A Meme: Ten books that have affected me

A meme, picked up from Sally Brewer: Ten books that have affected me.

1. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper
   This is one of the absolute best series I have ever read; I adore it, and despite my calling being to watch shitty movies, I have resisted ever seeing the movie of The Dark is Rising, because seriously, fuck that for a lark.
   The Dark is Rising is built around Arthurian mythology and its own cosmology involving the long war between the Light and the Dark. The servants of the Dark are manipulative, using humans to their own ends... and so do the Old Ones, servants of the Light. It was one of the first series I read in which magical power was not an unalloyed boon, and I think that was what I most took away from it. 
2. The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander
   Another series with its roots in Welsh mythology, The Chronicles of Prydain is high fantasy, rather than the modern fantasy of The Dark is Rising, complete with a giant cat and an oracular pig. It was also made into a movie that I haven't seen, but I hear that one isn't all that bad. The stories involved several instances of sacrifice, and I think that's what I took away from it. 
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
   One of the big names of fantasy, and one of my early influences. It's basically the ur-text for heroic fantasy, and one of the notable things about The Chronicles of Prydain was that it wasn't a Rings clone. The influence of Rings built up slowly for me, in part as a result of reading around it. Like Prydain, it's very much about the end of an age and the birth of the time of the ordinary human. A lot of these books are pretty melancholy. 
4. The Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
   I don't include The Amber Spyglass here. I liked that one, but the first two were - to my mind - better. Given that Spyglass doesn't follow the pattern set out in the front of either of the earlier novels, I've always figured that Pullman made a lot of changes to the plan while he was writing, and my feeling is that it could have done with a little more polish. Nonetheless, I like Spyglass and I love the first two.
   What I take from these... Okay, mostly it's the panzerbjorn. Who doesn't love a bear in armour. 
5. Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke
   
   A number of these entries are relatively recent books, and most of them have more or less disappointing movie adaptations.
   Inkheart is a story about storytellers who can read characters to life out of books, and some of the less savoury characters who have escaped from the eponymous novel-within-a-novel as a result. It's weirdly meta, and extremely dark, where the film was... a little murky in places. 
6. Mortal Engines, by Philip Pullman
   This is a book that could make a great film, but is more likely to make a terribly disappointing one. It's another dark fantasy, this one couched in a post-apocalyptic tale of a mobile, predatory London. It's the imagery that got me with this one; the vast, hungry cities and the skeletal, tech-undead Stalkers. 
7. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones
   I was a latecomer to DWJ, having read and not enjoyed one of her novels as a child (I know, right, but no-one is perfect and it was basically a musing on mortality and lost childhood, which didn't much suit me at 10 or whatever I was). Of the first batch that I read, The Homeward Bounders was the one that really caught at my mind. I think that what makes it stand out is the central idea that hope is a trap. So often, hope is held up as the last light in the darkness, but the Bounders are imprisoned by it, caught in a perpetual struggle and unable to escape because they believe that there is a way out. 
8. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
   Everyone has their own touchstone in the Pratchett canon, and mine is Wyrd Sisters. I love it; I love the Shakespearean references and the Marx Brothers bits, and the witches and Death at the absolute height of their powers. Love it. 
9. Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
   
   However, this for a long time my absolute favourite work by either Pratchett or Gaiman. I feel that it is the first great work by either of them, because Gaiman moderated Pratchett's early whimsy and Pratchett moderated Gaiman's early pretension, and that as a result they both emerged from the collaboration writing better books going forward. 
10. Whales on Stilts, by M.T. Anderson
    If you don't know why I love this book, I guarantee that you're assuming that the title is symbolic.
    It isn't. 

The Silkworm

The Silkworm is the second Cormoran Strike novel (following The Cuckoo's Calling) by Robert 'JK Rowling in a hat*' Galbraith.

The Silkworm is a tale of Jacobean revenge killing, set in the smiles-and-backstabbing world of literary publishing. It tell of Owen Quine, a somewhat mediocre author of sordid prose, whose last work appears to consist of searing symbolic indictments of everyone he has ever known or worked with, ending with the death of an author-insert protagonist in a particularly grisly manner. It is his last work because while the publishing world is awash with shock, horror and threats of legal action at the contents of the as-yet unpublished manuscript, Quine himself turns up dead, in the exact manner of his literary alter-ego.

With The Cuckoo's Calling, Galbraith/Rowling established a quite distinct literary persona, and The Silkworm continues in that vein, being if anything more profane and grotesque than its predecessor. Borrowing heavily from the same revenge tragedies as its subjects, much of the novel's impact relates to the bizarre and brutal ritual of the murder, and the progression of the plot on the almost torturous stubbornness of the characters.

It's less deft than the last novel; the killing more gruesome, the characters heightened almost to a kind of Jacobean magic realism. This is not entirely a criticism - I don't think magic realist Jacobean revenge detective fiction is either a bad thing in and of itself, or a genre which has yet found its defining voice, unless this be it - although it is to the novel's detriment in one particular, specifically that the Cormoran Strike of The Cuckoo's Calling was a more nuanced and interesting detective than the one on display here.

