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.