Before They Are Hanged, by Joe Abercrombie
The second instalment of The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie continues where the first, The Blade Itself, left off. Before They Are Hanged is in many ways the classic middle volume of a fantasy trilogy: the characters have been established in the first volume, along with the overall plotlines; the second volume gives the characters room to breathe and develop, and we find out more about the story arc, while leaving plenty of scope for the concluding volume.
So far, so typical, but what makes Abercrombie’s work so different from average fantasy fare is the characterisation. The characters that we follow are all, nominally, on the right side, but that does not make them good people: Abercrombie may be the first writer to have a professional torturer as a central character – and a sensitively portrayed one at that. Inquisitor Sand dan Glotka is a former war hero who, after being tortured by the Ghurkish, becomes a torturer himself. He is sent to the Union’s outpost of Dagoska to strengthen its defences in the face of a looming Ghurkish invasion. There, he devotes his resources to rooting out traitors, discovering the fate of his disappeared predecessor and, when the siege starts, taking command of the defences. Despite his use of violence and intrigue to achieve his ends, Abercrombie’s third-person point-of-view writing style shows him in a suprisingly sympathetic light, with an engagingly wry sense of humour.
The Pere Lachaise Mystery, by Claude Izner
Claude Izner is the pseudonym of two sisters who write entertaining crime novels set in the bookshops, garrets, backstreets and cafes of fin de siecle Paris.
Their hero, Victor Legris, is a Left Bank bookseller and aesthete who has in his orbit such crime fiction staples as a wide-eyed assistant from the provinces, a taciturn oriental mentor and a mysterious but nubile Russian lover. TPLM starts when a former paramour’s maid arrives at the bookshop in a panic and asks Legris to find her mistress who has gone missing at Pere Lachaise cemetery. Initially Legris is a reluctant amateur sleuth but when the maid turns up dead in a canal he has no choice but to investigate. Twists and turns ensue.
The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming (digital fiction)
Penguin have launched a new site called We Tell Stories – subtitled Six Stories, Six Authors, Six Weeks – which is designed to showcase digital fiction. Each of the stories is a homage to a Penguin Classic, and the first is The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming, which in title and style is obviously inspired by John Buchan’s classic The 39 Steps (which I admit that I have not yet read).
What makes this first story innovative is that is essentially a mash-up of a simple linear adventure story with Google Maps. The text appears in bubbles attached to points on the map (occasionally you get richer content, such as a text message actually shown on the display of a mobile phone, or a photo of what the narrator is describing), and as you click the links to move the story forward (there is a lot of clicking), the narrator’s journey is plotted on the map. As you switch from chapter to chapter, the style and scale of the maps change. This can be quite exciting at first – it starts in the new St Pancras International station (which I liked because they used to be a client of mine!) – but when the action is all set in one building, for example an Edinburgh hotel, it seems a bit pointless to have a bird’s eye view.
The Art of Captaincy, by Mike Brearley
I have been a serious armchair cricket enthusiast since about the age of 14, despite never having displayed any aptitude for playing the game at school. As I have learned more about the history and lore of the game, the legend of Botham’s Ashes in 1981 has always been one of the most appealing and beguiling stories. The England Captain for that series, Mike Brearley, is recognised as being one of the most thoughtful and skillful exponents of captaincy as a specialist discpline, and this book, first published in 1985 after his retirement from cricket in 1982, explores in detail his thinking about all aspects of the art.
For the cricket lover this is a wonderful book. Brearley, who former Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg once described as having “a degree in people”, and who went on to a successful career in psychoanalysis, explores a wide range of cricketing topics: the role of the captain, the disciplines of batting, bowling, fielding, the importance of training, the role of aggression in cricket, and motivation of individuals in the context of a team game. All of his points are lavishly illustrated with anecdotes, not all of which show Brearley in the best possible light – it is clear that he was very critical of his own performances as both batsman and captain.
The Way We Wore, by Robert Elms
Journalist Robert Elms’ The Way We Wore is a formative-years memoir based around clobber. It is Fever Pitch in natty threads, but if that sounds like an exercise in cynicism, don’t let it put you off. The Way We Wore is also an affecting social history of London told through street fashion.
In 1965 Reggie Elms is a sharp-suited mod living for the weekend and in thrall to nothing more than “getting it right” and parading up and down Burnt Oak high street. To Elms the younger, and to thousands of others, this is akin to heroism. So begins a lifetime’s obsession with looking good, looking right and becoming fluent in the secret language of clothes.
If this seems a tad shallow, Elms knows the relevance of his story, knows that whilst middle-class youth has mostly dressed down for social cache, generations of working class people have dressed up and looked sharp. The Way We Wore is at once a celebration of that impulse and an acknowledgement of the reasons why; that dressing right is a way of saying “I exist”. You lot may have careers, houses and opportunites but we’ve got glad rags and schmutter.
