The Vienna Assignment, by Olen Steinhauer
What a near miss. For two thirds of The Vienna Assignment I thought I’d chanced upon a spy series fit to give Alan Furst a run for his money. And then just as I had mentally committed myself to buying the lot, Olen Steinhaer trots out a handful of faintly ludicrous plot devices and the whole thing goes up in a puff of melodramatic smoke.
Let’s start with the good things about The Vienna Assignment, of which there are many. It is a labyrinthine 1960s Cold War spy novel in the grand tradition of John Le Carre. It is well researched, well written and convincing in that claustrophobic spy story way. The main character, Brano Sev is, in an interesting twist on convention, a loyal operative from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Although as morally compromised and disillusioned as any Le Carre hero, Sev is not beset with any great doubts and he is not on the road to any great Damascene conversion. The settings too are good ones. In particular the nameless Iron Curtain satellite country that feels a lot like Poland is well drawn and Vienna with its emigre community made up of people who either are or who aren’t who they say they are, shows up as well here as it does in other spy stories, most notably The Third Man.
Competition: five signed copies of No Angel by Jay Dobyns to be won [closed]
No Angel is the story of Jay Dobyns, an undercover cop who spent several years infiltrating the Hells Angels in Arizona – and came dangerously close to ‘going native’ in the process. Simon A is reading it at the moment, so expect a review on Bookgeeks soon; in the meantime Canongate have given us five author-signed copies as prizes to celebrate the book’s release on May the 7th.
All you have to do to for a chance to win is answer the following question:
What’s the preferred motorcycle marque of the Hells Angels?
- Triumph
- Harley Davidson
- Honda
Filth Kiss, by C.J. Lines
C.J. Lines returns us to those gloriously gory days of the 1980s in tone and in setting with his debut novel, Filth Kiss, via the independent Hadesgate Publications.
A brutal 190 page-turner readable in a couple of hours, Lines wastes no time immersing the reader in the lives of his main characters, the Davies brothers. Jeff is coming to terms with the news that his father, Guy, has died. Taking time off from his job in London he mulls over the realisation that he never had much to do with his father whilst he was growing up, and neither did his brother Peter, always the younger, quieter of the two.
Peter is a convicted paedophile, (for a relativly minor offence, he insists), and his relationship with Jeff and his sister Jennifer has deteriorated completely. Out of prison on parole with a job in a fish and chip shop, Peter is trying to rebuild his life and resist urges which have never truly gone away. The scene is set for the brothers’ return for their father’s funeral, and an uneasy reunion with Jennifer who still lives in the Gloucestershire village of Broadoak where they grew up. Read more
Earth Ascendant (Astropolis Book 2), by Sean Williams
The second volume of Sean Williams’ Astropolis trilogy is a welcome successor to Saturn Returns, and fortunately explains a lot of what actually happened in the first book. Imre Bergemasc has been a busy chap since the end of Saturn – given that he was reassambled from partial data at the start of that book, he’s doing well to have become the ruler of the galaxy! To be more specific, Imre now heads the Returned Continuum, an empire that he is gradually expanding in an effort to bring the galaxy back to some kind of order from the chaos into which it had descended after the Slow Wave.
Aided by the wonderfully-conceived Apparatus, a kind of quantum mega-computer that exists outside our space-time continuum, and by his old command team from the Corps, Imre has been busy in the hundreds of thousands of years that has elapsed since Saturn Returns. Establishing Earth as a base, he makes grand tours to bring new star systems in to the fold, trying to recreate things as they were – but thoughts of the mega-powerful Forts, the beings who ruled the roost before the Slow Wave, and the two competing organisations who seem to oppose any attempt to recreate them, the Barons and the Luminous, dominate his concerns, especially after he ‘kidnapped’ by the partial remains of a Fort and given a prophecy.
Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives, by David Eagleman
The concept of Sum, by neuroscentist and writer David Eagleman, is a wonderful one: it’s a small book, at only 110 pages, and the forty stories are comensurately short, some only two pages long. Each story gives one weird or wonderful idea for how the afterlife might be – and Eagleman brings everything in to play for his heavenly conceptions, from quantum physics to world mythology, human pyschology to information technology.
Every trick of scale and perspective is used to create heavens and hells which don’t conform to traditional expectations (although there are a few twists on traditional cloud-and-harp heavens too). One of my favourite ideas is when there is a relationship between your time in the afterlife and the ‘living memory’ of you back in the world – only when you are forgotten can you move on. Many of the ideas would not be out of place in science fiction (one is remarkably close to Douglas Adams’ idea of the Earth as a giant computer with humans as data processors).
