Snuff

Snuff is the 39th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and you've got to take your hat off to a man who responds to the impending loss of faculty to Alzheimer's by setting out to write a murder mystery. Admittedly, it's not the twistiest of mysteries, but nevertheless it's a pretty tight plot.

We're back with Sam Vimes for this one, as Ankh-Morpork's hard-bitten watchman brings big city law to the countryside in a narrative which owes a lot to In the Heat of the Night, but with the inevitable Discworld slant. It continues the process of modernisation, with factories, plantations and ox-powered paddle boats added to the already established telegraph network and movable type printing to drag Ankh-Morpork kicking and screaming out of the Century of the Fruitbat, and almost unrecognisably far from the high fantasy pastiche of The Light Fantastic.

As with many of Pratchett's more recent works (by which, I feel old to recount, I pretty much mean the last fifteen to twenty years) the humour of the novel is tied up with a darker side and an exploration of the human condition. In common with the Sam Vimes back-catalogue (post-Guards, Guards at least), this means an examination of the importance of law in separating right from wrong, and in particular the adherence to law as the last fire by which savage humanity can warm themselves and keep from falling back into the blackness. There is also a pretty solid - if not unproblematic; the story is still about the white folks - look at racism; ground that Pratchett has covered before, but rarely so bleakly, as the goblins also embody an extreme of class-based oppression.

Snuff is a solid adventure with a good conspiracy/murder mystery at its core, and a lot of thought behind it. It was also at least one soul-destroying child death short of what I had feared, so that's good.

On reading - Choices

Reading involves choices; has done since long before we passed the point that a single human being could hope to read everything ever written, even in their own language. So, what are the choices that I make when selecting my reading material, and what informs them?

These days, I confess that I shy away from ongoing series, although that used to be a shoe-in for me. Of course, I used to ask essentially one question: Is it on the SF/Fantasy shelf at the Fleet Library. That was how I ended up reading Battlefield Earth, the Atlan saga (featuring a female protagonist whose sole contribution to anything seemed to be to bounce haplessly around the landscape like a rogue billiard ball, putting out for anyone who seized her roughly and then pining about them when they got killed/bored/forgotten by the plot) and just about everything the Davids Eddings and Gemmell ever wrote.

Why have I changed my modus operandi? Well, aside from the evidence above, Robert Jordan has a lot to answer for in that respect; not because he died before he finished The Wheel of Time, but because it was notably the first series in which boredom overtook the completist demands of my egg-hoarding lizard brain and I decided that I just could not be arsed. And yet, I still kinda want to know how it ends; thus my new policy. If I stick to self-contained novels, then if it's shit I can find out what happens without having to slog through three more volumes.

If I do see a promising series, I will usually look for a standalone by the same author to test the waters.

I still focus a lot on SF and Fantasy, because that's my jam, but crime fiction is in the ascendant with me. On the plus side, since most mass market paperbacks go for £5.99, £6.99 or £7.99, regardless of size, fantasy gives you a lot of paper for the price. SF and crime tend towards more modest volumes.

I read a lot of children's and YA fiction, having got into it very much as a teacher. Honestly, I enjoy the absence of the tawdry, pointless sex scenes which seem to be de rigueur in books for grown ups these days (and that's another shift in my tastes since I was a teenager).

Moreover, there is just so much stuff out there that I go more by recommendations than I used to, although I have to be careful with that. My mother recommended Angela's Ashes, and I don't think I've ever completely forgiven her.

I am also a full-on convert to the Kindle, for the simple reason that it's much easier to read on a bus, and with my smartphone my books and music are in the same place. The mobile telecommunications aspect is kind of a fringe benefit.

So, Kindle books, ideally non-series, in the SF, fantasy and crime genres; with some exceptions, naturally.

I also don't read as much as I maybe should, which makes me sad. Perhaps when I am commuting by train I will get more into the rhythm of the thing.

