Erin’s Review: Fool, by Christopher Moore
Even if the mere thought of a new offering from Christopher Moore, author of such hilariously satirical novels as Bloodsucking Fiends and Island of the Sequined Love Nun, isn’t enough to set readers’ imaginations whirling, the brilliant blurb on the back of Fool is sure to do the trick:
This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and …
Author: Erin Britton
Tags: Humour Modern Fiction
Sam’s Review: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, by James Attleen
This is the book that I wanted to write.
Like those books that tackle one subject thoroughly, and thereby pull in all of history – the potato, the pencil, Cod – Attlee has described the street in which he lives – a down at heel main artery into the cloistered city centre of Oxford – Cowley Road. He has explored the people who inhabit this street, their stories, tales and religions. Plus the story of the street itself – its history and changing fortunes.
My philosophy on travel and exploration is that rather than traveling we should learn about the 100 metres square, or perhaps less, where we live or work. As Attlee found in his wanderings, very often the world comes to you in the form of migrant communities and exotic practices. Not only this but once upon a time those square metres were home to Victorians, Farmers, Invalids, Anglo Saxons, Dinosaurs and more. Under our noses and our feet is a whole world. Traveling is great, mind expanding even, but so are the things that happen in our neighborhood.
Jennie’s Review: Jasmyn, by Alex Bell
Alex Bell’s Jasmyn is one of those novels with a backstory as compelling as the action it chronicles. It begins with Jasmyn, despairing in her grief over the sudden death of her husband. She abandons herself to her sadness and barely manages to interact with anyone at the funeral. Jasmyn’s grief may not be the only reason the world around her has ceased making sense though, as the funeral is interrupted when black swans tumble from the sky to fall dead onto the coffin below.
Jasmyn’s life continues to be upsetting and strange. She is threatened by a visitor who claims to know her husband, the photos in her wedding album show a woman screaming, and it becomes clear that her husband kept a life apart from the one they shared. All of this shatters what little composure she has left, and Jasmyn tries to flee to her grandparents’ house, and then California, in an attempt to run from the horror that her life has become.
Her husband’s death, and the events that led to it, continue to chase Jasmyn, and soon she must join with her brother in law, Ben, to search for the secrets that doomed her marriage. Their search draws them towards Germany and the tragic history of Ludwig II, the Swan King, with his magnificent castle and suspicious death. Read more
Paul’s Review: The Missing by Jane Casey
The Missing is Jane Casey’s first novel, a thriller set in a Surrey commuter town, narrated by an English teacher at a girl’s private school. Sarah Finch is a thwarted soul hiding a tragic secret. Her brother disappeared from their front garden when she was eight years old and never returned, no body was found. She lives with her mother in that same house, the brother’s bedroom kept as an immaculate shrine. They bicker and fight, the mother drinks and snipes all day, unable to forgive Sarah for her failure to remember any significant details about her beloved son’s disappearance or abduction. Her mother’s life lies shattered, but Sarah is long past feeling any sympathy, though she sees it as her duty to stay where she is not wanted and look after her as best she can.
One Monday morning, Michael Shepherd, the father of one of Sarah’s pupils, makes an appeal to her class for information: his daughter has been missing since Saturday afternoon, has anyone seen or heard from her? Later that day, Sarah stumbles across the girl’s body on her evening run and finds herself at the centre of a highly emotive murder investigation. Naturally, the new case stirs up memories for Sarah, and she can’t help getting involved, whether it’s offering lame platitudes to the grieving parents after a press conference held in the school hall or gently interrogating pupils before the police have had a chance to and striking gold. Her position is further complicated when an impulsive liaison with one of the detectives leading the investigation forces her to withhold potentially crucial information, and when the case’s sordid underbelly is uncovered, suspicion is turned towards Sarah herself.
