless exclamation marks (!), with Rice struggling to convey anything other than Man Wolf Reuben being covered by a giant mullet. There are lots of descriptions of hairstyles in the book, and lots of mirror gazing and hair flicking, which makes you wonder if Rice is interested solely in lycanthropy for its man-grooming possibilities....more
This short novel left me with a lot of ambivalent feelings: on the one hand, it is quite spare and unflinching. The unadorned prose seeps melancholia.This short novel left me with a lot of ambivalent feelings: on the one hand, it is quite spare and unflinching. The unadorned prose seeps melancholia. On the other hand, there is quite a distance between the reader and the text. This produces a curious lack of affect, with the novel ultimately being underwhelming.
Of course, that could be precisely the impact the author was aiming for. I did find myself mulling this book after I had finished it. Somehow it crept into my brain space, as certain books are wont to do – a thought, a reference, a comparison; anything can produce a touchstone for the reader. Whether or not this means it is a good or well-written book is, however, debatable.
All Days Are Night is the first novel by Peter Stamm I have read; a brief bio mentions him being a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. Stamm lives in Switzerland and writes in German; this was translated by Michael Hofmann.
I mention these facts because there is a definite European feel to the novel, a kind of Savoir-faire wrapped up in fatalism, like a mystery within an enigma. This curious duality is reflected in the title, from a William Shakespeare quote:
All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
It is also one of those novels that not only start as one thing but then end up as something totally different, but one where those turns are quite unexpected.
It begins with Matthias and Gillian having a quarrel at a party, and then ending up in a car accident on the way home. Matthias, who remains a cipher throughout the novel, is killed, while Gillian’s face is disfigured. Okay, the reader thinks, I can see where this is going ...
We then learn the reason for the argument: Gillian posed nude for an artist called Hubert. The second part of the book tells Hubert’s story, his estrangement from his wife and son and his disaffection with his own artistic integrity and capability.
Hubert and Gillian eventually meet up again at a mountain resort, where she is entertainment director. Both are changed people. I do not want to give the ending away, suffice it to say that it is heartbreaking and liberating at the same time. Ultimately we realise that the accident was merely the start of Gillian’s evolution as both a woman and a unique human being.
There is a lot here too about art and representation, and how we derive meaning from the world through imagery and sensory impressions. Hubert’s crisis of art is quite convincing.
Stamm also paints a believable portrait of Gillian as a television producer and writer, whose vocation very much relies on her beauty. When this is destroyed by the accident, it results in her own professional and existential crisis.
We really do get a glimpse into the souls of these two damaged and disparate people, and the forces – a lot of it beyond their control – that both attract them to, and repel them from, each other.
Worth reading if you like fiction that probes into the psycho-pathology of its characters, without pandering to its readers, and with no clear-cut resolutions to the complex questions it poses. Perhaps little joy to be had here, but a smorgasbord of thought....more
What I love about David Mitchell is his fearlessness as a writer, his willingness to experiment, and his boundless enthusiasm for pushing the envelopeWhat I love about David Mitchell is his fearlessness as a writer, his willingness to experiment, and his boundless enthusiasm for pushing the envelope of language and, indeed, the very form of the novel itself. Also, he does not pander to his readers, and expects you to follow where he leads. No molly coddling here; no easily digestible plots and stereotypical characters.
Well, that is what one would have thought after Cloud Atlas. Imagine my surprise then when The Bone Clocks turned out to be one of Mitchell’s most enjoyable, easily digestible and, yes, linear books to date. It is structurally akin to Cloud Atlas in being a series of inter-linked novellas. But there any resemblance ends, for this is equally unlike anything Mitchell has written to date.
Mitchell is not only at the top of his game, but is having a huge amount of fun. So much so that you wonder if he is not parodying himself, especially in the Crispin Hershey section, where his character not only dismisses genre fiction, but meta fiction as well (especially lazy writers who have ‘writers’ as characters).
Mitchell then follows this post-modern nudge-wink with a bravura ‘high concept’ SF / fantasy section that is as over-the-top as anything in a Hollywood ‘sci-fi’ blockbuster. Think Harry Potter / Star Wars / Twilight combined – that is how ‘purple’ this section is, replete with psycho-duels and dramatically collapsing masonry.
The difference here is that the reader believes every single word, because we have invested so much in these characters up to this point, and also because the Anchorite / Horologist battle is so well grounded in the very fabric of the story.
Rather than end the novel on such an impossibly high note, Mitchell then opts for a quiet, bittersweet coda that is one of the best ‘end of the world’ scenarios I have ever read. This elegiac and graceful section really showcases Mitchell’s talent as a writer, and brings Holly’s story full circle, as it were.
