Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel
After the success of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel needs little introduction. Having said that, Beyond Black, originally published in 2005, is a very different offering to her now bestselling book. It tells the story of Alison Hart, a medium in the modern world, making her way around the demos and private clients of her business via the seedy hotels and service stations of the dirtier parts of England’s South.
Alison is surrounded by spirits. But these are not the polite, eager to please and communicative spirits the Victorians would have us expect. They consistently disrupt her interaction with the ‘real’ world, invisibly interrupting conversations and plans, finding ways to make her follow the path they would choose for her, and, as most people cannot see them, she feels she must protect the world from the realities of ‘Spirit’. They make her ill as she relives their shocking ends and disgusting deeds. Even Diana appears to her with smudged mascara and confusion. Alison’s own spirit guide, Morris, is remorselessly sordid and attracts more spirits of the same kind. Many of these spirits are conjured from Alison’s past, old ‘friends’ of her infamous mother. They invoke often shockingly dark memories from her childhood which she must piece together to give her a chance of release. But who is her father? Her mother certainly doesn’t seem to know or care. And how did MacArthur lose his eye, or Keef his balls? Where did she get the scars on the backs of her thighs?
Mantel mixes a dark and difficult past with a present filled with solitude and hope. Alison and her assistant/manager, Collette, seem to embody the two extremes of female loneliness, the fatty protections of the compulsive eater and the cold hardness of the divorcee, both shunning the right kind of male company in their own ways and attracting all the wrong sorts.
Mantel is a master of description and the motorway corridors and housing estates of the world she creates for us are spaciously and gloriously delivered to us. The unexpected slant on the life of a medium is filled with delightful (and horrible) detail. Beyond Black is a book that you will look forward to returning to each time you have to put it down.
Reviewed by Pam Lock
Robert Lloyd Parry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).
Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.
Most people who love M R James – and I’ve only ever met those who love him or have never read him; I have yet to meet a full blooded James hater – most people who love him seem to have got hooked during adolescence. But they’re a pleasure that endure into adulthood and – for the purposes of this, anyway – beyond.
They grow on you. Of the stories I perform, The Mezzotint, The Ash Tree and Lost Hearts have increased in stature in my eyes over the years while Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad, and A Warning to the Curious have retained their status as firm favourites.
I started doing MRJ shows five years ago, when I worked at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and got the chance to perform in his old office – the Founder’s Library, a magnificent Victorian book-lined interior with a huge marble fireplace, where he catalogued so many of the medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections. I think I’ve probably performed Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook over two hundred times since then and I’ve really not got sick of it. The gradual build up of tension, the accumulation of detail, the spectacular, climactic apparition, and that slow, rather melancholy coda – they affect me now as they affected me a quarter of a century ago.
Perhaps, in fact, after so many repetitions the stories aren’t quite as chilling as they were on first reading. One might think that’s a failure in a ghost story but I don’t. For me the shudders – and they are undoubtedly there – have always been only part of the pleasure that MRJ delivers. There’s a humour in the stories, a playfulness, and that distinct narratorial voice – sometimes diffident, always friendly – that make them perfect holiday reading. Particularly if that holiday is taken alone. In winter. By the sea. And one reaches it by train. I think I’ve always found something strangely comforting about M R James.
They were composed for the holidays in the first place. James wrote all except one of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to read aloud to friends at Kings College at Christmas (the last, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is for me the least satisfying of the collection and was written at the publisher’s request to fill up the volume). So they are party pieces, really, candlelit, donnish entertainments, to be enjoyed with wine and anchovy toast after chapel on Christmas Eve. James’s protagonists are often solitary men, even lonely men, and this often leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable phenomena, but he’s not out to describe or inspire any existential agony. He doesn’t show us a cruel, random universe. His is a world of cathedral precincts and pipesmoke-filled hotel sitting-rooms, into which the monsters and grotesques that lurk in the margins of his beloved medieval manuscripts sometimes intrude. If James has a world view it is, as he admits himself, a very simple one – that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio… And that golf is an inexplicable waste of time.
I also love James McBryde’s illustrations in the book. Poor, genial, doomed, talented James McBryde, MRJ’s beloved friend. A reluctant medic, he had in 1904 at last embarked upon a career as an artist. The illustration of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was his first professional job and he went at it with gusto. A framed print of McBryde’s version of the climax of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, hangs above the desk where I’m writing this.
A quick recap: Parkins, the Professor of Ontography at Cambridge University, is enjoying a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast. He finds an ancient whistle by the beach, blows it and inadvertantly summons a… well it’s hard to say what exactly… but something responds to the whistle and attacks him in his room in the middle of the night, something wrapped in bedsheets.
The story makes the being’s “intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” the focal point of the terror. James McBryde pays more attention to the grimace of its victim: in the picture Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his claw-like hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch. Like the best book illustrations, it not only complements MRJ’s prose, it adds to the enjoyment of it.
The young artist himself sensed that he had created something special. On the 6th May 1904 he wrote to MRJ. “I have finished the Whistle ghost… I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn…”
It was probably also the last piece he completed. By the 4th of June he was dead, from a botched operation to remove his appendix. It was partly as a tribute to his great friend that James published Ghost Stories… in the first place.
I’ve also grown to love the look and feel of that first edition – the weight of it, the thick pages, the brown, hessian-like binding, the Gothic script on the cover. I’ve seen and handled a few copies over the last few years and still scour charity shops and jumble sales just in case one of those mythical copies turns up, going for 50p because the vendor doesn’t know what he’s selling.