The Poison That Fascinates, by Jennifer Clement
It will surprise no one who reads The Poison That Fascinates that Jennifer Clement is also a published poet. Her prose is saturated with a poet’s awareness of language: its flexibility, its sounds, its resonance. This does not mean that the book is filled with page after page of hyperbolic description. Each word is placed carefully for the effect it has on the novel and ripples that may only be felt pages and chapters later. There is even a chorus of sorts, with clippings and facts on women murderers punctuating each chapter.
The novel’s driving force is Emily Neale. A girl who was abandoned by her mother and raised by her father
“on encyclopaedias and dictionaries. She likes to collect facts. She knows she can travel in an atlas and fall in love in a novel.
She knows she can kill someone in a book.”
For Emily, books, stories, and facts are living, breathing things. They serve as protections from the losses in life. The possibilities inherent in books (a mode of travel, a place for love, a murder), and the fact that the main character has been raised on such heady fare, begins a strange journey to a Mexico that is plagued with disappearances, filled with saints, and haunted by the quiet despair left behind whenever a parent leaves a child. Read more
The Ignorance of Blood, by Robert Wilson
So to Andalucia for The Ignorance Of Blood, Robert Wilson’s fourth book to feature Sevillano homicide detective, Javier Falcon. Over the course of three previous novels Falcon has emerged as a fantastically appealing character and these are complex, resonant and thoroughly enjoyable crime novels of the highest order.
Wilson’s Seville is a vibrant place on the far edge of the new Europe being flooded with new money, some legitimate but much of it inevitably criminal. This is a city at once beautiful, ancient and ordered to its own rhythm but also changing fast on the secret proceeds of drugs, prostitution and corruption. Not to mention it is a city facing new threats from fanatical Islamic terrorists and from an influx of super violent, nihilistic Russian mafiosi. Read more
Freebies for new users over at Canongate’s cultural hub
Congratulations to Canongate on the official launch today of their Meet At The Gate website – not just a publisher website, but rather a forum devoted to books, film and everything good in the arts.
Andrea See, who is Online Marketing Executive at Canongate (and thus our kind of person) says:
A publisher’s name often doesn’t mean much to the consumer; readers relate to authors or genres rather than publisher brands. By creating a site that is filled with interesting, diverse and outward-looking content, rather than an online catalogue, we aim to attract regular and loyal visitors, who will discover Canongate books along the way.
The first 500 people to sign up from the launch date (that’s today) will each receive a free book, and everyone who signs up get a free download of The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Yes, you hear right, we said free books – so get cracking and get over to Meet at the Gate.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is the true and disturbing tale of a well off Victorian family and murder in their midst. The book is really about the reaction to the shocking and unexplained murder at Road Hill House – from the general public and press to the police force, these reaction speak volumes about the class divide and the menace lurking under the outward respectability of this household and polite society in general. That the murderer of the smallest child in the Kent family was, according to the detectives, clearly not likely to be one of the well-to-do house but one of the manservants or a stranger says a lot about contemporary prejudices, and because of these, crucial evidence was ignored or missed.
At the outset this book seems like a classic Cluedo-style whodunnit, but wanders breezily into territory about the media of the time, class, and respectability. The case became something of a media fad – the press demonised those involved, not least the understated detective Mr Whicher, while the public clamored for information and apparently the whole country had an opinion on who was responsible. All things considered, perhaps it’s not surprising that the book and its subject matter feel contemporary.
Tank Men, by Robert Kershaw
The tank was a weapon that made its debut in the Great War, but it was the one of the defining technologies of the Second World War, enabling the German Blitzkrieg, preventing the re-emergence of trench warfare and significantly changing the scale over which battles were fought. As the title suggests, Robert Kershaw’s excellent book deals both with the machines, with all their quirks and shortcomings, and with the men (and in the Red Army, women) who lived in them, fought them and often died in them. It’s this focus on the human dimension which makes this such an enjoyable and impressive book.
It kicks off with the genesis of tank warfare in the latter stages of the Great War, and the impact of these unreliable monsters on the battlefields of France – they were credited with enabling British victory at Cambrai, which may have been an exaggeration – but even at this early stage in their existence, many key characteristics of the tank were set: confusion about the best way to use them in battle, a tendency for tank designers to ignore the needs and comfort of the crew, and the terrible toll that they could take on those crews. In the inter-war years British tank design was neglected while the Germans progressed in leaps and bounds, and were the only nation with a proper vision for armoured warfare when war came, though they did not really have the tanks to back it up.