Of course, in order to buy into this novel, I think you have to fall madly in love with Holly Sykes, which I did from the very first page. If nothing else, Mitchell is an absolute master of characterisation, especially in terms of regional dialogue – what I found remarkable is how quickly I began to ‘hear’ Holly’s voice in my head. He then introduces the rather odious Hugo Lamb – who is anything but ... and then brings Hugo and Holly together.
As an end note: There have been a lot of comments on the ‘cohesiveness’ of this novel. I think Mitchell’s overarching strategy here is to take disparate elements and knock them together, like balls on a pool table. He does not simply write separate novellas and slap them together.
While reading the IMAX Show Me The Money section on the Anchorite / Horologist psycho-duel, I kept on thinking of the Iraq war section – which has its own jargon and geopolitical context, and which would make for equally bizarre reading if one knew nothing about it.
Does this ‘fantasy’ section trivialise the Iraq war and ‘end of the world’ sections? I am unsure; the success of Mitchell’s mythopoesis is definitely up to the reader ‘buying into’ the fantasy elements. For me, the novel’s disparate parts function seamlessly, and the novel is much more powerful as a result. Have faith in Mitchell, in other words, and he will show you wonders and terrors.
As a final end note: a lot has also been made of the ‘fantasy’ elements of this novel. Is it science fiction? Well, yes and no – if I can think of anything to compare it with, I would point to a novel like Transition by Iain M. Banks.
Mitchell is a restless auteur, and likes to prowl the shadowy edges of genre boundaries. He takes a real risk by injecting some high-concept fantasy into the mix here, but manages to strike a careful balance with the real heart of the story, which of course is the wondrously alive Holly Sykes, whom we follow fearlessly, and with love, into the darkness....more
This is a perfunctory and dour thriller that attempts to update the Frankenstein story, with mixed results. The ending is elegant and rather sad, but This is a perfunctory and dour thriller that attempts to update the Frankenstein story, with mixed results. The ending is elegant and rather sad, but is a case of too little, too late. The big problem here is that the main protagonist, Nicholas, is so unlikeable that not even his doppelganger likes himself; which poses a bit of a problem for the reader.
I got the feeling reading this that Marcel Theroux himself failed to believe sufficiently in his hypothesis of using language to ‘code’ human consciousness, like a role of imprinted music for a player piano.
This can then be used to transfer such a consciousness into a different body. (We never learn what happens to the consciousness already inhabiting the body; all we get of ‘the Procedure’ itself are vague and bloody hints).
These sections of the novel are rather preposterous, tied up as they are in meditations on Russian mysticism and pseudo science. I think Theroux wrongly tries to straddle the fence here: he should either have opted for more mysticism and horror, or injected more scientific speculation and hence increased the thriller quotient.
Instead he tries to do both, which unfortunately turns a potentially fascinating premise into a bland potboiler. There are some standout sections here, like the ‘reborn’ Dr. Samuel Johnson figure who reacts in abject terror at the usurpation of the London of his memory, and the framing sections set in a rather seedy London mental unit. But this is very much a case where the parts (of bodies, minds and unfinished theories) do not make for a unified whole....more
“I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, “It’s all meta-fiction, all the time.”
“I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.”
These two quotes sum up what I found both fascinating and frustrating about this short novel of three inter-linked meta-narratives by Paul Park. On the one hand, Park rather dazzlingly conveys not only the potential of the written word, but the plasticity of the novel format itself.
We are so habituated to traditional narrative formats that any form of meta-fiction (simply understood as a recursive story, where the beginning and ending are enfolded into a Möbius Strip of multiple beginnings and endings) often takes us out of our comfort zone as readers.
As soon as we have to ‘work’ at a text in order to extract its meaning, the compact between author and reader changes, I think, where the reader becomes a far more active (and culpable?) creator of that particular text and its embedded meaning.
It is not that simple though, for on the other hand, meta-fiction often engages multiple levels of irony and various sleight-of-hand tricks to frustrate the reader in his or her quest for meaning. I think the main aim of this is to force the reader into thinking differently about how the text itself functions as a discrete unit, and the (sometimes contradictory) roles that the author and reader play in this process.
I say ‘contradictory’, because the main bugbear with meta-fiction is this: any reader not habituated to this particular form is unlikely to find any kind of conventional narrative satisfaction or resolution here; and hence is unlikely to read such a book, which defeats the stated purpose of educating readers into reading differently and thinking about texts differently.
The other problem I have with meta-fiction is that it is so self-interested in the mechanics of fiction that it is often hard to connect to the story and its characters emotionally. As I get older, I am finding that I really value an emotional connection to my reading. Yes, I am fascinated by books such as this, but they remain hard work and are often very difficult to connect with.