The Mission Song, by John Le Carre
In The Mission Song, we see John Le Carre trying out a new stylistic approach to his material, specifically the use of a first-person narrator, Bruno Salvador, aka Salvo. We also see a continuation of the post-Cold War interest in Africa that has already manifested itself in The Constant Gardener, and in the shady areas where government and big business interests overlap.
Salvo is a hot-shot interpreter, the son of an Irish missionary and a Congolese mother, and his Catholic upbringing in the Congo has made him fluent in English, French, Swahili and a number of of the more obscure Congo dialects. As such, he is in high demand, and as the novel opens he is already in the pay of the British intelligence services on a part-time basis, working in their ‘Chat Room’ listening in on telephone calls and bugged meetings. Offered the opportunity to act as face-to-face interpreter on a deniable operation, he drops everything and finds himself being whisked off to an unidentified island in the North Sea that is playing host to a very irregular conference.
WARNING: Spoiler ahead
The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy 3), by K.J.Parker
There’s no-one does fantasy quite like K.J.Parker. In fact, I don’t think there’s anyone doing anything even close. The Engineer Trilogy has contained very few of the recognisable features of fantastical fiction: no magic, no heroic square-jawed swordsmen, dwarfs, elves, evil sorcerors, quests or dragons. What is does feature are morally complex characters, almost none of who can be pigeon-holed in to the hero or villain categories, and an extremely clever plot.
The darkness and moral ambiguity of Parker’s storytelling have been a central feature of all three of his / her fantasy trilogies (very little is known about the author, although a now defunct version of the official K.J.Parker website suggested Parker was a woman). That darkness has not necessarily become more pronounced in the Engineer novels – after all, the first trilogy featured a central character who killed his own nephew and made him in to a bow! However, it has become more mundane and everyday – the evils that are perpetrated are those of characters who are only trying to do the right thing for themselves and those they care about. While Parker’s characters recognise that some of their actions are evil, they can always rationalise them as ‘a necessary evil’ (a key recurring theme). There are no characters in Parker’s world who think of themselves as baddies. By the same token, none of them really think of themselves as goodies, either – just as people who are doing the best they can with the tools at hand.
The Devil’s Star, by Jo Nesbo
Every now and then the stars align to allow popularity and excellence to combine orbits. So it is with the current wave of Scandinavian crime fiction.
Like many, I first encountered SCF via Peter Hoeg’s 1996 novel, Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. Since then I have followed the exploits of numerous damaged and/or laconic Nordic detectives as they pursue depraved killers and encounter political and moral corruption against a backdrop of geographical and existential bleakness. Luckily the odd shag gets thrown in for good measure.
Despite stiff competition, The Don of SCF is clearly Henning Mankell and his Karl Wallender series. Now however, only two books in, we must consider Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series to be its equal.
The Miracle at Speedy Motors, by Alexander McCall Smith
When I needed a book to read for the day of my operation – to read in the waiting room, and after the event – I knew straight away that the latest tale of Mma Ramotswe would be absolutely ideal. The Miracle at Speedy Motors is the ninth installment of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and for me embodied all the best aspects of the series. A couple of the previous books had made me wonder whether the shine was coming off the formula, but this episode is a definite return to the form of the early books.
McCall Smith’s lyrical and accessible prose style is as fluid as ever and has always been what makes these books such a joy – he devotes himself fully to writing in a way that’s appropriate to the characters and to their home country of Botswana. You only have to compare his other writings, which are equally excellent but just as different, to see just how thoroughly he inhabits this world.
Four Days in June, by Iain Gale
The four days of the title are the Battle of Waterloo, beginning with several less famous prior engagements, and culminating in the day of the battle itself. Writers of other Napoleonic historical novels have sometimes struggled to shoe-horn their heroes in to the sprawl of Waterloo – Cornwell’s Sharpe has to be a supernumerary officer who just happens to find himself at some of the crucial points of the battle, while Mallinson’s Matthew Hervey also manages to get about the battlefield rather more than is plausible. By setting out to write specifically about Waterloo, and picking five historical characters to follow rather than just one, Iain Gale has given himself an opportunity to encompass the broad sweep of the build-up to the battle, and the decisive day itself, from the perspective of the British-led Alliance army, the Prussians and their mutual foes, the French.
Gale’s protagonists are: an English officer who is a senior member of Wellington’s staff; a Scottish Colonel in the Guards; a Prussian General; the French Marshal Michel Ney; and most ambitiously of all, Napoleon himself. Given the necessity to accomodate the story arcs of five characters within one book, it is perhaps not surprising that the characters come across as somewhat stereotypical (at least the less famous ones). The Scot is brave and phlegmatic; the Prussian is straight laced and somewhat humourlesss; the Englishman is rather neurotic, and a classic upper-class officer type. The heroic Ney is, in Gale’s version, exonerated of responsibility for key French blunders, which are ascribed to a Napoleon who is depicted as indecisive, self-deluding and pained by his piles.
