The Yellow Admiral and The Hundred Days, by Patrick O’Brian
I have just read the 18th and 19th of O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series basically back-to-back; it’s with mixed feelings, as I know that all I have left is the final instalment, Blue at the Mizzen, and then I will have finished what has been called one of the greatest story cycles in the English language. I am actually quite jealous of people who have yet to read these books, as they have it all to look forward to!
In The Yellow Admiral, Aubrey and Maturin find themselves, as periodically happens, in a financially parlous situation. Despite this, Jack’s thoughts are turning to the prospects of his promotion to flag rank. His fear is the possibility that he will be ‘yellowed’, that is passed over for promotion to Admiral. His opposition to enclosures in Parliament is not doing any favours to his prospects (though we get some enjoyable insights in to his role as Lord of the Manor), and his deployment on the Brest blockade does not provide him with any opportunities to distinguish himself, especially as the Admiral commanding the squadron has it in for him. By the end of the book, Stephen has a plan to take Jack temporarily out of the Admiralty promotion race, which peace has made even more competitive, with a semi-official mission to assist the independence movement in Chile; en route to Chile, once again aboard his beloved ship Surprise; Jack is intercepted with orders to take command of a squadron in the Mediterranean – Napoleon has escaped from Elba, and war is returning to Europe.
Gents, by Warwick Collins
Warwick Collins’ bijou novel Gents proves that you don’t need glamorous locations or high concept to deliver an enjoyable slice of fiction – and you don’t get any less glamorous than a gents toilet. We join Ez on his first day as a lavatory attendant. Ez, along with his new boss Reynolds and fellow cleaner Jason are all Jamaican, and their place of work is also a popular cottaging destination. To begin with, they only sporadically discourage these casual encounters between people they refer to as ‘the reptiles’; however when faced with the threat of council closure, more concerted action is called for.
The three have very differing attitudes to the problem: Ez views the issue through the prism of his Christianity, though it’s apparent to the reader that he may soon have a call to re-assess his attitude; Rasta Jason sees in these soul-less sexual encounters a facet of the moral difference between white and black; while Reynolds is a simple pragmatist. Their solution for reducing the popularity of their toilet involves a combination of fake security cameras and occasionally brazening it out with the reptiles.
The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan
Richard Morgan‘s hard-boiled, techo-noir was a breath of fresh air in the world of sci-fi; intriguingly, after five novels, Morgan has switched his attention to fantasy, a genre that has seen some refreshing new voices emerging over the last few years, writers who have moved beyond traditional swords and sorcery with their exploration of darker moral territory, unlikely heroes and subversion of traditions – Joe Abercrombie, K.J. Parker, Scott Lynch and Steven Erikson, to name a few. I am pleased to say that Morgan can be counted as an addition to this group of pioneers, and if his first fantasy effort is anything to go by, he has found a rich new furrow to plough.
The willingness to be different is apparent from page one – Ringil, grizzled former soldier, war hero, and master swordsman, is gay. It soon turns out that he is also the scion of a wealthy noble family; hence the beginnings of his ‘quest’ are delivered not by a wizard or a king, but by his mother. The hero of Gallows Gap may begin the book running a family errand, but he’s still a formidable opponent.
Show Me The Sky, by Nicholas Hogg
Another day, another ambitious first novel, desirably slipcased with a cover that earned curious glances from fellow commuters (remove the book from the slipcase to reveal an attractive patterned cover with the book title hidden in the pattern). Show Me The Sky is a book of many loosely connected parts, told in a number of different styles:
- Detective Inspector Jim Dent’s first person account of his investigation in to the disappearance of the rock star Billy K
- The journal of Nelson Babbage, the new name of a Fijian native educated in England and inculcated in to Christianity, now on his way back to bring the word of God to Fiji as part of a group of Victorian missionaries
- An account of Jimmy, a teenage runaway from a broken home
- The letters of Cal, stranded in the Australian Outback after a motorcycle accident, to his girlfriend Monique
- For good measure, we also have magazine articles, interviews, e-mails and recordings of dialogue
The central narrative arc is around DI Dent’s quest for Billy K, a world-famous rockstar (who defies plausibility by being as big as the Beatles and Elvis combined, though the method of his disappearance is more reminiscent of Richie from Manic Street Preachers). Having followed leads halfway around the world, Dent’s only remaining clue is the book Billy was reading when he vanished, being the journal of Nelson Babbage, entitled ‘Show Me The Sky’.