I also found I was distracted by wandering if, in the midst of this tale of literary revenge fiction, there wasn't a hint of life imitating art, and if any of the less-than-discrete literary types who fail to keep Bombyx Mori under wraps might be modeled after the person who let Rowling's identity out of the bag.

I enjoyed The Silkworm, if less so than The Cuckoo's Calling, and I remain optimistic for the series ahead, at least for a few more novels.

* Disappointingly, Rowling's publicity stills for the book don't feature a hat, although apparently she wore a suit and tie to appear at a crime writing festival, which is almost as good.

S - A prelude

Yesterday, I slipped and bought a book I'd been eyeing up in the window of the Cambridge International Book Centre for a while. It's going to take some getting through, since I really can't read it on the train without things falling out.

S is written by Doug Dorst, based on a concept by JJ Abrams and inspired by Bookcrossing. I'm only a few pages in, so a review will have to wait, but the production of the thing is such a factor that I feel it's worth exploring first.

Held within its slipcase is a hardback novel called Ship of Thesus, by V.M. Straka. The book carries a library stamp, and its pages are defaced with columns of handwritten notes from two readers, conversing only by this medium and discussing the mysterious identity of the book's reclusive author, and also the identity and reliability of the editor and translator of the novel. Slipped between the pages are other documents relating to the mystery.

It is a thing of beauty, in a format I've only seen before in a handful of children's and YA novels and carrying the form to new heights. It's a text and a metatext, which I've only just begun to explore (I'm not even through the foreword yet; the one document I've got to is a letter, in German, with an attached translation.)

It may yet prove a triumph of style over substance, but I think I'm going to have fun finding out.

The Girl with All the Gifts

"Not every gift is a blessing"

Melanie's world is very small. There is the cell, the corridor, and the classroom. Sergeant and his people move her from place to place in a chair with straps. Saturday and Sunday have no lessons, and on Sunday the children are fed and showered. She thinks that she would like to leave this word one day, but it might just be that she is wrong.

The Girl with All the Gifts represents Mike Carey's move into 'grown up' writing. It's not his first novel, but the switch to initials distances this book from his others, asserting a different authorial identity. His past work is mostly in comics and paranormal adventure; The Girl with All the Gifts is a grim, post-apocalyptic road novel about a small group of survivors crossing a hostile Britain.

The bulk of the novel is made up of the interactions of five self-loathing characters in the claustrophobic setting of a trek across enemy country, and the evolution of the relationships between them. None of the characters are particularly likable, but the combination has a kind of alchemy that makes them work as a unit where they would not as lone protagonists. It's not a fun book, but it is effecting and it manages to break new ground despite belonging to a popular subgenre (which I won't specify for the sake of spoilers).

The Girl with All the Gifts is well worth a read, but it is pretty grim and is pretty rough on its child characters.

Redshirts

The Universal Union's flagship Intrepid is the most prestigious posting for the young officers of 'Dub U', and the most dangerous. Every mission seems to result in the death of at least one junior crewmember, and the old hands all duck out when the senior staff come looking for someone to add to the away team. Could a ship really be this unlucky? Could the amazingly handsome Lieutenant Karensky really survive so much punishment? And why is it that backstory seems to pop into people's heads as if it had always been there?

John Scalzi's Redshirts kicks off as a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for Star Trek, with a clear division between the scenes which are just the junior crew chatting and those where the senior crew drag the focus back onto them (mostly in the form of a change in the occurence of swearing and sexual references from 'lots' to 'none'). It then pushes into its own territory as Ensign Andy Dahl tries to escape the predestined fate of all short-arc supporting characters via a rogue mission to exploit the bad time travel mechanics of the Narrative and stop the deaths at their source: the basic cable show The Chronicles of the Intrepid.

Redshirts is not a new idea - within the text itself Scalzi openly refers to half a dozen implementations of the 'characters talk to their creator' concept, and people have been making jokes about red shirts for as long as I've been alive - but the central characters are lively and entertaining, and the bafflement of the various officers as the Narrative spotlight comes and goes is entertaining, as well as really rather creepy.

Once the main narrative is exhausted, Scalzi does go off the boil a little, however, and apparently needing some extra pages to make contract adds three codas, each one following one of the 'real world' characters. They're not bad in themselves, but they feel extraneous (which is, I suppose, why they're codas), and more like the author playing around with alternative approaches to his concept than like they are truly related to the main story.

Ancillary Justice

Breq has a mission. Once she was a soldier, she was many soldiers, and the ship that carried them; now she is but a single body, a single killer with a singular grudge. She is seeking a weapon, and a way to reach its target, but she may not be as single-minded as she believes.

Ancillary Justice is the debut novel by author Ann Leckie, and the first volume in a space opera trilogy set in the galactic empire of the the Radch. The Radch is a super-culture, which is reaching the end of several thousand years of continual expansion across occupied human space. Their military forces are unparalleled, both their AI-driven warships and their ancillary armies, the bodies of conquered peoples slaved to the control of the same AIs. Breq was once an ancillary of the AI Justice of Toren, but is now the only remaining part of the distributed consciousness, following the betrayal and destruction of the ship herself.