If this is your first exposure to meta-fiction of any kind, give this one a wide berth. Rather begin with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a form of meta-fiction ‘lite’. Then again, if you are already a habitué of Mitchell, you will probably be fascinated to find out how far the form can be expanded and twisted in the hands of a dedicated writer like Park....more
This is kick-ass SF of the highest order. It is provocative and smoking hot in terms of some of the latest scientific thinking and ideas.
As with BlindThis is kick-ass SF of the highest order. It is provocative and smoking hot in terms of some of the latest scientific thinking and ideas.
As with Blindsight, the most fascinating part of the book is Watts’s ‘Notes and References’, where I was amazed to learn how much of it is based on real facts and current hypotheses (here Watts joins an elite group of scrupulously accurate SF writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter and Paul McAuley).
Equally important, Watts is a very good writer. He strikes a much better balance between the info dumping and sheer barrage of ideas than he did in Blindsight. In fact, Echopraxia is not so much a sequel as an iteration of the previous novel.
The theoretical focus is free will, as opposed to the nature of consciousness in the previous novel. This shift allows Watts to tackle some hot potatoes such as the meaning of religion and the existence of God.
That he does so with great vigour, humour and insight within the framework of a pretty conventional SF thriller (with vampires and zombies to boot) is testament to a considerable achievement.
One of the weaknesses of Blindsight was that Watts never takes us to his future earth, but only gives us fascinating glimpses. That novel, of course, was constrained by being a First Contact story of the Theseus mission to the asteroid Icarus and what it encountered there.
We do indeed find out why contact was lost (or was it?). In the sequel, however, Watts widens his scope even further to bookend Echopraxia with extensive sections set on a future earth overridden by environmental catastrophe and rampant gene-splicing, where large swathes of the population have retreated to digital environments.
I was a bit disappointed in the ending, which seems a bit of a misfire given the build-up. Or maybe I just did not understanding the implication that Watts was striving for. Perhaps he deliberately takes a step back to leave himself room for a third and final novel....more
There is the Ray Bradbury whimsy-with-a-hint-of-darkness Stephen King that writes mom-and-apple-pie books like Joyland.
And then, thank heavens, there There is the Ray Bradbury whimsy-with-a-hint-of-darkness Stephen King that writes mom-and-apple-pie books like Joyland.
And then, thank heavens, there is the dark side of Stephen King, which compels him to fire out nasty little nuggets like Mr. Mercedes, which is black as pitch, pretty gruesome where it needs to be, and very, very funny (though it is the sort of dark comedy that makes the reader complicit in its illicit humour).
This is not the ‘detective noir’ I thought it would be, but then one must always be leery of pre-publicity, especially when it comes to a writer as unpredictable as King, who runs the gamut of total crap like Desperation to dazzling brilliance like Doctor Sleep.
It is fitting to refer to the latter, his last book, because King seems to be on a roll at the moment (I have Revival lined up as a holiday read, and that is already an Amazon Top Pick of 2014).
I was quite surprised to see some Goodreads reviews not only decry the lack of supernatural elements in Mr. Mercedes (they are wrong, by the way), but also bemoan the fact that it is not horror at all. Did we even read the same book, I found myself thinking when I put it down after its grim but hugely satisfying ending.
King has always been superb at evoking creepy relationships, and none are creepier than that between Brady and his mother (the phrase “my handsome honeyboy” quickly becomes a sobriquet for such queasy intimacy that it leaves the reader squirming).
Brady’s mom joins a long line of beautifully evoked female characters in this book, from Hodges’ girlfriend Janey (this is a bittersweet love story as well, among its many other attributes) to the embittered old woman who gets the story rolling, as it were. Hodges himself acknowledges that an inordinate number of these women meet a diverse array of fates.
Then there are the ancillary characters like Jerome (yes, there is a cute dog as well). Jerome’s Huck Finn patois is a hilarious counterpoint to the non-PC thoughts of Brady we are constantly subjected to, and hence balances it out. But this is not nearly as neat a technical trick and narrative sleight of hand that King manages to pull off with the tormented character of Holly.
The particular revelation here (and let no one dare spoil it for you) is so masterful and so note-perfect that it involves a 360° change-of-view of this character in a few sentences.
Early on in the novel King presents the full text of the first taunting letter that Brady sends to Hodges. I read this quickly, as I wanted King to get on with the story, man ... only to realise that the letter is the story.
King then lets us see the letter through Hodges’ trained eyes, picking up on the stylistic tics and narrative clues that help him to form a mental picture of Brady. I actually found myself going back to this letter to check the points that Hodges highlights, as they certainly did not register when I read it initially. And then I read the subsequent letters extra carefully the first time, to see if I could outsmart Hodges...