An Expert In Murder, by Nicola Upson
The year is 1934, the setting is London and a body is about to be discovered on a train. We may have been here many times before, but Nicola Upson’s An Expert In Murder adds enough to the formula to make for an entertaining diversion.
In the book as in real life, Richard of Bordeaux by popular crime author Josephine Tey, is the smash hit play of 1934 and entering the final week of its 475-show run. The real life Richard made a star of John Gielgud and apparently galvanised British theatre. The fictional ROB is equally successful, but the author, actors, producer and various members of the backstage crew have had quite enough of Richard and are busy cat-fighting their way to the final curtain. Read more
House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds
It’s been very interesting to read Alastair Reynolds’ new slab of space opera, House of Suns, so soon after having read Iain M Banks’ new Culture blockbuster Matter. While House of Suns does not take place in the Revelation Space universe in which the author has set much of his oeuvre, it shares a great deal of its outlook and many of the same preoccupations. Reynolds’ universes are bleak places – civilizations rise and fall with predictable regularity; mankind and its evolutionary offshoots are the only sentient organic life anywhere in the known universe; factions are endemic, and Reynolds always imparts these in particular with a lot of depth, from the Ultras and Conjoiners of Revelation Space to the ‘Lines’ of this new Universe. Banks’ ideas appear even more Utopian in the light of Reynolds’ vision – the Culture offers solutions for age-old problems, providing immortality and true freedom through technology; by contrast Reynolds offers us a darker concept of societal development, though perhaps humanity’s persistence in the face of adversity is optimism of a kind.
Meat, by Joseph D’Lacey
Bloody Books, publishers of the Read By Dawn anthology series, (itself related to the annual Scottish Dead by Dawn horror film festival through Adele Hartley’s curatorship of both ventures), ups the ante with their latest release, Meat, by Joseph D’Lacey.
Back in the day, I remember losing myself in the visceral volumes of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Gritty, experimental and imaginative, Barker’s short stories took horror fiction to a whole new level of artfully manufactured grue. Whilst D’Lacey’s novel almost certainly won’t create as many red ripples, (let’s face it, nothing could), Meat is an undeniably powerful read.
The town of Abyrne is hungry as hell. Possibly a surviving suburb of a now abandoned and rotting City, Abyrne is surrounded by an unexplained and unforgiving wilderness. A gnawing post-apocalyptic appetite dominates the rhythms and thoughts of the townsfolk. Plant-life is rare. Vegetables are seen as insufficient and lacking protein. The authorities have long since gone, replaced by ginger giant psychopath, Magnus, the owner of the Meat Processing Plant whose factory produce keeps the populace in thrall.
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, by James Meek
Adam Kellas is a journalist- more specifically, a war reporter, and the novel starts with him covering the American war against the Taleban in Afghanistan post-9/11. Actually, it starts with a passage from the deliberately bad, sub-Frederick Forsyth thriller Rogue Eagle Rising that he’s writing. It’s pretty execrable stuff, and he knows it, but after the failure of his several literary novels, he’s ready to sell out. While in Afghanistan, Kellas meets the American writer Astrid, and the novel is essentially the story of Kellas’s pursuit of Astrid, in a journey that takes in Afghanistan, London, New Jersey and Iraq.
Structurally the journey involves a fair number of flash-backs and initially this all got quite confusing, but after about 100 pages it all started to come together, and the second half of the book felt much more pacy and focused. Meek’s own experiences as a war reporter is apparent in his descriptions of the Afghanistan conflict, which capture the mixture of confusion, ennui and occasional explosions of action involved. He is keen to explore the position of journalists at war – are they truly neutrals, or by trailing around after the combatants, do they acquire guilt by association? In this light, Astrid’s decision to obtain a handgun can be seen as symbolic of a wider question.
Roll over Radiohead
Radiohead’s decision to release their album In Rainbows for free via digital download garnered huge amounts of publicity, and has spawned many imitators, and much thinking about the implications of the model for all kinds of digital publishing. Now John Buckman of Bookmooch is considering a publishing and distribution model that combines print-on-demand, tipping of the author if you like the book, and using a bookswapping site such as Bookmooch to keep the book in circulation. Under this model, if you like the book, you pay for the pleasure of having read it, and pass it on; or pay more and just keep it. If you don’t like it, you relist it on Bookmooch and when someone else asks for it, ship it off – all it will cost you is the outward shipping, so it’s less costly than buying a book you don’t enjoy.
Could it work? I think it could be a viable mechanism for authors starting out – after all, if a book is good and enjoyed by the majority of its readers, each copy is likely to earn much more revenue for the author over its lifespan than if it had been sold in the traditional way. It might also be a good way to generate word of mouth publicity and a bit of a buzz.
For more, see the BookMooch Blog.
Simon A
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