The Buenos Aires Quintet, by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Manuel Vazquez Montalban died in 2003, leaving behind a body of work to rival any in modern crime fiction. From the mid 70s on he traced, via the medium of the detective novel, the emergence of Barcelona as a global city and recorded the excitement of rapid change – but change that always feels like defeat.
Drawing heavily on his own experiences, Montalbán’s alter ego, Pepe Carvalho, is a man with a compromised past and a shattered faith in the future. Carvalho doesn’t like the new homogenous city and is disillusioned by the forces prospering in a country still riven by the scars of the Franco years. But Carvalho isn’t raging, he’s defeated and he knows it. A communist in his youth, a disappointed pragmatist in later life and a gastronome throughout, Carvalho’s world has shrunk to include only his surrogate “family” of waifs and strays, his private detective work and his sensual pleasures – drink, sex and above all, food.
Having made his separate peace Carvalho is an aspiring live-in-the moment nihilist – albeit one who cannot quite rid himself of his world weary romanticism, his sense of honour nor his resourceful pragmatism. Most of the crimes he investigates centre on naked big business, but the books are never didactic. Instead they are funny, warm, absurd, philosophical, poetic and touching. There is love in the depiction of his “family”, of his prostitute sometime girlfriend; his ex-party member now vagabond informer; his assistant who lives behind the office curtain; and his partner-in-food-worship next door neighbour. Then there is the city itself. Montalban might mourn the passing of the barrios of his youth, but he is every bit to Barcelona what Chandler is to LA or Ian Rankin to Edinburgh.
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Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, by Marcus Chown
I have occassionally dabbled with science books for idiots before, such as the Science of Discworld series, and Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything. Marcus Chown’s new offering is a much more compact volume, with the goal of explaining the two great scientific discoveries of the 20th century: Einstein’s theories of relativity, and quantum theory. He starts by coming up with as many fascinating facts as possible: for instance, you age faster at the top of a building at the top than at the bottom (relativity at work), and if you removed all of the empty space from the atoms of the human race, you could compress us all together in to a 1cm cube. These facts serve to highlight many strange and wonderful aspects of the science on offer.
Quantum theory comes first. Quantum theory (which even Einstein didn’t really get) describes the behaviour of the essential particles (atoms, photons, electrons, etc.) that are the building blocks of life, and that have a dangerous tendency to violate what we think of as the laws of physics more or less whenever they feel like it. I must confess that even with the plain English examples, some of this was too much for me to take in: atoms possess the properties of both particles and waves; as soon as you try to observe the behaviour of a particle, you influence the outcome (how does it know it’s being observed?), etc. Chown reassures us that even scientists who work on this stuff don’t know why most of it happens, only that it does. From my perspective as a sci-fi reader, there were one or two ideas that have been picked up by writers, notably Charles Stross’s use of paired quantum singularities for instant communication across the void of space in Singularity Sky (sadly, says Chown, although these atoms can somehow violate the speed of light to reflect each others’ state across a vast distance, you couldn’t use it to communicate due to the fact that observing the state of the particle stops it doing its magic. Pesky quantum). Star Trek-style teleportation is pretty much impossible too. Boo.
The Commodore, by Patrick O’Brian
So to the 17th episode of Patrick O’Brian’s fantastic Aubrey-Maturin story cycle. In the last volume, The Wine-Dark Sea, we saw the effective conclusion of a mini-sequence of novels which has taken our heroes around the world, to Australia, South America, and various islands of the South Pacific. The Commodore opens by ushering H.M.S. Surprise to Shelmerston, the home port of many of her hands, and setting the stage for the next, enjoyably varied instalment of the series.