I think that King has become such an institution that we tend to forget just how much of a sheer fucking story-telling genius he is. I found myself reading this in a kind of sick panic, desperate for Brady to get his comeuppance.
However, in some dark corner of my own mind, I was secretly rooting for Brady. I think King is well aware of this ambivalence, which makes his bad characters so particularly frightening and heartrendingly human at the same time.
King frays the reader’s nerves until they seem to twang like guitar strings. And then he still manages to throw in a couple of quiet scenes where we actually get to feel sorry for Brady. Now that is a real writer....more
Okay, I knew this was a short novel when I saw the page count listed as 150 on Amazon ... but it reads much faster than that on Kindle, about an hour Okay, I knew this was a short novel when I saw the page count listed as 150 on Amazon ... but it reads much faster than that on Kindle, about an hour and a half at a push, and yet the pricing is that of a full novel.
There does seem to be a trend for authors to maintain reader interest by releasing shorter work in between major work, for which Kindle Singles is an ideal platform, for example. However, pricing shorter work the same seems a tad disingenuous. Then again, there is nothing to suggest that Amazon does not consider this to be a fully fledged novel. Perhaps the author does not either.
This is the first time I have read Nancy Kress, so I have no idea how her latest work compares to what she has done before. To me, this seemed like a brief sketch or initial try out for a much longer work: an immediate red flag in this regard is the fact that Kress provides no explanation for the appearance of the strange 2001 Monolith-like structure on the Denebs’ home world that points them initially towards Earth.
Yesterday’s Kin is a rather bland First Contact novel: curiously human-like aliens land in New York, warn the UN about an impending deadly interstellar spore cloud that the Earth will pass through in about a year, which begins a race against time to find an antidote.
Kress fleshes out this join-the-dots plot by looking more closely at the lead scientist’s dysfunctional family, which of course includes the token rebel son ... Anyone who has seen the telly show V. will know already how this particular narrative strand plays out.
And that is the biggest problem here: there is really nothing new that Kress adds. The ‘big reveal’ at the end is telegraphed so loudly so early on, that it came as no surprise to me at all. I am unsure if this is because I read so much SF that I can spot a trope galumphing in from a mile away. Whatever the case, this is a rather anaemic read.
I would recommend this to non-regular SF readers who want to dip a toe into genre waters without going native....more
Emily St. John Mandel knows the importance of a good beginning, and her opening line of “The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored” is one of tEmily St. John Mandel knows the importance of a good beginning, and her opening line of “The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored” is one of the most arresting and haunting I have read in a long time. This introduces us to the character of Arthur Leander, who is playing King Lear (it is no spoiler for me to say for the last time in his life).
Arthur dies on stage, a victim of a global swine flu pandemic. Within a few brief chapters, civilisation itself is relegated to the wings of the stage, as it were. It happens so quickly that the reader is left rather dumbfounded; Mandel makes some vague pronouncements on incubation periods and infection rates.
This is a general problem of the end-of-the-world genre: a writer has to choose between the Fall itself, or the aftermath of the Fall. Doing both is tricky, and is best left to much larger canvases such as the trilogies by Margaret Atwood (MaddAdam) or Justin Cronin (The Passage). The best single books in this sub-genre are inevitably rooted in the Fallen world itself, such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.
It can be argued that Mandel chooses to dispense with civilisation in such a cursory fashion in order to convey to the reader how astonishingly quickly such an event can occur, and how all-encompassing it can be to the people caught up in it.
Of course, the book slows down very rapidly after the beginning, and we do get to learn a lot about how the world grinds to a halt and what the aftermath is. Our viewpoint character in the Fallen world is young Kirsten, a child actor who happens to be on the same stage when Arthur Leander dies.
We pick up her story after she has joined the Travelling Symphony, an itinerant band of musicians and thespians who delight the locals with Shakespeare and classical music. (There is a fascinating subtext here as to how Shakespeare and the world he inhabited was also shaped by plague and pestilence).
Mandel then pulls off a neat narrative sleight of hand by going back in time to tell us Arthur’s story. Here the book truly comes alive with a sense of poignancy and urgency. Clearly the author is as fascinated with Arthur as is the reader.
Unfortunately, Kirsten is not a strong enough counterpoint to Arthur. I kept on thinking of her as an amalgam of Katniss and Arya Stark; she just did not gel for me in the same way that Arthur does as a living, breathing character. Instead Kirsten joins a host of rather stock end-of-the-world stereotypes, the most interesting of whom is The Preacher. However, he is perhaps the most cursorily sketched, which is a great pity.