And finally I like the idea of some Dennistoun or Parkins of the future digging up my funerary copy and becoming increasingly uneasy as he reads about what can happen when you pilfer the treasure of the past. So uneasy in fact that, by the time he has reached the end of the book, he decides it might be best to return the modest looking volume to the bony grasp of the skeleton from whose grave he snatched it. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do.”
◊◊◊
About Robert Lloyd Parry:
Since December 2005 Robert has been performing two one man shows based on the stories of M R James, the greatest writer of supernatural tales in English. His uncanny resemblance to the author has been noted with a shudder by more than one enthusiastic audience member.
Heartstone, by CJ Sansom
Ah, Brother Shardlake, you’re back I see.
I haven’t finished Heartstone yet. Truth be told I’m only just halfway through, but I know there are people who will want to know. I dare say there are a few like me who simply need to know. Right now, darn it.
Well, for all of these people, relax, I’m here to tell you it’s all going to be fine, the wait is over and Heartstone is great. Really great. So plump up the cushions, get your favourite chair ready - you’re going to need it.
It’s been a year of half decent historical fiction, but Heartstone marks the return of a master storyteller.
PS I’ve finished it now and the second half was as good as the first. Enjoy.
Neil Young’s Greendale, by Joshua Dysart and Cliff Chiang
I have to start this review by admitting that I am not a massive Neil Young fan. I quite like his soundtrack for Dead Man which I occasionally stick on the stereo, but that is were my relationship with Neil Young starts and ends. I was vaguely aware of his eco-political concept album, Greendale, which he released in 2003. What I didn’t know is that the album also spawned a film, a book and the obligatory ‘interactive tour’… and now there is the Greendale graphic novel, written by Joshua Dysart with art by Cliff Chiang.
It did occur to me that to properly review Greendale I should track down the album, listen to it on headphones while completing the interactive tour on my laptop with the live action film on mute on the telly in the background. All that seemed quite a task simply for preparation for reading a comic book so I decided not to give the album even a cursory listen. Instead I dived right into the comic book without any in-depth knowledge of Young’s project apart from an inkling that it would contain tree hugging and maybe a mild rant against George Bush. I expect the creators of this graphic novel wanted it to be consumed without the need for backstory and that it should work as a stand alone piece. So that is how I approached it.
The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas
One day, at a suburban barbeque for family and friends, a man loses his temper and slaps a child. The child in question isn’t his.
And so begins the groundbreaking international bestseller, The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas. What begins as a normal, laid-back get-together between friends turns into a confrontation that will dramatically alter their lives and affect every person who is there to bear witness. Because The Slap is so much more than it first appears. What seems like a simple focus on what is acceptable in today’s society when it comes to other people’s children turns into an in-depth exploration of what life is like in modern day Australia when race, religion, culture, gender, and sexuality comes into play.
Some of the most interesting dynamics in the story are those between Harry, the perpetrator, and Gary and Rosie, the parents of the slapped child. While Gary and Rosie bounce between feeling a mixture of upset and fury, the only remorse that Harry seems to feel is for the backlash he’s caused. Furthermore, it’s interesting that most of the characters don’t seem to fall into the expected route and rush to defend Gary and Rosie. While the majority of them remain silent and diplomatic, while dipping into their thoughts we can see that a part of them agrees with what Harry did.
When we look at the backgrounds and identities of Harry, Gary, and Rosie, we can’t help but notice that this isn’t down to chance. While Harry comes from a well-respected, rich family living in a big house, Gary and Rosie live on the poorer side of town and are privately scorned and mocked about Gary’s drinking habit and Rosie’s ‘mother earth’ approach to parenting, allowing her son to throw public tantrums and get away with whatever he wants. The barbeque is an environment filled with Harry’s ‘kind of people’ and, as a result, Gary and Rosie can find no real allies.
This unexpected perception of events is to be expected in The Slap. Any preconceptions you may have about the reactions of the characters are turned on their head. Culture, identity and background play an enormous part in this story. All stereotypes of the laid-back, sun-kissed, bleach-blonde surfer-types that we’ve come to expect from Australians are shattered as Tsiolkas teaches us about how close to the surface each ancestor’s nationality is in this new country.
We see this in Hector, Harry’s cousin. While his wife, Aisha, is quick to stick by her friend, Rosie, Hector works hard to defend his cousin. Both Hector and Harry look up to the older generation in their Greek family and know that honour plays an important role in their eyes in spite of whether the incident was right or wrong. This causes conflict between Hector and his wife, an Anglo-Indian veterinarian, who refuses to take sides “just for the family.”
It’s hard to sum up what makes The Slap so enjoyable and even harder to try and convey how superb and well-written the story is. It could be that each chapter is told through a different character’s voice. It could be that Tsiolkas not only opens our minds to the multicultural society we forget Australia is but tackles quite a lot of controversial subjects in one go. Each narrative he provides – while told in third person – is gripping from the start and, unlike a lot of authors, each of his wide range of characters have layers and a personality, rather than just being thrown into the mix as a cheap stereotype.
Out of all the books I’ve read so far in 2010, this is definitely one of my favourites. Books of this calibre only come along once in a blue moon. I want the excitement for The Slap that I have to be infectious, so I’m urging everyone to get their hands on a copy as soon as possible. It’s been a long time since I’ve held a page-turner like this in my hands. The story is gripping, the characters are dynamic and realistic, and the writing is a pleasure to read. I will definitely be on the lookout for further work by Tsiolkas.