Erin’s Review: The Affair of the Necklace, by Edgar P. Jacobs
Edgar P. Jacobs was a friend and collaborator of the famous Belgian writer and artist Herge and the adventures of Blake and Mortimer were in fact serialised in the first issue of Tintin magazine in 1946. Although surprising at the time, that first story, The Secret of the Swordfish, proved more popular than the Tintin story that it accompanied and so the Blake and Mortimer adventures were developed and soon published as an independent series of graphic novels. Featuring a dynamic partnership between famous British physicist Professor Philip Mortimer and Captain Francis Blake, the head of MI5, the Blake and Mortimer novels were set during an atmospheric and mostly accurate interpretation the 1950s and involved a thrilling mix of classic detection and science fiction. However, despite proving incredibly popular in their native French, the Blake and Mortimer stories were not available in English until the late 1980s and then only briefly. Fortunately, in 2007, Cinebook Publishing began reprinting Blake and Mortimer, albeit not chronologically, with The Affair of the Necklace being the seventh title published.
As The Affair of the Necklace begins, dapper heroes Blake and Mortimer are travelling to Paris to testify at the trial of Count Olrik [the official nemesis of the series who appears in all but one of the books]. Stuck in a never-ending traffic jam, Professor Mortimer reads a newspaper for entertainment and learns that the citizens of Paris are abuzz with news about the discovery by Sir Henry Williamson, a wealthy British collector of antiques, of a necklace once owned by Marie-Antoinette that was thought to have been destroyed centuries ago. Rumours are swirling that Sir Henry intends to present the necklace as a birthday gift to Queen Elizabeth II. Mortimer’s contemplation of the historical significance of the necklace is brought to a sudden, if temporary, halt when Captain Blake spots their old friend Commissaire Pradier of the French security service. Pradier explains the reason for the traffic holdup – Count Olrik has staged an audacious escape from his prison van as he was being transferred to court for trial.
Paul’s Review: Orphans of Eldorado, by Milton Hatoum
A tiny Roman numeral at the top of the spine announces (in a whisper) that Orphans of Eldorado is the thirteenth instalment of Canongate’s critically acclaimed Myths series. However, it seems that Canongate have relaxed their branding, as Hatoum’s slim novel is issued as a trade paperback, and a colourful one at that. The decision to publish in paperback has prompted a flurry of angry comments on the novel’s official page on the Myths website, but binding aside, Orphans of Eldorado doesn’t disappoint.
The myth that underpins the story concerns Amazonian tales of an enchanted underwater utopian city. Hatoum suggests in his afterword that these stories, which involve people being seduced by dolphins or anacondas and taken down to the riverbed to live an enchanted life, may have been the inspiration for the conquistador’s search for the chimerical golden city of Eldorado. Supernatural rumours and whispers abound in Hatoum’s depiction of early twentieth century Brazil: the novel opens with two vignettes about a man who is strangled by his own enormous penis and a woman who copulates with a male tapir. However, the narrative is driven by an ancient, universal trope firmly rooted in reality: the story of the prodigal son.
Jennie’s Review: Truth or Fiction, by Jennifer Johnston
Jennifer Johnston’s Truth or Fiction is a slight, upright novel, and the physical presence of the book echoes the ethereal nature of the story within it. This isn’t to imply that the story is lacking power, emotion, or heft, but that it, and the memories and stories it contains, spin a thread that feels slippery, as if the flex and jolt of the characters and their interactions make the entire novel impossible to grasp.
It begins with an argument. Not without cause, for it is the unspoken dreams that are often missed the most, and when Caroline’s partner finds success and suddenly wants to get married, the years of deferring dreams and unspoken compromises push Caroline out of the house, of her life, to go look at the life of someone who has already “finished” his career, someone who is ready for a journalist to come along and tie all of the strings together, to tell the truth of his life.
Of course, Desmond Fitzmaurice is not done living, nor is the life he recounts entirely trustworthy. And his stories, some told to Caroline outright, some recorded for posterity, some shown through the eyes of his ex-wives, children, and friends, sit uneasily next to each other. Even everyday happenings, where he goes and what he does, are coloured with the fiction he prefers, with the control he exerts over life and story. In some ways, he lets Caroline in. He exposes the memories he has chosen to record, the version he has decided to tell himself and the world, but they seem unable to form a complete story. Instead, each memory has a life of its own: both disturbing and uncertain, confused and pointed.
