The Khyber Pass: A History of Empire and Invasion, by Paddy Docherty
Mention of the Kyber Pass may, for many of us, evoke images of the hoary old film favourite Carry On Up the Khyber, but as Paddy Docherty expertly illustrates in The Khyber Pass, it has played a crucial role in the history of India and the many peoples, from the Greeks to the Persians, the Mongols to the Huns, who have traversed it in the course of migrations and invasions. In giving us the context to these events, Docherty provides compact histories of some famous, and some deeply obscure, empires.
As the only significant, viable route from what is now Afghanistan through to the Indian Subcontinent, the Khyber Pass has seen numerous significant passages; yet in places it narrows to only few meters across, putting the traveller at the mercy of the local tribesmen on the slopes above, and making them vulnerable to determined defenders. Perhaps the first significant invasion of India through the pass would have been the Persians; they were succeeded by the Greeks of Alexander the Great as they reached the Eastermost extent of their epic journey of conquest. As a result of these movements, Persian was the lingua franca of Northern India for hundreds of years, while Greek influence continued to be felt in the Punjab long after Alexander was a distant memory.
The Resurrectionist, by James Bradley
Set in London in 1826, but recalling a later Dickensian city, The Resurrectionist is about to become a very popular book indeed. This is due in part to being annointed by Richard and Judy, but also because The Resurrectionist is a grimly entertaining and claustrophobic story of grave-robbing and madness.
Gabriel Swift, brought up by a respectable family following the death of his destitute, alcoholic father, is apprenticed to Edwin Poll, the most famous anatomist of the day. Gabriel’s job is to prepare cadavers delivered at night by competing gangs of grave-robbing “resurrectionists”. A memorable grand guignol first chapter sets this scene and we instantly know we are in for an atmospheric and grisly ride.
Having established the backdrop of disinterment and dissection, Bradley goes on to tell the story of Swift’s inexorable descent into purgatory, exile and madness. Although outwardly an upstanding member of the gentry and an ambitious trainee surgeon, Gabriel is adrift, apart and alone. Bemused by everything, Swift lives in a detached, dreamlike state, almost a spectator of his own life. Swift respects his master, Poll, but is more drawn to Lucan, shadowy king of the criminal trade in stolen bodies and still more to an unexplained need to tear down his respectable life in London.
Reaper’s Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen), by Steven Erikson
I usually feel a faint masochistic thrill when starting a new Steven Erikson novel – not just because of the sheer size and weight of each such tome (especially in hardback), but because I know that I will usually spend the first third of the book frantically trying to work out what the hell is going on, how it related to what happened in the preceding book and who everyone is. As an experience, an Erikson novel could be compared with a series of The Wire – you don’t necessarily know what’s going on all the time, especially at the beginning, but you enjoy it anyway, and then suddenly it all starts to make sense, and then it’s wonderful, enthralling, compelling and utterly unlike any other fantasy you could ever read.
There are many writers pushing the boundaries in the fantasy scene at the moment, a number of who I have reviewed here on Bookgeeks – K.J.Parker, Richard Morgan, Joe Abercrombie – but Erikson is in a league of his own. The breadth of his vision, the complexity of the underlying mythos, the myriad interweaving plotlines, coupled with the fact that Erikson can really write, make this a richer fantasy experience than any other.
Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch
Red Seas Under Red Skies is the second volume of Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards sequences, following on from the successful The Lies of Locke Lamora. The sequence is planned to be seven books long, so it’s a good job that the author demonstrates that the wonderful first volume was not a flash in the pan. Following the bloody finale of the first book, Locke Lamora (not his real name) and Jean Tannen (his real name) are all that is left of the Gentleman Bastards, the gang of master thieves and grifters. Driven to flee their home city of Camorr, they have headed for the city state of Tal Varrar, where we find them planning to fleece the city’s great gaming house, The Sinspire, with its high rollers and its impregnable vault.