Reviewed by Ceri Padley
The Prince of Mist, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
At last, Carlos Ruiz Zaphon, the author of the wonderful Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game is having his ‘back catalogue’ translated from the original Spanish into English. The first of these is his first children’s book, The Prince of Mist. Typically gothic in flavour, but milder than his later creations with a mind for its audience, The Prince of Mist is a deliciously scary tale of a dark conjurer and the three children who pit themselves against him.
It starts as a standard ‘moving to a new area’ story, describing the fears, and the hopes, of a child taken from familiar surroundings and plunged into a new town on the whim of their parents. The Carvers move to escape the war in 1943 but soon the mysterious beach house they exchange for their city flat is filled with shadows. Then Alicia and Max are left alone by their parents when their sister is rushed to hospital in a coma. They meet Roland and his mysterious step-grandfather who reveals the story of Cain, the Prince of Mist to them. Roland’s grandfather has been guarding the town against Cain for 25 year in the lighthouse that he built for the purpose. Cain is a nightmare of devilish deals and consequences beyond the grave. But which pact is he chasing payment on now? As the story picks up speed, danger is piled upon them. Diving for a wrecked ship and exploring a garden of subtly moving statues are just a small part of the twists and turns that lead Alicia and Max, and their friend Roland, to an unavoidable and deadly confrontation with the Prince of Mist.
The plot writhes beneath the reader and gives a clear and exciting rendition of the gothic tradition for ‘young adults’. And this older adult rather enjoyed it too. Zaphon, while writing for children, is still flexing his literary muscle. Why shouldn’t he? The book sparkles with the pictures he paints, the characters he makes us love and hate, and there is sunshine speckling the dark tale in the shape of deep friendship, loyalty and love. This fast paced adventure will leave you with a heart beating for more.
Reviewed by Pam Lock
The Haunted Hotel, by Wilkie Collins
Penguin has reissued Wilkie Collins’ The Haunted Hotel as part of their Gothic Classics: Gothic Reds series, a collection of stories featuring quintessential horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe. This edition brings to light one of Collins’ smaller works, and set aside such company places him at the forefront of the Gothic horror movement. T S Eliot once described Collins as the creator of detective fiction, influencing the great Charles Dickens, and coining the sensation novel which influenced later Gothic writing.
The Haunted Hotel combines sensation, detection and horror, within the framework of a traditional ghost story. In addition to what one would expect from a Collins mystery, the haunting element of the ghost story brings Collins work into the Gothic horror field. Collins exploits the exoticism of his Venetian setting, capturing the Gothic revival of the nineteenth century, in his mysterious haunted hotel. He uses the formidable Countess Narona – with her ominous premonitions and her mysterious brother Baron Rivar – juxtaposed against the angelic and innocent Agnes Lockwood, to create the sense of otherness central to the Gothic horror. (Frankenstein, Jane Eyre).
Transformers: Exodus, by Alex Irvine
The 1980s were a great time for cartoon lovers with such legendary series as Transformers, Thundercats, Battle of the Planets, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and He-Man being aired for the first time. It was also, undoubtedly, a great time for those involved in toy sales and merchandising. Transformers is often held up as being the first series where the cartoons actually served as a loss leader for the toys and related products marketed by series creators Hasbro. Such capitalist considerations did nothing, however, to lessen the popular appeal of the Transformers and, after a few years in the entertainment wilderness, the modern revival of the franchise in film form has been accompanied by a similarly large number of tie-ins. In my time I have been the proud owner of Transformers videos, toys, comics, clothing and even a window valance, but this is my first encounter with a full-length Transformers novel. Released to coincide with the launch of videogame Transformers: The War for Cybertron, Alex Irvine’s Transformers: Exodus is billed as the official history of the war for Cybertron and is intended to provide insight into the back-story to the game and to give further detail to key characters and events. Although the colossal battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron has remained constant throughout the various reboots of the Transformers, Exodus is the first attempt to explain the reasons behind the conflict, to present the saga of Optimus and Megatron before they were enemies, before they even knew each other.
Megatron alters the destiny of the caste-bound planet of Cybertron forever when he publically proclaims that “Freedom is every Cybertronian’s right!” In doing so Megatron, an undefeated gladiator, issues a battle cry to the oppressed masses and also opens the mind of an insignificant data clerk to possibilities that were previously unthinkable. Before becoming [transforming into?] the brave and honourable Optimus Prime, Orion Pax was a humble office underling [stay with me here] and an extremely unlikely candidate to become mixed up in a counter-revolution. However, after learning of Megatron’s plans, Orion is determined to fight the threat that the revolutionaries pose to everything Cybertron stands for, regardless of the consequences for himself.
Exodus promised a lot but delivered very little. For fans of the series, some of the details included in the synopsis are no doubt already giving cause for concern. Optimus Prime, the fearless warrior and leader, hero to generations, began life as a meek and nebbish minor bureaucrat? I couldn’t help but wonder whether the greatest Transformer of all time wore a pocket protector and had a poster saying “Hang in there kitty!” adorning the wall of his cube. The beginning pages of Exodus are very dull and loaded with tedious exposition as we encounter Orion Pax at his workstation and witness his inane plodding. Even if it was possible to ignore the damage done to a favourite character like Optimus Prime, this is no way to begin what is clearly intended to be an action-packed novel. The character of Megatron is better developed than that of Orion/Optimus but still has some major weaknesses. In the beginning Megatron’s ideas for reform were valid and, even though he was obviously going to take a turn for the evil at some point, this side of him should have been explored further. All too quickly he gets drugged up on Dark Energon and turns from a rational progressive to crazed villain.