The Long-Legged Fly

The Long-Legged Fly is the first of James Sallis's noirish detective novels, featuring Lew Griffin, a black PI in near-contemporary (in this book, 1960s to the early 1990s) New Orleans. Griffin is a struggling man; struggling to make ends meet, but also fighting with racism and with his own demons - most notably drink, rage, and a sense of incompleteness in his life.

The novel is divided into four parts, each defined by a particular case. In 1964 he is hired to find a missing black activist leader, in 1970 a runaway girl, in 1984 the kid sister of an acquaintance and in 1990 his own son. The first case is the highest profile, but Griffin pursues each one in a low-key, bleakly realistic fashion, running down leads and shaking down potential informants; and hitting dead ends as often as not. In truth, the cases are a backdrop for Lew's own story; his evolution from a bitter, brutal ex-MP to a self-educated college teacher and novelist, by way of the revelations and relationships that get him there.

Moreover, the book presents a rich picture of New Orleans through the years, and one unaffected by sentimentality. No jazz-soaked romanticism or shadowy voodoo for Lew Griffin's New Orleans; this is a city dominated by particular shades of ingrained racism, politics, and above all, food, for Griffin is a gourmet of Southern cuisine.

An interesting book, although not an upbeat one by any stretch.

Oblivion

And so it comes to this, the final volume in a series that I started reading some twenty years ago. Back then, I picked up a copy of The Devil's Doorbell in my school library, knowing Anthony Horowitz only from the Diamond Brothers series of comic noir detective stories. The gripping horror novel that followed took me by surprise, and may have been responsible for my interest in horror thereafter (I hadn't much cared for it before).

I devoured the book, and the next two in the Pentagram series: The Night of the Scorpion and The Silver Citadel (which also provided the name for a recurring antagonist for my PCs - Evelyn Carnate). Sadly, the school library never picked up a copy of The Day of the Dragon and the fifth book in the series was never published at all.

I had more or less given up on ever knowing how the story ended, when Anthony Horowitz - better known now for the Alex Rider series of teenage spy novels - published a book called Raven's Gate, which I was asked to review for Write Away, and much to my surprise I found that - with the exception of a few character names, and some extra mobile phones and modern references - what I was reading was The Devil's Doorbell.

Five books later, and with some changes - minor and major - to the original material, we come to the missing conclusion: Oblivion, in which the Five - five children with incredible powers, destined to stand against the Old Ones - must reach the final confrontation in Oblivion, the fortress of the King of the Old Ones, in the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

In a bold move, Horowitz splits up his protagonists and runs four-to-five stories in turn throughout the book, one told in the first person - a major shift for the series - by a new character who, ultimately, is revealed as the overall narrator of the series in their in-universe form as the history of the Five. None of the narratives are pretty, and most are in fact extremely dark, as the Five find themselves jumped forward to a world in the grip of the Old Ones, full of misery and much inflicted by humanity upon itself.

The story winds through adventure, fear, loss and betrayal, and each of the Five is forced to draw on their own strengths to win through, even if the strength that they need is the strength to fall. There is also a good mechanism to motivate the villains without making them seem foolish: Killing one of the Five replaces them at once with an alternative version who is an unknown quantity, thus they seek instead to capture them, with the risks that that entails.

It's a strong ending to a strong series.

The City and the City

China Mieville is an author whose work I should have devoured. He writes the sort of stuff that I like, I've even met him, but I've read very little of his stuff. I think in part it's just that his books are to big to read on a bus.

Enter the kindle, and The City and the City, as I decided to kick off with something stand alone. Previously, I've only read his children's book, UnLunDun, which is also a book about the nature of cities, so I think he may have a bit of a theme there.

The City and the City is the story of Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Besel, investigating a murder. The complication is that Besel is not alone. It is part of a divided city, sharing its geographical identity with Ul Qoma, not along a single divide, but with the two cities sharing space, overlapping, with some areas belonging to one or the other and some being part of both, separate not by space or walls, but by a state of mind. As the case crosses the boundary of perception, Borlu must cope with the law of two cities, and the Breach between them.