The first half of the novel alternates between a series of flashbacks bringing us up to date with the Bastards’ schemes since they arrived in Tal Varrar, and the increasingly complex ongoing plot. As in the first volume, nothing really goes quite to plan for Locke and Jean – their designs on the Sinspire become entangled with the machinations of the city’s ruler, the Archon, and his ongoing power-struggle with the merchant elite, not to mention parties unknown making regular attempts on their lives. With so many enemies and schemes on the go, it all gets pretty complicated but Lynch managed to keep all the plates spinning. The red seas and red skies of the title are encountered when our heroes are forced to take to the ocean as makeshift pirates, in a conspiracy designed by the Archon to restore his waning popularity by stirring up a pirate revolt for him to crush. The nautical sequences, while maybe not up to the level of authenticity of Patrick O’Brian, are very well realised, and as Locke and Jean come to realise that pirates are just thieves afloat, and therefore their kind of people, their web of loyalties becomes notably more tangled, especially when Jean finds love. There’s most than a hint of Pirates of the Caribbean to these parts of the book, which is no bad thing.
The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson
Andrew Davidson’s first novel is hugely impressive – The Gargoyle deals with extreme physical suffering and pervasive mental illness, with history and literature, and with love and loss, and Davidson handles his chosen range of themes with a great deal of panache.
Our nameless narrator is, by his own admission, a moral vacuum, a maker and purveyor of pornography, a serial womaniser unable to form emotional attachments after a crappy childhood, and a serious substance abuser; his only redeeming characteristic is a love of books and knowledge for its own sake. The story opens with the car accident that will transform his life, leaving it (and him) utterly unrecognisable, burned over much of his body. He describes the course of events in vivid detail, and then explains in a very matter-of-fact way the torments and tortures that he experiences in the burns unit in the name of treatment. It’s very graphic and at times hard to read, but simultaneously compelling – and Davidson has obviously done his research in to the recovery process for burns victims.
In to this new existence, Marianne Engel appears one day. A psychiatric patient from elsewhere in the hospital, she has no doubt that she and the narrator were lovers in their former lives, and she installs herself completely in to his life. Despite her apparent strangeness, this is not unwelcome, all former ‘friends’ having recoiled from the charred horror that the narrator has become. Marianne embarks on telling the story of their past lives and their relationship, teasing it out a bit at a time. She also tells a series of other short stories, all focusing on characters from other cultures – an Italian blacksmith, a Japanese glassblower, an Icelandic artisan, and others – and all concerned with the idea of doomed love. Stories become a major part of the currency of their developing relationship, and they are beautifully told.
This Night’s Foul Work, by Fred Vargas
If Euro Crime really is the new black, then its popularity is due in no small measure to a sense of recognisably distinct voices being applied to recognisably distinct places. A few pages of a good Euro crime novel and it should be clear where we are and the sort of ride we are in for. This is certainly true of Fred Vargas’ latest novel, This Night’s Foul Work, which is idiosyncratic, elliptical, playful, implausible and affected. Its characters, more a collection of quirks than real people, are self-obsessed, prone to unselfconcious discussions of academic philosophy or breaking into 17th C poetic forms at the drop of a hat. Is this heady brew particularly French? Maybe, maybe not – but it’s a thousand miles away from a Scandinavian police procedural.
In the Paris flea market, two small-time drug dealers have had their throats cut. It is clearly a case for the Drug Squad, yet Zen homicide detective Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, notices some dirt under the victims’ fingernails and this is enough for him to become involved. It soon emerges the murders may be the work of a wraith-like, elderly female serial killer(!) who Adamsberg caught but who has now made a daring escape from prison(!!). Despised by the rest of the force but revered by his own motley crew, Adamsberg pursues the shadowy killer across Paris and the Normandy countryside. And then the story flies truly out there, taking in grave-robbery, stag mutilation, ghosts, narcolepsy, 17th century recipes and a criminally intense intra-village rivalry. Oh yes, did I mention the homing cat?
Starstruckgeek
Last night Mathew and I attended the launch for Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, a book that I greatly enjoyed and that has received a lot of attention here in the UK: from Radio 4, Newsnight Review, The Guardian, The Scotsman, and most importantly of all (I would humbly submit), from your friendly neighborhood Bookgeeks!
It’s the first time I have been to a book launch, and it was a very pleasant way to spend a bit of time.
Plus points
- Friendly chat with the author himself
- Short but enjoyable speeches
- Free booze
- Delicious canapés
- Free flapjacks (read the book and you’ll understand)
- Oh, and I met John Le Carré, who happens to be Nick Harkaway’s dad
Minus points
- I forgot to take my copy of the book to get Nick to sign it (only got myself to blame there)
- In the excitement of pursuing Mr Le Carré, I forgot to take a free flapjack (don’t ever say I don’t know how to make tough choices)
So on the whole, I think you would say the pluses vastly outweighed the minuses and call it a very cool experience indeed. And did I mention that I met John Le Carré?