The majority of the well-known Transformers also show up in Exodus in cameos and supporting roles, but the choices are often peculiar and/or forced. I’d like to know the reasoning behind introducing Armorhide before Ironhide and having Barricade and Blackout popping up so fleetingly. Even Alex Irvine doesn’t seem to know what is going on with these minor characters at some points in Exodus. Although Starscream is introduced as being a scientist, there is a later comment to the effect that neither Starscream nor Megatron were scientists. Some of the confusion may have arisen through Irvine’s attempts to meld together various Transformers continuities, but it’s still extremely annoying.
Even aside from the bonkers editing [for example, where exactly are Megatron and Orion Pax in chapter seven? Together or on opposite sides of the city?], the storyline of Exodus never had the potential to be great but there were some peculiar pacing and structural changes that occurred during the book that really didn’t help. Exodus began with short chapters and this served to quicken the pace of the story even when the chapters involved an obvious information dump, but a sudden lengthening of the chapters completely broke up this pace and made the story even more stilted. There was also an unhappy switch to the use of journal entries by Alpha Trion, who had previously only served as a mentor, to tell the reader about what was happening in the war on Cybertron. It would have been much more effective and emotive to describe events as they were happening.
The McGuffin that is the Covenant of Primus and the Quill that Alpha Trion wrote it with was also extremely unsatisfactory. The Covenant details the past, present and future of Cybertron and would have been incredibly useful if only Alpha Trion had been able to read it. Yes, he wrote the history and prophecies of the Covenant but couldn’t read them and also seemed rather sketchy about current events too. Neither the Covenant nor the magic pen it was written with have featured in the Transformers world before and they really have no place there now.
There were some elements of the story that I quite enjoyed although, admittedly, I would probably not have ploughed on with Exodus long enough to get to them if I had not been reviewing it. The budding friendship between Orion Pax and Megatron was nice and, even if it is something of a cliché to have archenemies who had once been great friends, I thought this could have been developed further. As it is, the relationship collapses all too quickly when the High Council name Orion Pax as Optimus Prime and, in placing him in charge, infuriates and alienates Megatron. Since they never had the opportunity to develop a fully fledged friendship, the animosity and betrayal that develops between them seems rather out of proportion.
So, ultimately, Transformers: Exodus is a mediocre story that is bound to disappoint.
Stephen Graham Jones: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
“Just realizing that this is a completely different question than What book have you reread the most, or even What book is your favorite book, though I kept trying to read it that way. Since you asked, I’ve generated lists and lists, and consulted old lists, and it’s too painful to select just one, but at the same time I keep wanting to allow myself to cheat, just string ten or twenty together here, the same way you wallpaper your room with band posters when you’re fourteen, in hopes somebody’ll walk in, see how obviously cool you must be.
Or, really, I kind of gave up on an answer, was ducking the reminder I’d set to do this. But then, yesterday, I was writing the notes for this story collection I have coming out, and it hit me, or, I discovered it on the page, which is pretty much where I discover everything: It. Stephen King’s It.
That story’s still running in my head, is probably the most permanent piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The most influential, anyway, the one I’m just now seeing that I’ve always been trying to rewrite without getting caught. Because, even just looking at it on my shelf, that’s enough for me to see some chrome eyeballs rolling my way, sure, but the real magic of that story’s those kids, their dynamic, how they’re growing up together. With It, you get the horror but you also get the, I don’t know, the distinct sense of what it means to be human, and to keep trying to be human, even when the world’s failing all around you. A completely magical book for me, and I so appreciate the way it splits into all these distinct storylines but then comes back together. I mean, reading it, just remembering it, I know it’d be dangerous to be in that story, and it’s likely stupid to secretly want to be, but, just for the chance of gambling everything on that bike ride at the end, the chance of gambling and winning, it’s got to be worth it, yeah? My heart’s pounding, even, writing this. Just thinking about that story again, about It.
I’m going to have to read it again now, soon. Need to get back to Derry for about a thousand pages.”
◊◊◊
About Stephen Graham Jones:
Stephen Graham Jones has seven books out so far, two of them horror – Demon Theory and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (the second a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) – and has two more horror novels on the horizon: The Ones That Almost Got Away, a collection of horror stories out with Prime Books in October, and It Came from Del Rio (Trapdoor Books), Book 1 of the Bunnyhead Chronicles.
Jones has been an NEA fellow, a Texas Writers League fellow, has won the Texas Insititute of Letters Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, and, in spite of all that Texas stuff, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigning Jack Ketchum to his students every chance he gets. His next two courses are The Slasher and The Zombie.
Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.demontheory.net/
Girl in Translation, by Jean Kwok
When eleven year old Kimberly Chang moves with her mother from their home in Hong Kong to New York, she expects tall skyscrapers, glistening department stores and an exciting new life. However the reality is very different. Girl in Translation opens with Kimberly and her mother arriving at their apartment in New York and discovering that it is not anything like what they had imagined. What they find is an apartment that has dead roaches all covering the floors, broken windows and a single old, stained mattress.