This is a book that demands the reader buy into a pretty odd conceptual device, and one that could only really work in literature. To try to convey the separation between Besel and Ul Qoma visually would be at best problematic, at worst silly. In writing, however, out works, and the book approaches the question mostly in terms of the mindset of the residents of the city and the city. If nothing else, I can say without fear of contradiction that it is a book with a very new idea.

The concepts of identity are explored, without taking the easy course of making it strongly about racial prejudice. While racism exists in the setting, the focus is on the social construction of reality and the nature of cultural constraint.

Borlu is a bit of a cipher, but no more so than most detectives, and his emotions are convincing, which makes him thing true. His partners, in the two cities, provide a good link to either side, and the strangeness of Breach is effective at representing something both human and alien.

I am considering investing in the kindle edition of Perdido Street Station.

My Life in Reviews

So, this page here is a list of the many reviews I wrote for Write Away (now Just Imagine) when I was teaching. I stopped when I stopped teaching; having begun in my first English Lit training class with a copy of Across the Nightingale Floor and another of Shadowmancer, which I never even managed to finish, I think it was too tied up in my mind with being a teacher.

NOTE: Well, apparently Write Away doesn't do reviews anymore, so that link is a dead duck. Ah well; brief was my glory.

A Madness of Angels

In a continuing vein of urban fantasy, I moved on from John Dies at the End to the slightly more accurately named A Madness of Angels. I'd tried it before and been turned off early by some pretty minor grammatical and stylistic flaws, which on a second reading proved quickly to mask a quirky and adept use of narrative voice. In fact, I suspect that part of the problem was that the accidental errors hid the deliberate beats.

Having got over that, I was able to engage with the book on its own terms and discover a really new and exciting vision of an urban-fantastic landscape, where sorcerers draw their power from the tiny magics of everyday life and the turnstyles of the Underground make the finest hermetic pentagram look like a welcome mat; where the quirks, fears and frustrations of everyday living are writ large as the spirits and gods of a new pantheon and the symbolism of the everyday becomes the language of modern magic.

Ultimately, the greatest failing of the book is the protagonist, a first person narrator who manages nonetheless to be a cypher. In part, this is deliberate, he is a mystery even to himself for much of the book, but for me it went further than that and, even as he became more realised, it was hard to connect with him through the layers of magic and weirdness.

This niggle aside, I enjoyed the book very much and shall be reading more of the series... when/if the price for the Kindle editions drops a bit.

Next up, China Mieville's The City and the City.

John Dies at the End

I read kinda slow these days. As the weather gets nicer, I walk more often, which takes out my bus ride reading time, and at home I spend as much time as I can with the baby. Except when I'm right near the end of a book and become this shamefully neglectful lunk trying to finish.

I mention this largely because a distracted stream of consciousness seems the right way to review David Wong's 'comic horror' novel, John Dies at the End, which is sort of what you'd get if HP Lovecraft had done a lot of really relaxing medication and spent most of his life sitting around on the couch playing video games while August Derleth took notes and published them, only not actually like that at all.

What the book takes most of all from Lovecraft is a sense of cosmic futility. While our protagonists David and John battle monsters and gaze into the abyss with blithe disregard for standard Neitzchean safety protocols, they lack the triumphal surety of later Mythos heroes (if such a pair of words can ever be allowed). What they take from those later figures is the desire to fight instead of just fainting. To borrow a phrase from the movie I was watching yesterday - and honestly, that also feels like an appropriate thing to do in a review of this book - they are the guys who don't know what they should do, only what they can do, and choose to do it.

And the result is a lot of fun, and the kind of fun that keeps on giving. Hell, it was only looking out the image above that I came across the author's description of the book as a 'comic horror' and realised that this might be a pun on 'cosmic horror'; maybe I'm wrong, but it is apt.

I am excited to see the movie, if only to see how someone might make this book into a movie, let alone how well.

Fearless

Fearless is the second book in Cornelia Funke's Reckless trilogy, following the adventures of Jacob Reckless, a young man who escapes from the burdens of his life through a magic mirror, entering a parallel world of fairy tales.