Calling all Facebookers
You can now become a fan of Bookgeeks on Facebook – so if you like what you see here at Bookgeeks, share the love and let us know. Once a month we will send an update to fans with a round-up of the month’s reviews and a sneaky peek at impending reviews.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Bookgeeks on TV! (well, sort of)
I just spotted a link to our review of The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, which launches today, on the website for the book. Probably the closest we will ever come to getting on TV (unlike Mr Harkaway, who should be on Newsnight Review this Friday at 11pm).
Visit the Gone-Away World website.
Through A Glass, Darkly, by Bill Hussey
Bloody Books return with their second title, a very different but equally memorable companion to Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat.
Bill Hussey‘s debut novel, Through A Glass Darkly is an unnerving joy to read, dark words that demand a rainy afternoon with no distraction. Hussey’s obviously been brought up on that wonderfully nutritious diet of Hammer films, M.R. James‘ quiet curatorial ghosts and Dennis Wheatley‘s Satanist tracts that have left a dark seed in so many thirty-and-forty-somethings. Hence the story moves subtly through a solidly thorough British horror heritage and drips an enthralling occult atmosphere as it forges its own distinct and horrifically contemporary path.
Detective Inspector Jack Trent cannot touch another human being for more than a few seconds. He sees the future in his dreams, and those that he touches see things too, things that live inside Trent. Things that took up residence, when in his childhood, an unbelievably traumatic experience opened a gateway to somewhere very, very dark, from whence something very, very dark, crawled through.
Happy Birthday, Turk!, by Jakob Arjouni
One of the joys of Euro crime is the sense of visiting a specific place and being told a tale in a language unique to that place. Henning Mankell is now so clearly Swedish, MV Montalban Catalunyan and Fred Vargas French, so much so you couldn’t transpose the writing style of any from one location to another.
Disappointing then that Happy Birthday, Turk!, the first novel in Jakob Arjouni’s Frankfurt-based series featuring Turkish PI Kemal Kayankaya, should seek to pay such homage to hard-boiled US pulp of the 30s, 40s and 50s. This is perhaps not quite so surprising given the Kayankaya series arrives courtesy of the good people at No Exit Press, fine purveyors of all things noirish and hard-boiled.
Happy Birthday, Turk! was first published in 1989 and is the opening novel of a series featuring the Turkish-born investigator. In it Kemal Kayankaya is hired to find the killer of a Turkish worker stabbed to death in Frankfurt’s red-light district. During the course of a not particularly intellectually challenging investigation, KK finds time to be beaten up, be gassed, beat other people, have a gun pulled on him, pull the same gun on some one, come close to being run over, uncover a heroin ring, become involved with a prostitute and expose a little police corruption. And the murder itself. None of which is bad for three days work.
The Savage Altar, by Asa Larsson
More Scandinavian crime. This time we’re in the rural North of Sweden with the first in Asa Larsson’s darkly foreboding series featuring troubled tax lawyer, Rebecka Martinsson and pregnant detective, Anna-Maria Mella.
A charismatic evangelistic preacher is found by his sister and her daughters horribly murdered in the huge church, that in every way dominates the small town of Kiruna. Eager for a quick resolution the police appear ready to settle on the sister as their prime suspect. She then contacts her estranged friend, high-flying Stockholm tax lawyer and ex church member, Rebecka Martinsson, to intervene on her behalf. Although initially reluctant, Rebecka is forced by complicated bonds of loyalty to help her friend out.
On arrival it soon emerges Rebecka was forced to leave both the church and Kiruna for some serious but unnamed transgression. Consequently what Rebecka faces is a town under hidden instructions not to co-operate, a barely functioning friend, a boss who wants her back, a politically motivated Chief Prosecutor and an overwhelming sense of residual guilt and resentment. The only glimmer of a saving grace is help from a sympathetic police inspector.
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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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The Bookgeeks Competition
The Richard T. Kelly Column
Richard T. Kelly
Richard T. Kelly’s exclusive monthly column, in which he addresses various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and his own experiences as a writer. Richard is a novelist, screenwriter, biographer and journalist, and you can read his column exclusively on our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.Connect with Bookgeeks
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