I say varied because here we have many of the ingredients which have made earlier episodes so enjoyable: Stephen Maturin’s re-immmersion in the world of British secret intelligence; Jack Aubrey’s re-discovery of a wife and children he has not seen for many years, not to mention his assertive mother-in-law, now earning a living as a bookmaker, of all things. There are domestic tribulations for both men, but these matters have to be dealt with as best they can be before Jack embarks on his new commission (taking Stephen with him as surgeon, of course) – as Commodore of a task force of ships bound for Africa’s slave coast, there to act against the slave trade. He also has a second mission – to intercept and destroy a fleet of French ships bearing an invasion force to Ireland, in the hope of aiding Irish independence and opening a new front against the British.
The Fourth Man, by K.O. Dahl
The Fourth Man is an entertaining if somewhat workmanlike thriller set in a wet and snowy Oslo. Positioned close to the point where Henning Mankell’s sober diligence meets Jo Nesbo’s intricate chaos, The Fourth Man also has much in common with classic, hard-boiled US noir.
At the beginning of the novel Inspector Frank Frolich embarks on an intense, erotically charged affair with a woman he encounters during a botched police operation. She turns out to be the sister of a known gangster wanted for a string of armed robberies under investigation by Frolich. By the time she disappears, immediately after providing a convenient alibi for her brother, Frolich is not only obsessed but severely compromised. Frolich is taken off the case by his grizzly but fair boss, Gunnarstranda, and in true crime fiction style, refuses to let it lie.
The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway
I do a lot of reading, and I read a lot of Good Books. Many of them, because I do my homework and read reviews and go by the recommendations of people I trust, are Very Good Books. Nick Harkaway’s debut novel is that rarest of things, a Bloody Amazing, Brilliant, Splendid Book. In The Gone-Away World we have a rambling (but never flabby), charming, funny, scary, bleak and very clever story, and it’s a really juicy read.
The Gone-Away World is a war story. The larger-than-life characters and their larger-than-life adventures in the Gone-Away War reminded me strongly of Joseph Heller’s classic war novel Catch-22. Harkaway shares Heller’s love of the ridiculous, of the surreal, the ability to find the absurd in both the mundane and the terrifying experiences of war. There are some seriously memorable characters, characters like Ronnie Cheung, military instructor and serious hardass (trademark insult: “bumhole”); Master Wu of the Voiceless Dragon School, Tupperware-fascinated martial arts teacher, and enemy of Ninjas everywhere; Ike Thermite, leader of and spokesman for the Matahuxee Mime Combine, and Zaher Bey, piractical but surprisingly well-educated and undoubtedly charming resistance leader, whose dressing gown is chosen to match his Rolls Royce.
Principles of Angels, by Jaine Fenn
Winston Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” I like to think he was wrong, but on a day when large parts of England and Wales go to the polls, including the voters of London picking a new Mayor, it’s interesting to think about what democracy means. For our politicians, the consequences of failure are not too grim: a second career as an after-dinner speaker, reality TV ‘star’ (well OK, that’s grim) or company director. For the politicians in Jaine Fenn’s first speculative fiction novel, Principles of Angels, the consequences of failure are rather more terminal.
The floating artificial disc of Khesh City – rather like a miniature version of the Discworld… on crack. Topside, tourists flock to sample the drugs, sex, and freedom that are on offer; beneath the disc, in the Undertow, we encounter a grimy world where food and water are at a premium (don’t ask what they eat), and gangs predominate, sending whores and thieves up top to fleece the tourists in any way they can. The Angels who also live there are the assassins of the City: chosen by the mysterious Minister, they kill politicians who have been selected in a public vote to pay the price for their failures. No-one messes with the Angels or their loved ones. Unfortunately for Taro, someone has made an exception and his line mother, the Angel Malia, is killed by a hired assassin, leaving Taro without protection and plunging him in to the centre of a conspiracy involving forces beyond his comprehension.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Kat Falls
Kat Falls grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and now teaches at NU, where she is continually inspired by her students’ creativity. She started writing Dark Life as a writing exercise. Knowing that her 12-year-old son loved reading about the ocean, Wild West pioneers and, of course, the X-Men, she combined his interests and created the premise for a story that kept her up nights plotting and world-building.
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The Book That...
Robert Lloyd Parry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
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Richard T. Kelly
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