In Chapter 24, Mandel comments on “The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone”. There is a lot of lovely nature writing and pastoral ruminations, which places this book more in the category of Cosy Catastrophe. “If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”
Anyone who has read Stephen King’s The Stand will know from the get go that The Preacher’s part in this story will not have a happy ending (in the context of the greater unhappy ending of the world at large, of course). Yes, there is some obligatory darkness, but I felt no lingering sense of horror or dread at any point in this book (maybe I have become too jaded in my genre reading).
The ending is a bit of a misstep as well, I think, carrying on for one or two beats of additional chapters after the perfect point at which it should have ended (again, anyone who reads a lot of horror or SF will know exactly how the book ends after reading the opening).
I cannot help but think how different this book would have been if Mandel had had the conviction to jettison all the end-of-the-world schtick and focus exclusively on Arthur. Still, this is well written, lingering and affecting. It is probably a very good introduction to this particular sub-genre for people who do not like zombies, vampires or gene-spliced mutations....more
This book has a great premise. Calvin, an ageing and single gay man (which as David Pratt would tell you is a double whammy if you want to be part of This book has a great premise. Calvin, an ageing and single gay man (which as David Pratt would tell you is a double whammy if you want to be part of the ‘gayristocracy’), inexplicably finds himself inside the world of the porn video he is watching one evening.
One man’s heaven is another’s hell; Calvin quickly finds that perfection is rather dull and rote. He manages to return to his circumscribed existence in his rent-controlled apartment in New York City, but with Joey in toe, the man of his dreams.
Calvin’s best friend Peachy decides that Joey is their Golden Ticket to crack an invite to the social event of the season, a lavish party thrown by the reigning king of the ‘gayristocracy’ (a dildo-and-lube millionaire; and yes, there are lots of appalling jokes about this).
Joey is such a morsel of perfection that Peachy thinks their invites are a slam dunk; at the same time, they can give Joey a crash course in what it means to be gay in the modern world. As I said, a great premise. Unfortunately, the execution is rather uneven, wobbling between gross-out gay humour, maudlin pathos and relentless cynicism – often on the same page.
I am thinking of one scene in particular where Calvin does his time slip trick again and ends up in a drinking hole filled with Roman legionnaires talking Latin. He lets himself be picked up by one and goes to his apartment. With Liza Minnelli crooning on the sound system, the Roman looks beseechingly at Calvin before pulling out a hammer and nails.
Yes, there is a certain subtext about Calvin feeling an innate need to be ‘punished’ due to his perceived failure as a gay man. However, this scene in particular steps over the boundaries of good taste.
And there are various other instances where Pratt does not seem to know where to draw the line: Calvin’s relationship with Joey becomes a complex father-and-son interaction, but when Calvin gives Joey a hug, it gives him a hard-on. Or the ‘disabled sex anthology’ entitled Spasms: Sex for the Differently Abled, which crudely subverts a rather important part of the story.
Pratt clearly wants us to take Calvin seriously as he follows a (meandering) path towards redemption and grace. But along the way the author gets sidetracked by his own cleverness and need to wring humour out of every situation, whether bathos or slapstick. This quickly becomes tiresome and irritating.
I think that comedy is one of the most difficult things to write. Pratt tries to pull off quite a balancing act here between a genuinely screwball premise and some serious, heartfelt ruminations on life, death and the universe. He only succeeds partially because he is like the clown at an office party who thinks that placing a farting cushion on an unsuspecting person’s chair is the height of hilarity.
Still, it is refreshing to read a gay-themed novel that is funny and uplifting at the same time. It might be a half-baked soufflé, with too much sugar in some places, but Pratt has us rooting for the unlikely trio of Peach, Calvin and Joey from the get-go. And that, after all, is what the ‘gayristocracy’ is all about: rendering the unconventional both palatable and beautiful....more
I was rather underwhelmed by this, my first Adam Christopher, but I am curious enough to want to read The Burning Dark to see how this obviously talenI was rather underwhelmed by this, my first Adam Christopher, but I am curious enough to want to read The Burning Dark to see how this obviously talented and adventurous author fares in a different genre.
This book reminded me of so many other authors: Nalo Hopkinson (Sister Mine), Neil Gaiman (American Gods), Robert Jackson Bennett (American Elsewhere), Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus) and, of course, Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes) and the eponymous HP Lovecraft.
Thus it is clear that Christopher is working within the boundaries of a particular (sub) genre of urban fantasy; the question is how, or even whether or not, he manages to map out a little bit of the territory for himself.