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, by Dan Gardner
In a similar vein to the recent The Decisive Moment, Dan Gardner’s Risk is an exploration of the way our brains are divided between instinctive and rational thought – throughout, Gardner talks about the differing reactions of Gut (instinctive thought) and Head (rational thought). He also refers throughout the text to several key principles that Gut uses to make its determinations, such as the Example Rule (if you can think of an example of something, you are more likely to be judge it to be plausible), and the Anchoring Rule (whether you like it or not, if I mention there are 530 words in this review, and then ask you for a numerical estimate of something else, you are likely to make your estimate with reference to my original number).
The key principles are lucidly explored with good use of examples, and a clear explanation of why our brains have evolved the way they have (don’t read the next sentence if you’re in Kansas) – they are very suitable for making the judgments required of hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa, but not really for making snap judgments in the modern world of mass media, democracy, air travel, terrorism and all the rest of it. We have simply not had time to evolve the way our brains work to cope with all the inventions the human race has come up with over the years (ironic, isn’t it?).
Garbage Man, by Joseph D’Lacey
In 2008 Joseph D’Lacey unlocked the pen and set free MEAT, a dystopian and possibly post-apocalyptic novel that coupled religious cults and corrupt governance with unspeakable food production sources and techniques – authoritarian hierarchies and processes enabling the isolated town of Abyrne to survive without help from an outside world that might not even be there.
D’Lacey’s second novel, Garbage Man, takes us straight to the seeds of an impending environmental apocalypse, allowing us to watch as its roots spread intractably throughout the town of Shreve, a town that is just like any other in today’s United Kingdom.
Mason Brand is an outsider, a man who turned his back on society and his once successful career as a photographer. Living in the deepest countryside, with an old farmer as his guide, Brand learnt about himself, about the nature of nature and its relationship with man. He understands nature evolves to survive, that its processes cannot be predicted and that it simply doesn’t sit back and take abuse. He’s heard and responded to ‘the calling’. Now, giving society one last chance before he retreats forever into the wilds, he lives quietly in Shreve, shunned by almost everyone in the town, the town eccentric.
John Wray, author of Lowboy
John Wray was born in Washington, DC in 1971. His first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep won a Whiting Writers’ Award. He was recently chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists 2007. Jennie recently enjoyed and reviewed his latest offering, Lowboy, calling it “a thriller, a coming of age novel, and an immersion into the head of a schizophrenic boy.” We caught up with John to ask him about his craft.
Photo credit: Amber de Vos
Are you a bookgeek?
I’ve never been asked an easier question in an interview. Yes, absolutely. I’m a geek, and I love books. But of course Mother is the ultimate authority on this issue. Perhaps you might ask her.
Austerity Britain: Smoke in the Valley (Tales of a New Jerusalem 2), by David Kynaston
Smoke in the Valley marks the second in David Kynaston’s New Jerusalem trilogy. A World to Build was the first of the books. They form a history of the British postwar years from 1945 – 1979.
There are many reasons why we should consider these two books as one – and I suspect the next book will slot right in where the others have left off. The most noticeable aspect is that the books flow into each other. The first book ends pretty much suddenly and unexpectedly, almost mid-sentence, as does this second volume. The same could be said of chapters and sections of any of the books, as Kynaston leads us on a journey that is chronological in nature, rather than taking one aspect, cricket say and following this history through. This approach is one that the similar books White Heat and Never Had it So Good employ. Instead we jump from cricket to politics to TV to what housewives say of the transport system. And this is the joy of this book – this wandering path through the age feels almost pedestrian and haphazard yet the intellectual and research might of the work shines through on every page. Read the books in order if you like, but it’s not a pre-requisite.
Zulu Hart, by Saul David
I’m a sucker for historical fiction, and never more so than when a book jacket features 18th or 19th century military uniforms – my enduring love for the adventures of Richard Sharpe has led me on many forays to try and re-capture the simple pleasure that Bernard Cornwell has provided over the years: for a while Alan Mallinson filled the gap, and Iain Gale’s Four Days in June was very enjoyable; Simon Scarrow’s Napoleon and Wellington series lacks the visceral sense of action experienced by the lower ranks, and Flashman is wonderful but too flippant to scratch this particular itch. So with effusive quotes from Cornwell and Conn Iggulden on the cover, I approached acclaimed historian Saul David’s debut novel with high hopes. Unfortunately, I was left somewhat disappointed. The cynic in me thinks that these titans of the genre felt able to praise David because they know they won’t have serious competition from him anytime soon.