The first high-concept challenge for Leckie to get past is therefore that of convincingly representing the memories of the Justice of Toren as those of a multifaceted being, and this she manages quite well. Where she is slightly less successful is in establishing the distinctions between the facets of her personality, but although there is a little more tell than show in this area, it is not actually a failure. All of this - together with a distinctive SF universe - would be impressive on its own, but this is not the book's only conceit.

The language of the Radchaai is ungendered, and as a result Breq, as first person narrator, simply refers to everyone as she, whether they are male or female (in fact, many characters, including Breq herself, are never clearly established as either sex). The ungendered language itself is not extraordinary, but simply by referring to every character in the book as she (save when a few supporting characters are speaking some other language), Leckie challenges conventional assumptions and forces the reader to look at the characters without one of the standard props.

The story is both a good story, and makes use of the high-concept aspects of the story. The multiple nature, not only of the Justice of Toren and of the Emperor of the Radch, is at the core of the narrative. The nature of war and humanity are also explored, along with some - fairly broad - commentary on prejudice and privilege, although the latter is not the most effective part of the book.

Ancillary Justice is well worth a read, and I will be keeping an eye out for part two.

Red Seas Under Red Skies

The second book in the Gentlemen Bastards series sees Locke and Jean caught mid-game by old enemies and delivered into the power of the military governor of a merchant state, and the action - once more consisting of a series of increasingly large gambles and deceptions - is transferred from the Elderglass towers of Camorr to the witchwood hull of a pirate ship and the terrace merchant city of Tal Verrar, where the Gnetlemen Bastards still plan to pull off their magnum opus, and at the same time remind the great and the good that however big you are, no-one fucks over a Camorri and walks away from it.

More even than in The Lies of Locke Lamora, the strength of Red Seas Under Red Skies lies in its characters. Jean has far more voice in this volume, and whereas Lies was about 90% Locke, the split here is roughly even. This is in part because the big, dramatic character moments fall to Jean, although that is not to say that Locke gets no growth.

Red Seas Under Red Skies is a fine follow-up to The Lies of Locke Lamora. By received wisdom, sequels need to get bigger, get smarter or get more personal, and this one definitely gets bigger, opening up the canvas as well as having the Bastards take on two of the most powerful men in their region for profit and vengeance.

The Throne of Fire and Scrivener's Moon

About two or three months ago, the library in Littleport reopened. We took Arya along, and I renewed my library card and picked up a couple of books; or I tried to. Actually, what happened was that my card had been unused for so long they wanted to see my passport. I was busy, so I said I'd come back, leaving the books with them.

A month later they emailed to say that the books which were sitting on their shelf were overdue.

When I popped in, they didn't care about my passport, gave me my new card and checked the books out for two months, since they're closed again now for roof repairs.

The first of the two books was The Throne of Fire, second volume in the Kane Chronicles, by Rick 'Percy Jackson' Riordan. Despite the slightly feeble film effort, I remain an adamant fan of Percy Jackson and of Riordan's writing. In the Kane Chronicles he does for Egyptian mythology pretty much what he did for Greek and Roman myth in his other books, but with a twist. Carter Kane and his sister Sadie aren't the children of gods, but magicians of the House of Life, an ancient order dating back to Dynastic Egypt. They are capable of great feats of magic on their own, but against the teachings of the House they study the path of the Gods, a magical practice which allows them to call on the power of the Gods directly, and which their parents and their uncle believe to be necessary to save the world from Apophis, the ultimate expression of evil and chaos.

The Throne of Fire gives Carter and Sadie a bit of a power downgrade (in the first book, The Red Pyramid they channeled the power of Horus and Isis directly, but by this point have decided this is too dangerous. They also, however, have students, and crushes, which alternately help and hinder as the siblings set out to raise the Sun God Ra from his sleep of millions of years (that's a technical Egyptian term, not a literal length of time).

I personally find the Kanes a little more stock than Percy Jackson, as characters, although it might just be a result of Riordan's attempts to express Sadie's British habits to a US teen audience. I do enjoy his narrative mechanism of having Carter and Sadie narrate separate and occasionally overlapping segments. The stories themselves are good and the mythology, as in the Percy Jackson books, both well researched and interestingly interpreted. The nods to the Olympian series - Egyptian magicians, for reasons unspecified, avoid New York, the home of the Olympian Gods - are a nice touch, although with Norse Gods dropping into Boston next year, it's a wonder there is any room for humans on the East Coast.

Scrivener's Moon, the latest entry in Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb series, which are in turn a prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet, is about as bleak as its pedigree would suggest, mixing black humour and sly nods to the world that once was with dramatic and brutal action sequences. It introduces mammoths to the world of Mortal Engines, and also features a rarity in children's literature as Fever Crumb begins to question her sexuality.

It's a cracking, if rather bloody, adventure story, and while much of it is bleak and the outcome of the climactic battle not in doubt (such is the nature of prequels), the final scenes are actually some of the most hopeful in the sequence, outside of the epilogue to A Darkling Plain. I would still recommend Reeve's Larklight trilogy as a better starting point for younger readers, but this is solid fare for teenage adventure fans.