They soon find themselves living in complete poverty, staying in the extremely rundown apartment that is below freezing in the winter and too hot in the summer. Having spent all their money on the move to New York they are in debt to Kimberly’s Aunt Paula, whose kindness to them is actually not as kind as it seems. As Kimberly and her mother struggle to earn enough money to survive, they also have to adapt to the foreign culture. To pay back the debt they owe to Aunt Paula, Kimberly and her mother work in a factory in Chinatown, a factory run by their Aunt Paula. Most shocking about this story is that it is based on fact, from the experiences of the author; the conditions that Kimberly lives in are, at times, horrifying to read about.
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by Christopher Andrew
MI5, Britain’s Security Service, tasked with counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, hit the headlines recently when their work in Northern Ireland was criticised. Public attention for MI5 is a relative rarity and undesirable, on the whole, so it’s perhaps surprising that they invited an independent historian to write an authorised history of their work to celebrate their centenary, and that it should be designed for wider publication. Having decided to do so, Professor Christopher Andrew, who has made the study of modern intelligence services his specialty, written accessible yet scholarly tomes on the KGB, CIA and other services, and co-authored books with KGB defectors, was the obvious choice for the task.
In forewords to the main text, both the Director General of MI5 and Professor Andrew lay out the parameters of the exercise – what he could and couldn’t see, who he could and couldn’t talk to, what he could and couldn’t say. While he may have seen more classified material than he was actually allowed to write about, there is no doubt that Andrew has formed his own independent opinions about the successes and failures of the Security Service over the years. Of course, the failures are sometimes better known than the successes – the failure to detect the Cambridge Five, the Spycatcher affair, et al. Successes, often defined as they are by the absence of an event, tend to be less well known, especially post-war, and Andrew does his best to redress the balance there.
Beta Male, by Ian Hollingshead
It’s an interesting time for new authors to be attempting to grapple with what it means to be a young man in the early 21st century. Previous generations of pontificators on the subject of masculinity have either spent their words wrestling with broken dreams and futile aggression – see Chuck Palahniuk. Or indulging in hyperactive, buck chasing narcissism like Brett Easton Ellis, and it’d be nice to see something more refined and progressive try and capture this period of life. Young Brit Ian Hollingshead’s second novel occupies that age bracket and succeeds in being much tamer and more cordial than anything those guys have ever written. But he has decided in Beta Male to address how it feels to be a man in his twenties and has, in his own clumsy way, written something with undertones and subtext that are just as, if not more, troubling than anything Ellis or Palahniuk have ever penned.
The book is the tawdry tale of four twentysomething blokes. There’s Sam, the womaniser and winnable actor, Alan the boring monogamist who, in typically clichéd fashion, is an accountant. Ed, the unhinged teacher and Matt, the unemployed doctor. Through the course of the novel’s fairly slim spine, they lust after a series of girls, occasionally falling in love, but mostly pottering around in their undergarments indulging in testicle driven monologues on how woman are suffocating men. The four are bound together by a sub US teen movie bet and hackneyed portrayal of male friendship, the lads embark on a series of loosely linked shenanigans, flirting with heartbreak and a flaky kind of danger, but without ever conveying any real sense of tension.
The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory
Philippa Gregory’s The Cousins’ War series is set during a particularly turbulent period of English history, a period now popularly described as the Wars of the Roses when cousin fought against cousin, brother fought against brother, and dynasties were forged and destroyed. The first book in the series, The White Queen, followed Elizabeth Woodville as she rose from relative poverty to become the wife and, even more impressively for her time, shrewd advisor to King Edward of York. With this second book, The Red Queen, Gregory turns her attention to Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the Tudors.
The Margaret Beaufort of The Red Queen is an ambitious and passionate woman who never falters in her loyalty to the red rose of the Lancastrians and her belief that her family are the true rulers of England. As a young girl it seemed that her ambitions were to be thwarted when, after the annulment of a brief and unconsummated marriage to John de la Pole, Margaret’s cousin King Henry VI selected her as a suitable bride for his half-brother Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond. Margaret was twelve when she married twenty-four year old Edmund Tudor and this second marriage lasted even less time than her first. At the age of thirteen Margaret was a widow and was seven months pregnant with her first child.
Margaret is still, however, determined to turn her lonely life into a triumph. After her son is born in 1457 Margaret sets her heart on, one day, having the boy crowned King of England. She names the boy Henry after the ruling King and allows him to be raised by his father’s family from the age of two and pledges him in marriage to the daughter of her enemy Elizabeth Woodville, before permitting him to go into exile in France at the age of fourteen. Although her son is scarcely ever in her presence, Margaret works tirelessly and quietly to manoeuvre him into a position of power, giving only scant thought to the potentially terrible consequences of her plans for herself, for England or even for the boy himself. A savvy political operator, Margaret works her way through another loveless marriage, treacherous alliances, dangerous plots, and positions herself into a trusted position in the court of the usurper Richard III.
When she is widowed yet again, Margaret enters into her fourth and final marriage to the ruthless Thomas, Lord Stanley, and her fate is once more in the hands of another. Gambling that her husband will support her, Margaret masterminds one of the greatest rebellions ever attempted as her son Henry returns from exile, gathers his army and prepares to seize the Crown.