Hang Wire begins confusingly, with a plethora of characters and timeframes that are difficult to keep track of or even place in any meaningful sequence or chronology. Being a regular SF/horror reader, I suppose my curiosity level, and resistance to writerly obfuscation, is probably higher than average.
However, I suspect that a lot of people will abandon this fairly quickly out of sheer frustration – which is a pity, because the story does begin to, er, hang together after a while and builds up nicely to a fairly rousing climax.
Tighter editing would have helped to focus the story a lot more, which feels padded out in places. The characterisation is patchy, with main protagonists like Ted and even the serial killer coming across as mere ciphers.
Coming to think of it, Christopher does not make nearly enough of his mysterious serial killer figure. There are a lot of great ideas in this melting pot of an urban fantasy novel, but not nearly enough ‘weirdness’, with a lot of the action bits reading like annotated movie scenes instead of taking on a life of their own.
The best bit: I adored the character of Bob the ex God, who has given up being a deity and instead devotes his retirement to giving impromptu and free dance lessons for tourists on a San Francisco beach....more
Michel Faber ends his First Contact/end of the world/star-crossed lovers novel at such a critical juncture that it left me quite flummoxed. The only rMichel Faber ends his First Contact/end of the world/star-crossed lovers novel at such a critical juncture that it left me quite flummoxed. The only reason I could think of is that Faber plans a sequel or continuation. Then again, perhaps the ending forms part of his larger project here of deconstructing SF tropes.
Thus the novel ends as if it were Part One of a trilogy (or diptych) only because that is the (SF) reader’s general expectation (it kind of reminded me of how Samuel R. Delany leaves the reader hanging at the end of Stars in My Pocket Like grains of Sand.)
I must admit that when I first heard about this novel, which also marks my first time reading Faber, I had no idea that it was SF. All the marketing portrays it as a ‘literary’ novel and either downplays the SF elements or does not mention them at all.
However, the SF reader’s response to this novel is likely to be different to a non-genre reader (here I am also perhaps thinking of the potential difficulty a reader could have with The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell if he or she has not read any SF, let alone any meta fiction or post modern writing.)
For example, the SF reader will immediately be able to place The Book of Strange of New Things in a larger genre dialectic it shares with A Case of Conscience by James Blish and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
This is not to suggest that your appreciation of Faber’s book will in any way be diminished without having read these classic texts. Rather what Faber has done here, I think, is to write a distinct SF novel for non SF readers ... but which genre aficionados will be able to appreciate as well (Faber signposts his geek side by stating in the Acknowledgements that all the surnames he uses are based on Marvel Comics characters.)
Faber, however, plays a strange genre game here: He gives almost no details of the trip to Oasis (we have no idea where it is located even; Bea and Peter’s email correspondence is also instantaneous, which any SF reader knows is highly unlikely).
On the other hand, Faber’s description of the Oasans and their culture is almost hallucinatory in its vividness and attention to detail. There are also some lovely haunting touches in his descriptions of Oasis, such as the ‘dancing rain’.
My reaction to and perception of this novel was changed irrevocably by the revelation in The New York Times that Faber’s wife Eva succumbed to terminal cancer when he was making last changes to the final draft. This adds almost unbearable poignancy to the story of Bea and Peter.
The two central characters are separated by a gulf of space and time, each faced with their own harrowing version of hell (Earth succumbs to climate change and geopolitical instability, while on Oasis Peter goes irrevocably native in attempting to communicate with the Oasans).
There is a moment of such godforsaken bleakness towards the end of this novel that it left me feeling quite shattered. It is a testament to the skill of Faber as a writer that he manages to conclude on a note of transcendence, ambiguous as it may seem. Another superlative achievement is that Faber never seems to proselytise, given that the book is so steeped in Christianity and the Bible.
My only caveat is that the book could have been much shorter. It seems weighed down by its quiet middle section where Peter first encounters the Oasans. This makes bits like Tartaglione’s Kurtz-like oration towards the end and the final revelation about the Oasans seem rather abrupt and rushed. Stylistic note: I loved the way that each chapter title is, in fact, its last sentence....more
The problem with this book is summed up in the title: it is a pretty-sounding phrase, with a tentative meaning only tangentially alluded to in the ploThe problem with this book is summed up in the title: it is a pretty-sounding phrase, with a tentative meaning only tangentially alluded to in the plot, with the result that the reader has a sneaky feeling that the author chose it simply because it is rather baffling.
This is well written, even over written at times – particularly the end, which should have been the emotional crescendo of this origami-like tale, but instead we get this:
And so I thought about what was important to me: about how I would want to be remembered, about the totality of my vision realising itself now under the heavy pressure of the moment but remaining true, still true, to the impermeable solitude of its origins.