Reckless introduced our hero and his partner, Fox, a young woman who can shapeshift into a vixen with a magical fur coat, but at the price of aging in fox years while transformed. We learned of Jacob's life as a treasure hunter, seeking mystical trinkets out of fairy tale, and of the changes wrought on the mirror world by his father's introduction of 'real' world inventions for his own profit.

Rescuing his brother from the Dark Fairy cost Jacob dearly, and as Fearless begins he is dying from an inescapable curse. With all of the standard curatives proving useless, he seeks a dangerous last chance: a weapon of terrible and destructive magic that might just possess the power to heal if wielded in love.

What follows is an adventure story with heart and guts. The fairy tale mirror world is a dark and dangerous - one might say Grimm - place, and while the central story stands on its own, it also links into a wider narrative. The central characters are likeable and convincing, with their courage and their fears, their strengths and their failings. I have had a lot of time for Funke's work since I was introduced to Inkheart, and for me at least, Fearless is Funke at her best.

Retrolective: From the Ashes

This was, barring a couple of Spider-Man comics I stumbled on as a young boy (I was unimpressed, although largely because anything with Black Cat in is too predicated on the UST between Spidey and not-Catwoman to appeal to a six year old), my first brush with Superhero comics. I was fourteen or fifteen (I know, right, but seriously for years I had literally no idea that either Superman or Batman had been in comics first) and I found it in the library. I wasn't new to comics - I'd been reading Marvel UK's slightly expanded Transformers run for years and read through most of Judge Dredd: Cursed Earth during rehearsals for Oliver! - and I knew of the X-Men in passing from a choose-your-own-adventure book I'd picked up - also in the library - which hadn't been very good, but which had intrigued me enough to check out this comic, or rather trade paperback.

I must have read it cover to cover three or four times in a couple of days.

Having no background with the ongoing series, I had no idea what the Phoenix Force was or who Jean Grey had been, but that was part of what intrigued me; the fact that this seemed to be part of a much larger world. Part of the reason I read and re-read was to pick up on as much detail as I could. It also contained challenging storylines - Madeleine Pryor might just be confusing, but the same volume has the introduction of the Morlocks, including Storm's fight to the death against Callisto, one random mention of Colossus's sister having been kidnapped by demons and, best of all, Rogue's original face turn.

The latter begins with Rogue - short hair, modest green outfit - showing up at the Mansion after absorbing Ms Marvel's powers and conscience, only to get punched out through the roof by Marvel (now called Binary), which is awesome, followed by a clash with Silver Samurai's minions alongside a highly doubtful Wolverine which contained such a critical mass of sparky, antagonistic banter (ending with Rogue testing her newly-gained invulnerability almost to destruction and Wolverine thanking her with a super symbolic kiss to transfer his healing factor to her temporarily) that I've never entirely forgiven either Gambit or Jean Grey for being their official main crushes in the wider narrative.

The conclusion of the main storyline (a wizard did it, or at least a mutant with illusion powers) was actually a bit weak compared to the rest of the book, but this was still the one that got me into superheroes and comics in a big way.

I should probably write something about Transformers at a later date, as that was a big influence, and possibly the X-Men cartoons on My Life as a Doge...

The Man Who Was Thursday

The Man who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a surreal and semi-philosophical ramble by GK Chesterton, he of the Father Brown stories and the hardcore Catholic conversion, which tells of a man named Syme who embarks on a great and wondrous adventure in the name of law and order and poetry.

It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but it really is a splendid read, full of whimsy and excitement, two things that are not often enough mixed.

I'm currently in the middle of reading it to my girlfriend and baby, because I find the dreamlike rhythm of the writing to be rather restful.

Reckless

Reckless is the first novel in German author Cornelia Funke's follow up to the acclaimed Inkheart trilogy, also called the Reckless series and intended, so they say, as a pentalogy. The second book came out recently and is on my Kindle and to-read list, because Reckless was a book that I very much enjoyed. I got back into young adult fiction, especially fantasy, during my teaching years, when I reviewed books for a site called Write Away. (Oh look; a new Marcus Sedgwick - no! Be good! You already bought Fearless today.)