The Red Queen is a great continuation of The Cousins’ War series. Margaret Beaufort was an exceptional woman whose place in history is all too often overlooked. From an extremely young age she felt the privilege and burden of her family and, having identified a role model in Joan of Arc, never wavered from her principles and single-minded pursuit of her goals. In a time when women were subservient to their men folk, Margaret gave the outer appearance of conforming to societal norms while always working to ensure her own interests were taken care of and, of course, finally succeeding in a plot that her male relatives had failed to pull off for years. She may have been a schemer, but Margaret Beaufort certainly got a lot done. As well as the events of The Red Queen, she would eventually act as regent for her grandson Henry VIII and so would wield ultimate power, if only for a short period, over England. There was clearly a great deal to be said about Margaret’s life and Philippa Gregory has done a great job of pacing The Red Queen so that the most universally significant points of the story are brought to the forefront and fully developed, while never ignoring the more mundane elements of Margaret’s day-to-day, public life.
Of course, for all her achievements and undisputedly great impact on history, Margaret Beaufort was a hugely complex character and, like all those who scheme for power and glory, she could never be described as a “good” person. In her push for power for her son, one of the gravest accusations that can be levelled against her is that she played some role in the murder of the princes in the tower. That being a mystery that has never been solved, in The Red Queen Philippa Gregory opts to give Margaret Beaufort a definite role in the murders that is both believable and tragic, particularly since this book should be read after Gregory’s interpretation of the life of the princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, in The White Queen.
Philippa Gregory is a masterful writer of historical fiction and The Red Queen lives up to the high standards she has set with her previous books. It being historical fiction, there are some historical inaccuracies in the story but they serve to add drama and pathos to the narrative and do not distract from the overall truth of the book. The Cousins’ War is a fine series and, if the books that follow The Red Queen are of the same standard, may end up being even better that Gregory’s Tudor trilogy.
Blood and Iron, by Tony Ballantyne
Compared to the first and third books, the set up and the conclusion respectively, the middle segment of any trilogy seems to get off lucky. Readers know the main characters, the world, the narrative. They’re already invested in your story if they’ve followed you this far. So, the middle book is where the fun happens.
Set up by Twisted Metal, Tony Ballantyne’s opening to the saga of the thinking robots on Penrose, is Blood and Iron. Penrose is a world completely dominated by artificial life, from various robotic communities, down to the more itchy likes of metal beetles and the vast forms of metallic whales. The perpetually abused whales, in particular, have the most cause for sympathy as the long suffering victims in a world where, in one way or another, everyone and everything is victimised. Because Penrose is also a world completely dominated by an obsession with metal. Read more
White Cat, by Holly Black
Seamlessly integrating magic believably into a real-world setting is a hard task to accomplish. It has to be introduced into a story in such a way that we accept it without question as readers, inducing that famous ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. It has to be said of Holly Black that she manages to do just that in her latest YA novel, White Cat (the first of a trilogy), where the use of the outlawed ‘curse-working’, as she’s termed it, is so flawlessly ingrained into the world and milieu she’s created that the reader doesn’t actually realise that there’s anything weird or fantastical about the premise.
Cassel is the youngest son of a curse-working family, a family which also just happens to be one of the five big crime families in America. There’s only one big problem in his life, however: he’s the only member of his family who isn’t a curse-worker, and as such is a big disappointment to his family, especially to his two older brothers, Philip and Barron, who positively hate him for it. The book opens with Cassel waking up at night on the roof of the exclusive school he attends, Wallingford Academy, having apparently sleepwalked up there from his dorm while having a dream of following a white cat. It’s an act that manages to get him excluded from school for a while: however, the cat isn’t a figment of his imagination – she’s very real and is just about to make his life very complicated indeed.
As the title implies, the cat is central to plot of this story which mixes the faintly supernatural and the exploits of mobsters. Black carefully reveals all the little secrets and puzzles of Cassel and his family drip-by-drip, as his life gradually unravels and he’s not quite as certain about the way things are as he used to be. The narrative threads don’t really start to mesh together until roughly a third of the way through, but from then on the story clips along at a good pace. However, a clever reader will be able to start putting all the pieces together long before the end comes together if he/she has been paying attention. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – even if the reader DOES figure out what’s happening there’s still a solid enough and well-written story behind it to keep the reader fully engaged.
The idea that magic can co-exist with technology like computers and mobile phones seems, on paper, to be a recipe for disaster, or at the very least a jarring juxtaposition. However, Black subtly weaves the idea throughout the story and, although it’s a major component of Cassel’s world, it isn’t overplayed to the point where it’s constantly pushed into the reader’s face or becomes a jarring note, or even becomes an attempt to spice up an otherwise prosaic story. In addition, curse-working brings together and neatly explains the plot threads and the action nicely and consistently.
Bearing in mind that this is a YA novel, don’t go looking for anything deep or meaningful here – it’s just a good story, competently told and with the characters drawn as much as they need to be. Admittedly, this reviewer found the adult characters somewhat more interesting (if, maybe, a little stereotypical), with Cassel’s school friends being less easy to engage with or relate to. Our erstwhile hero’s character, however, does grow a little over the course of the novel, if not in confidence and stature, then at least in awareness of the true nature of what’s going on around him, knowledge that is at times very painfully bought.
A good solid premise, marred a little by some fairly typical characterisations. The latter is not enough to deter this reader from following Cassel into the next volume, Red Glove, which is due out next year.
Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones
Five copies of Bad Things Happen to be won [closed]
Thanks to the kindly folks at Ebury Press, five lucky Bookgeeks will be getting stuck in to Harry Dolan’s new crime novel, Bad Things Happen, recently reviewed on Bookgeeks by Rob Cox.