Sean is a pretty unlikeable character, to the extent where I found it difficult to sympathise with him (the people I felt most sorry for in this sorry tale were his parents; I am sure readers of different ages will have different reactions).
While this book frustrated me, it also left me feeling uncomfortable and weirded out, which I suspect is a conscious strategy of the author to signpost the general incomprehensibility of life and people, particularly those alien creatures known as adolescents. Who knows why anyone does anything?
Having said that, all the clues (the swords, the musing on Conan as some kind of a sage) points to the fact that Sean simply and desperately emulates the death of Robert E. Howard, his hero. Thus Trace Italian becomes a homage to the Hyborian Age.
This is so depressing though that the reader does not want to believe such a prosaic and devastating conclusion, which I suspect is why other reviewers have attached words like ‘transcendent’ to this book. But for me that fetishises suicide.
I know nothing about the Mountain Goats and so came to this book cold, which left me cold and feeling rather soiled by this reading experience, which is eye-wateringly bleak .
Being forced to sift the clues about Sean’s fate from the fragmented narrative, I felt strangely implicated in keeping him alive somehow, but at the same time harbouring this relentless curiosity about his downfall. It is a difficult balance to maintain, particularly in such a relatively short book.
This makes for grim but compelling reading, but at the end I do not think it coheres sufficiently to become something more than the sum of its parts (like the pieces of Sean’s face, like all the envelopes containing all the clues of the Trace Italian)....more
This novel is one of those guilty pleasures one is reluctant to admitting how much you enjoyed it, as Philip Hensher spares no sacred cows, pieties, sThis novel is one of those guilty pleasures one is reluctant to admitting how much you enjoyed it, as Philip Hensher spares no sacred cows, pieties, scruples or morals in this often grotesque and lurid, but extremely funny, skewering of middle-class society. Even the reader has his or her pretensions examined ruthlessly at one point ... and found to be sorely wanting, of course, as is everyone else under Hensher’s ferociously intelligent gaze.
In the fictional English town of Hanmouth, on the Bristol Channel, a young girl by the name of China goes missing, presumably kidnapped. That her family is from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, is cause for much grievance among the upstanding citizens of Hanmouth proper, as the sadly unwarranted event gives undue publicity to the less than savoury aspects of this semi-rural idyll.
However, Hensher is little interested in solving the mystery of China’s disappearance, and simply uses this as a pretext to delve behind the curtains and closed doors of Hanmouth, to peer into its darkest nooks, crannies, desires, fears and hopes.
The irony of this, of course, is that the book is ostensibly about the invasion of privacy and the encroachment on human rights, as the stick-in-the-ass John Calvin of the local Neighbourhood Watch launches a one-horse campaign to increase the number of surveillance cameras in Hanmouth (‘If you are not doing anything wrong you will not be afraid to be caught out’, is the overall motto of this Big Brother benevolence).
Perhaps the highlight of the book is a bravua sequence contrasting a dinner party at one family, while a few houses down the local bears (fat, hairy and happy gay men) are getting down and dirty.
What I loved is that the book ends on such a sweetly domesticated note between the two lead gay characters, Sam and Lord What A Waste Harry, that the reader is totally wrong-footed by Hensher’s loving adoration for this doting couple, symbol of the true love, friendship and fealty that a proper community should be built upon....more
Chapters 18 and 19, the final two, are by far the best. In fact they are rather incongruous and stand apart from the rest of the novel, like the silenChapters 18 and 19, the final two, are by far the best. In fact they are rather incongruous and stand apart from the rest of the novel, like the silent birch trees in the closing images. While I was impressed by the enigmatic and poetically bleak ending, I suspect a lot of readers will be frustrated at Murakami’s apparent obtuseness in not providing any easy or final answers to the essential mystery of Tsukuru Tazaki.
As for the rest: this is so much more pared down than IQ84 that it reads like a Murakami checklist or primer than a fully fledged Murakami novel. I have no idea if this is perhaps an intentional play on the cult of Murakami, sort of akin to Don DeLillo releasing the fingernail paring of The Body Artist after the double fistful that was Underworld.
Aka the corporate guru comments: “Image is everything. You don’t spare any expense to create the right image. And word of mouth is critical. Once you get a good reputation, momentum will carry you.”
There is no doubt that Murakami has the “right image”, given that his latest novel reportedly sold a million copies in its first week of release in his native Japan. I do not know if that figure refers to a hardcover edition; still to a Western reader it represents an unprecedented level of interest and scrutiny in an author and his work.
There seems an emotional intensity and depth that Murakami is striving for here that is quite different to the studied obliqueness of IQ84. This may represent a new penchant for psychological realism, but for me it was constantly undermined by the frustratingly simplistic writing, which often felt child-like and under-developed. Then again this may be a problem of conveying the nuances of the Japanese language into English.