Erin’s Review: The Saga of Swamp Thing Bk. 2, by Alan Moore, John Totleben and Steve Bissette
When Alan Moore took over DC’s then failing Swamp Thing series in 1984 he swept aside the mythology that had been built up since Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson had begun the first regular Swamp Thing series back in 1972 and instead firmly rooted the character into the circumstances and environment envisioned in House of Secrets #92, the one-shot comic that first introduced the world to the Swamp Thing. Prior to Moore’s arrival on the scene, the Swamp Thing itself had been a mutated version of the scientist Alec Holland, his plight caused by a tragic explosion at his laboratory. Moore, however, wanted to return the Swamp Thing series back to its horror roots and so, in his first issue in charge, he brought the evil Sunderland Corporation to the forefront and had them apparently kill the Swamp Thing in a hail of bullets in an attempt to discover the secrets of Alec Holland’s research. An obscure supervillain, the Floronic Man, was brought in by the Corporation to perform an autopsy on the Swamp Thing’s body and discovered that it was only superficially human.
Although the body contains crude approximations of human organs, they were actually non-functioning, vegetable-based imitations of their human counterparts, indicating that the Swamp Thing had in fact never been human. The Swamp Thing was not Alec Holland; it only believed itself to be so. Alec Holland was killed in the explosion at his lab, but the swamp vegetation had absorbed his knowledge, memories and emotions and created a new sentient being that believed itself to be Alec Holland. This was the essential tragedy at the heart of the series: the Swamp Thing could never become human again because it had never actually been human in the first place. At the end of his autopsy, the Floronic Man realised that the Swamp Thing was not actually dead but merely in a coma and so the Corporation attempted to imprison the Swamp Thing in cold storage. The Swamp Thing quickly regained consciousness, however, and after partially recovering from the shock of finding out what, rather than who, it actually was, escaped back to the swamps of Louisiana. This reimagining of the mythology of the Swamp Thing took place in the comics that were collected together in Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One, the first volume of Vertigo’s deluxe hardback collections of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run.
Jennie’s Review: The Victorians, by Jeremy Paxman
Jeremy Paxman’s The Victorians uses the paintings of the Victorian Age to paint a picture of the lives of the men and women who lived through a time filled with upheaval and investigation, darkness and discovery, a vibrant sense of purpose and a new perception of the purpose of art itself. Paxman deftly weaves the stories found on the paintings themselves with the lives of the men and women who painted them and the people who bought, criticized, and became the subjects of paintings that were “the cinema of their day.”
This book is a companion to Paxman’s BBC series with the same name and much of it will sound familiar to those who watched the series when it aired. The book does an excellent job of inserting prints of the paintings described, and Paxman’s descriptions are often enough to understand the story he is telling even if the painting itself was unavailable. The importance of the paintings to the story is evident, and the decision to include a number of colour prints really adds to the richness of the conclusions that Paxman draws from the art and the world that surrounded it.
Simon A’s Review: Bauchelain and Korbal Broach 1, by Steven Erikson
Originally published in the UK as limited edition novellas, Steven Erikson’s tales of the necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach are now finally available to the masses of Steven Erikson fans courtesy of this collected volume from Erikson’s American publishers. Readers of the doorstop-sized volumes that constitute the Malazan Book of the Fallen have long been aware of Erikson’s talent for dark, dry humour and snappy dialogue amidst all the nihilism and introspection, and this is a wonderful opportunity to see those talents brought to the fore. Of the many notable comic relief characters, Bauchelain and Broach, and their substance-addled manservant Emancipor Reese, have long stood out, making this volume even more welcome.
That’s not to say that the novellas eschew Erikson’s fascination for the darker side: as necromancers, adherents to dark arts, the anti-heroes of these books are involved in some pretty nasty stuff, with the eunuch Korbal Broach being undoubtedly the more evil of the two, though as he spends much of his time in the guise of a crow his presence is often brooding and sketchy. Bauchelain is the brains behind the outfit, and Broach’s enabler, and the city of Lamentable Moll is where it all kicks off. Broach has brought the city to its knees in fear, killing every night in pursuit of his own sick objectives, and Sergeant Guld is on the case – a copper that Pratchett’s Sam Vimes would truly be able to admire. As Guld closes in on the truth of the matter, Bauchelain is recruiting the luckless Reece as their new helper. Their exit from the city, as so often will be the case, is made in rather a hurry.
-
Connect with Bookgeeks
Bookgeek Chic