David Loogan is leading a new and quietly anonymous life in a new town. But his solitude is broken when he finds himself drawn into a friendship with Tom Kristoll, the melancholy publisher of the crime magazine Gray Streets – and into an affair with Laura, Tom’s sleek blond wife. When Tom offers him a job as an editor, Loogan sees no harm in accepting. What he doesn’t realise is that the stories in Gray Streets tend to follow a simple formula: Plans Go Wrong. Bad Things Happen. People Die. Then one night David’s new boss phones him in a panic, asking him to come to his house immediately. And bring a shovel…
To win a copy, all you have to do is answer the following question: Which Michigan city is the setting for Bad Things Happen?
The Wonder, by Diana Evans
In Phillip Larkin’s poem, ‘High Windows’, the speaker looks in on a changing 1960s Britain and finds it impossible to describe the newly-found freedom he witnesses in words. Instead an image comes to mind that is bewildering rather than liberating in its vastness:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Like Larkin’s poem, Diana Evans’s second novel suggests that absolute freedom is exhilarating but frighteningly expansive; that it is risky to lose oneself too completely in the heady pleasures that allow us to fly far above ground. The Wonder opens with an image of flight: Lucas, the young man whose journey of self-discovery frames the novel, is whisked away in a dream by a highway man and together they speed out of Ladbroke Grove and into open countryside, before Lucas wakes up disorientated in the cramped bed he shares with his sister. This opening passage reverberates throughout the novel as a pattern repeats itself across generations: a man in flight, enjoying the exhilaration of movement, is pulled back down to earth by the people, scents and sounds which are the fabric of our everyday lives.
Lucas was orphaned at a young age and in his mid-twenties begins to tentatively unravel his family history through photographs, anecdotes and other tokens of lives lived and lost, from newspaper cuttings to clothes rotting away in an old wardrobe. Out of these fragments emerges the story of a 1960s black dance troupe led by Lucas’s father, Antoney, and peopled with other creative and volatile characters, including Lucas’s mother Carla. As the troupe travels from London to Europe, we see the energy and exhilaration that comes from creative expression and success, but we also see the fallout when this excitement cannot be reconciled with personal relationships and everyday experiences.
The tension between these two facets of life is brilliantly communicated through the book’s language, which vacillates between energetic, bouncing prose that mirrors the dancers’ flies and leaps, and grounded earthy language which pulls the reader in the opposite direction. From taste to smell, the writing is thick with the intimate phenomena that make up our everyday lives and form memories of those who have left us. Descriptions of the characters within the dance troupe and the people who orbited their world are touching but unsentimental, while the book describes different periods of London’s history with an exquisite sense for detail. Just as Lucas’s own life is gradually peopled with the generations who have gone before him, so late-1990s Ladbroke Grove becomes populated with the ghosts of its past, the air filled with the sounds, smells and tastes of a developing multicultural community and the burgeoning Notting Hill Carnival.
Lucas’s research reveals a tendency among male members of his family to sacrifice all they have for the idea of freedom, including the people they love. The novel’s take on modern masculinity is remarkably nuanced and thought-provoking, the brash confidence of its male characters always undercut by a sense of sadness at the inevitability of their fate. However, the book’s themes reach beyond gender politics: it meditates on the transition we all have to make from the wonder of childhood and adolescence, when life is at its most vivid and colourful, to the rules and responsibilities of adulthood.
It is testament to Evans’s great skill as a writer that she manages to effortlessly weave these complex themes into a novel which is also a great pleasure to read. Beautifully written but never overwrought, The Wonder is brilliantly evocative of time and place and its characters are both intriguing and amiable. Furthermore, the mysteries laced through Lucas’s family history keep the pages turning until the very end.
Gary Fry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
“…E Mortius Revoco, a Guide to DIY Practical Resurrections.
Only kidding.
In fact, that’s a hard question, but put a gun to my head (and let’s face it, such an act would bring the grave a tad closer) and I’d have to say Money by Martin Amis. I love it. One of those books you can read from start to end with undiminished pleasure, or simply dip into and revisit certain seminal passages. The prose is wonderful, the jokes as dark and funny as they come, and the whole thing is frequently profound, provocative and stimulating. Amis is my generation’s big UK voice. Nuff said, sir.
Here’s a short extract to illustrate only some of the foregoing eulogising:
In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF–BOOZE–NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
What I love here, as in the great majority of Amis’s work, is the brilliance of the ideas, their phrasing, the way he alludes to great literature by way of tawdry modern life (“God’s green snot”). He has made the hideous beautiful – quite an achievement. If great writers hold up a mirror to their times, what is Amis giving us? In Money, it’s the way that the whole of social life has been commodified and subjugated to the rigors of capitalism. John Self is a void, a man who moves from one effortless addiction to the next. When he goes to watch an opera, he interprets the story according to a soap opera or a tabloid headline story. He’s drunk most of the time, but those blank-outs serve another purpose. Amis also offers us a meta-reflective rumination on the nature of novel writing. Characters disappear for great patches of all novels – Self simply blacks out: a nicely judged metaphor what happens when the reader ‘isn’t looking’. But Amis goes further, and later in the book we get a character called Martin Amis who’s deliberately manipulating his central character much in the way that ‘Godlike’ authors do: a smart touch. There are other things going on in this novel which beggar belief. The complexity masquerades as endless vitriolic and painful comedy. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read. And if Self achieves a little pathos and independence towards the end of the book, what are we to make of this? Is he redeemable? Are our times? Are we?