Murakami however himself cannot resist gnomic utterances about salmon, Star Wars and “bad elves” lurking in the forests of Finland, which definitely undermines the tone he opts for here, while his surprisingly stereotypical ideas about gender include such gems as: “There are some things, he concluded, that can only be expressed through a women’s form.”
The sex dream that underpins the novel psychologically, with its hints of fetishism and homosexuality, seems far more prosaic than what the author intended it to be, I suspect. This could simply be a case of me being far more jaded than Japanese readers, or the latter having rather more delicate cultural sensibilities when it comes to matters of the flesh.
Or maybe Murakami is just being plain coy; I do get the feeling he throws in the gay angle as a white flag for sexual equality, rather than out of genuine curiosity or experimentation on the part of the main protagonist.
I also thought that the Liszt piano music referenced by Murakami, from which the title is partially derived, is more an instance of name-dropping than genuine thematic integration (here I am thinking particularly of the song ‘Never Let Me Go’ from the titular Kazuo Ishiguro novel, or simply how Richard Powers writes about music and its emotional intensity).
The novel also wobbles dangerously when the main protagonist is suddenly transferred to Finland, mainly because Murakami fails to draw a sufficient contrast with Japan, resorting to stock images and character portrayals.
What did strike me was how ‘cinematic’ this felt to read, in the sense of a gorgeously photographed, hauntingly scored and sparsely worded ‘art movie’ that stays with you long after the experience, mainly due to the emptiness and lack of meaning beneath its shimmering beauty.
Ultimately this was a very disappointing read. I think Murakami should have let his story breathe for much longer. He also should have adopted a single tone throughout and scrupulously resisted all the Murakami-isms that it seems he could not resist squeezing in....more
What a difficult, frustrating and exasperating novel, quite lyrical at turns but excessively dense – to the point where the sheer quantity of knowledgWhat a difficult, frustrating and exasperating novel, quite lyrical at turns but excessively dense – to the point where the sheer quantity of knowledge here quite overwhelms the book, which feels infinitely longer than what it actually is, and is an interminable read as a result.
It begins promisingly enough, with a down-and-out Zafar arriving on his best friend’s doorstep in London, to recount the story of his life, which runs the gamut of studying mathematics to shenanigans in Afghanistan.
And that is about it for plot, until a too-rushed ending featuring a stock caricature called The Colonel and a Kurtz-Heart-of-Darkness stand-in called Crane. Perhaps the shortest shrift is given to the female characters, of which there are not that many, but of whom all are remarkably unlikeable and/or alarmingly insipid.
The rest of the book is something of a vast smoke-and-mirrors trick, as Rahman chats (at length, and often ad nauseum) about everything that tickles his prodigious fancy: from the Mercator map to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to the biology of menstruation to why the sky is blue.
You get the idea: this is one of those great Kitchen Sink novels, so stuffed with the author’s conviction of his Great Project that nobody in the book, let alone the poor reader, has a chance to come up for air (let alone admit his or ignorance about any point or, Allah forbid, offer a whisper of dissent from the rank-and-file).
And it features one of my pet hates about po-mo fiction: no speech marks, which in this case makes for daunting grey slabs of text confronting the poor reader. I have yet to find a plausible validation for this particularly modern literary affectation; this has done nothing at all to win me over to the cause of throwing fundamental punctuation out of the window. And given how painfully pedantic Rahman often is in his writing, it is actually quite a curiosity. Perhaps a signal of the rebel inside?
There is a particularly cogent remark by Zafar at one point that, for me, came to underline Rahman’s philosophy of writing here:
Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I’m not here to fucking entertain you.
This certainly places the reader in an interesting position.
Make no mistake about it, the writing here is crystalline in its elegance, with Rahman paying particular attention to cadence and rhythm in many of the longer sections – this is one of those books where whole chunks just beg to be read out loud, they are so beautiful.
But polemic is not literature. In my book, at least. I was left cold and uninvolved, like a fidgety guest at a business reception he must attend for decorum’s sake, but which he is not enjoying at all.
A much better book about the psychology of exile is Andre Aciman’s luminous and incendiary Harvard Square. Actually, when I started reading this I immediately thought about Aciman.
It seemed to me that the anonymous narrator was secretly in love with Zafar (a platonic, cross-cultural, brotherly, comrades-in-arms kind of love, mind you ... though Aciman, of course, is a master of unrequited love and untamed lust).
Yes, Rahman does write at length, and very beautifully, about love and its aftermath. There is even some very perfunctory sex. But there is just so little love to be felt in these cold and perfect pages....more
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