The hero of the tale, George Hart, is the bastard offspring of a half-Irish, half-Zulu actress (difficult to make her much more unwelcome in polite Victorian society, you would think), and an anonymous pillar of the British military establishment. Kept in the dark about his origins, George graduates from Sandhurst top of his class at the age of 18 and then discovers that his father will only provide further for him if he can achieve three deeply challenging things within ten years: marry a woman of gentle birth; win the Victoria Cross; and progress in the army to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Given that he doesn’t quite manage any of these in Zulu Hart, the foundations are well and truly being laid for a multi-volume Hart series – there are plenty more Victorian colonial wars and diplomatic adventures available for Hart to get embroiled in, that’s for sure.
Competition: Name that (Angry) Robot
Angry Robot, who describe themselves as the new ‘SF&F&WTF imprint from HarperCollins’, are giving Bookgeeks readers a chance to name their rather stern-looking mascot (pictured). The reader who comes up with the winning entry will receive a copy of each of their first 7 books.
So without further ado, point your browser at the Name That Droid competition, and give that cantankerous tin-can a name he / she / it can be proud of. Please don’t forget to tell them that we sent you!
The Brightest Moon of the Century, by Christopher Meeks
In The Brightest Moon of the Century, Christopher Meeks captures the embarrassments, flashes of joy, and moments of panic that make up everyday life. His central character, Edward, is reassuringly normal. As a teenager, he worries about girls. As a university student, he worries about his future. As as adult, he worries about his family. Throughout it all, Meeks uses Edward’s worries and internal dialogue as a focus to show the possibilities found in small moments: in sunrises, in friendships, in apparent disaster. Unpretentious and deeply human, the normalcy and everyman nature of the novel give it its power. These vignettes do not tell of an unattainable hero or indescribable villain; instead, here is a tale of first girlfriends, college buddies, working life, and family dynamics.
We first enter Edward’s life at the most humiliating of times, adolescence. Recently forced to attend the posh private school across town, he feels out of place among the richer and seemingly all knowing boys. Without the right tie, the right friends, or the right family, he is lost and feeling attacked. Luckily, Edward’s despair is often the reader’s entertainment, as a tightly wrapped ACE bandage demonstrates:
Oh, great. He probably had gangrene, too, and maybe more would be chopped off than just a hand. Was God toying with him like a mouse? No, God was the mouse. That left him to be what? Cheese. He hated being cheese.
Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-49, by Jim Baggott
Atomic is the tale of the creation of the Atomic bomb during wartime, and the political fallout from the realisation of these powerful weapons.
Baggott bills this as a book for lay-people, not scientists. It is true that this book concentrates largely on the people behind the bomb – the scientists driven in the most part by fear who were under no illusions over what the weapon in the hands of their enemy would mean. However the start of the book in particular is heavy on the science. In essence we need a lesson on how to build a bomb and why we need a reactor in order to make a viable explosion. Here I think that Baggott could have been more gentle with our learning curve – for example introducing the word Plutonium earlier rather that the confusing U-238 (versus U-239) – would have helped the readability (although the word itself was not invented until half way through the book). Also at the start we are introduced to the multitude of physicists who form the cast of this story. Necessarily each is introduced with a mini biography which becomes a little monotonous.
Giles Kristian, author of Raven: Blood Eye
Born in 1975 to an English father and a Norwegian mother, Giles Kristian has led a varied and somewhat unconventional life and admits that this suits him just fine. As the lead singer in nineties pop group Upside Down, he achieved four top-twenty hit records in the official UK sales charts and appeared on countless national and international TV shows including MTV and VH1. Upside Down were the subject of a BBC documentary which followed the band’s formation and rise to fame, including their first appearance on Top of the Pops.
Later, he worked as a model in London, appearing in national TV ads and poster campaigns. His poetry has been broadcast by the BBC, which has in turn led to him receiving numerous commissions. In 2004 Giles began working on Raven, the story of a boy’s relationship with a band of marauding Norsemen from across the grey sea. It is a rich and violent coming-of-age story with more than a touch of the old sagas about it, which I really enjoyed. I asked Giles about how writing compares to pop-stardom, and what happens to Raven next…
Last Train To Scarborough, by Andrew Martin
Having taken a wrong turn that lasted two episodes, book 6 of Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series has arrived and I’m happy to say Last Train To Scarborough places my favourite Edwardian steam detective right back on track.
If Death on a Branch Line and Murder at Deviation Junction strayed too far into John Buchan territory, Martin is once more doing what he does best, that is evoking a specific time and a specific place, not as a museum of the past, but as a living, breathing depiction of an aggressively modern world driven by social change and technology.
Martin writes beautifully and this is a very fine book indeed. The story is a good tale well told, but it is the scale of the setting that really sets Martin apart. Last Train To Scarborough is small, but it is precisely this concentration on the details of a life, that makes for a richer and more resonant experience.
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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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