On the basis of this book in particular, Amis has been described as a misogynist, but nothing – in my view – could be further from the truth. Selina Street manipulates Self, for sure, though it’s he who holds all the money and that’s what she’s after. And of course it’s another female character, Martina Twain, who attempts to reform Self, even though, when left in her flat a while, he spends rather less time reading the copy of Animal Farm she’s lent him than he does seeking out choice bits of photography over which he can masturbate. But come on, that’s all true – it’s so true. And that’s the bottom line for me: Amis tells it the way it is for men in these not-so-long-departed modern times.
Maybe he’s therefore a geezers’ author. I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that his fictional worlds resonate with me. The headiness of the language is intoxicating. He does what V S Pritchett insisted all writers should do: give voice to all the wonderful thoughts inside even the most base of people. And boy is Self base. But…maybe we all are. Maybe Amis is reminding us of that, and perhaps he uses his divine gift for prose as a way of smuggling these truths through the ever-so-refined filter of ‘good taste’. In short, he challenges what literature is supposed to deal with, the higher aspirations and concerns of humanity. Well, what can I say to support that? Something in the style of the superb Money, maybe: okay, here goes – Bach, Galileo, Shakespeare, Churchill, Keats, Constable, Brunel, to name but a few – they all surely enjoyed a handjob now and again.”
◊◊◊
About Gary Fry:
Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, though his first love is literature. To date he’s had four short story collections and over 60 tales published. His first novel – a frightening haunted house piece called The House of Canted Steps – will be published in 2010 by PS Publishing. He also has a disturbing novella – the colourfully entitled ‘The Invisible Architect of Psychopathy – out from Pendragon Press in 2010: this accompanies a fine piece by Simon Maginn in a book called Feral Companions.
- More news and views on Gary’s new website at: http://www.gary-fry.com/
The Children of the Lost, by David Whitley
David Whitley’s The Midnight Charter introduced readers to Agora, an ancient city-state where everything is for sale – goods, thoughts, emotions, and memories – even children. In this insular environment where money does not exist and trading and contracts are the only way to survive, successful merchants wield ultimate power, plague spreads rapidly throughout the slums, and children are possessions until their twelfth birthdays. In the tower of the famous astrologer Count Stelli, two young children, both of whom have been sold as slaves, meet. Mark has been sold by his father to the Count’s grandson in return for medical treatment, while orphaned Lily is now owned by the Count. As Mark and Lily struggle to find their place in Agora, him within the power structure of the city and her without, the mysterious ruler of Agora, the Director of Receipts, tracks their progress.
With The Children of the Lost we return once more to Agora as Whitley continues the fantastical adventures of Mark and Lily. The Children of the Lost picks up right where The Midnight Charter leaves off (this is a series that you definitely need to read in order) with Mark and Lily having been banished from Agora. Lost, alone and, for the first time ever, with only themselves to think about, Mark and Lily venture away from Agora and eventually discover the land of Giseth and take refuge in the village of Aecer, a seemingly idyllic community where everyone is equal and the concept of ownership is unknown. For Lily, who had always hated the frantic pace and mercenary ways of Agora, Aecer seems perfect, but Mark is suspicious. Both children are soon to discover that paradise comes at a price and, after Mark is denounced and punished for opposing the Speaker of the village, are left with important questions to answer: What secret is the silent Father Wolfram concealing? Why are two of their new friends so reluctant to reveal their mutual attraction? And who is the mysterious woman who appears in Mark’s and Lily’s dreams, telling them that they must find the Children of the Lost?
The Children of the Lost is an excellent sequel to The Midnight Charter. The narrative switches back and forth between viewpoints so that the world outside of Agora is explored while the reader is still kept up-to-date with events inside the city-state. This is a useful tool for visiting some of the minor characters from The Midnight Charter in greater depth while also moving the storyline forward and introducing new people and places. It is interesting to see the characters of both Mark and Lily develop as they try to break free of their past and make sense of the new world they find themselves in. The sometimes antagonistic relationship between the two is nicely expanded upon too. The apparent contrasts between Agora and Giseth are well drawn and, while there is a fair amount of exposition involved, The Children of the Lost is pretty quick-paced and hugely engrossing.
The Agora books are highly original and are great works of fantasy and the ending of The Children of the Lost has left me anxious to get hold of the next book (no date available for that yet though). It will be interesting to see whether David Whitley limits the adventures of Lily and Mark to the fantasy staple trilogy or whether he expands the series. There certainly seems to be potential in the characters and setting for more than one further book.
Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer
What if you were blind and the internet gave you the power to see not only the real world but into the mind of the web? This is the question asked in Robert J. Sawyer’s first instalment of the WWW trilogy.
Caitlin is a quirky, hockey stat loving, Math genius of a teenage girl who spends a lot of time on her livejournal blog. Shortlisted for an experimental procedure she travels to Japan with her mother and is given a neural implant that promises her sight. At first the device appears to be yet another failure in a lifetime of broken promises. However, something begins to stir and Caitlin is not exactly able to see the world as expected, but to actually see inside the web.
In a new home in a new country and with new friends Caitlin explores this new sensation with gusto, soon realising that she is not entirely alone in this new world. She has touched an emerging consciousness. It is an intelligence born out of the web itself and she is its guide and teacher.
NewsNow
Literature News 24/7-
The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
-
Latest Competition
Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
Latest Bookbitz reviews