Reckless takes place in the fairy tale setting of Mirrorworld, so called because it can be reached from the ordinary world by way of a mirror. Jacob Reckless first passed into this world after his father disappeared (possibly vanishing into the Mirrorworld himself) and has spent half his life using it to avoid the responsibilities of reality. Responsibility comes crashing into his existence however, when his brother Will follows him and is afflicted with a terrible curse.

In part a retelling of various Grimm's fairy tales, Reckless is also an adventure story in its own right, and the two are cleverly woven together, not least in the presentation of Jacob as a hunter of the precious objects of fairy tales, some of which he keeps and uses as tools of his treasure-seeking trade.

Notably, the book is listed as written in English, whereas Funke's previous work has been written in German and translated. I'm looking forward to cracking into Fearless in the coming week.

Rivers of London

I discovered Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London series on a trawl through the Kindle Store. It wasn't cheap, but the concept looked interesting and... Oh, who am I kidding. Ben Aaronovich wrote Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield.

Anyway, I kicked off with Rivers of London, which introduces us to half-Sierra Leonean copper Peter Grant, a man with a scientific mind but a limited patience for the nitty gritty of police work, as compared to his fellow newly-minted PC Leslie May, who is going places. It is through Peter's eyes that we are introduced to a world of magic that exists below the surface of the normal, where a miniscule but dedicated force of civil servants struggles to control an array of ghosts, monsters and gods through a labyrinthine network of vaguely defined 'arrangements'.

Note: there may be spoilers ahead.

I'm interested to know where Ben Aaronovich comes by the knowledge of Black London culture that informs not only PC Grant's background, but also the family of goddesses who represent the lower reaches of the Thames. I confess, white people - especially middle-class white Englishmen like me - writing about anything other than other middle-class white Englishmen always makes me a little uncomfortable, but Aaronovich does it well and has been largely praised for using a black central character, which suggests that he hasn't gone horribly awry, so I can mostly relax and enjoy the rest of the book.

And I did. It's got a wry sense of humour that I like in my fiction (I don't consider stony seriousness a bad thing, but it's not really my thing) and a world that feels real in its scope and incompleteness. In many ways, it is the fact that not everything is explained that makes it work.

Grant's approach to magic is at odds with that of his mentor (the technical term is Master, but as a black man working for a white man, he refuses to use it), Inspector Nightingale, an old school Newtonian wizard whose adherence to tried and trusted forms gives him power that Grant, lax student and experimenter, sacrifices for a flexibility which sometimes pays off. The fact that neither Grant nor May (who starts as an apprentice wizard later and is much better at the correct form) is shown as definitively superior (May, the student, masters the standards better; Grant, the natural, throws out wild cards and tries to look at how and why it works) is another strength. Most books of the sort are yay new thinking, and a few hardline traditionalist, but I like the mix better. Making the male lead the intuitive one is by now almost standard enough a reversal to be its own cliche, but it's done well.

A bold move comes at the end of the first book and is cashed in for the third, as the lead female character's face is transmogrified into the aspect of Mr Punch and then collapses, leaving her unable to speak for most of the second book and hideously disfigured in the third. As well as putting the mockers on your chances of selling the film rights, the complications in the relationship between May and Grant, and the impact on May's character, are played out effectively and convincingly, which is good going for a book that is largely quite lighthearted.

I basically chained through the first three books (the fourth is out in June) and enjoyed all three. It put me in a mood for urban fantasy which was only killed by Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels, and that only because the woman badly needs to learn to use a semi-colon (not just because everyone should, but because she writes in sentences that just flat out beg to be semi-colonised). I am told that that one is well worth it, however, so will be getting back to it at some point, possibly just before Broken Homes comes out in June.

The Iconomicon

Finally, this is my book blog. Life will remain on my LJ (lslaw.livejournal.com) save where it pertains to my status as ersatz dad.