The Martian

Again with 'A Novel'.

When a Martian storm forces a Mars mission to evacuate their base, one man is seemingly killed in a freak accident. He survives, however, and over the next 550 sols (Martian days) must scrounge, adapt and improvise to stretch mission supplies and resources long past breaking point in order to stay alive. On Earth, NASA struggles to come up with a rescue plan, and in the space between the worlds, the rest of his crew wait to hear the news.

The Martian is part Robinson Crusoe epistolary and part modern narrative, and in all honesty it's the former - botanist Mark Watney's survival log - that is by far the better half. It's not that the rest is bad, more that the log sections, composed in Watney's dryly, humourous voice, are excellent. The sections at NASA are still very good, with a range of accessible, convincing characters and just the right mix of technical detail, drama and humour. The weakest parts are the few occasions when Weir steps back to an omniscient perspective to describe the things that no character can see, because by definition they lack the characters who bring the rest of the novel so vividly to life.

The audiobook reading by R.C. Bray is truly excellent, one of the best single-voice readings I've come across, capturing perfectly the tone of the narrative.

The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky

Tiffany Aching is a practical girl who lives on the rolling downlands known as the Chalk. It's a quiet country, a safe country, largely free of monsters and tyrants, until another world knocks on the door and things start creeping in. Granny Aching would have sent them packing, but Granny is dead, and that leaves nine year old Tiffany to take care of business; because if not her, then who?

Fortunately, she isn't without help, as the local clan of the Nac Mac Feagle have taken a shine to her, and what could be more useful when confronting a faerie queen than a band of tiny, blue men with anger management issues?

The second of Terry Pratchett's more child-oriented Discworld novels (the first was The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents) and the first in the Tiffany Aching series, The Wee Free Men serves as an introduction to Tiffany and her Pictsie allies, who are basically a pack of tiny, drunken, woad-painted brawlers with far more speed and strength than their size implies and a bizarre quasi-Scots dialect. Tiffany's enemy, the Queen, first seen in Lords and Ladies, is a terrifying being, powerful and utterly callous, and her parasite world with its collection of interesting and unpleasant passengers presents a horrifying, dreamlike environment for a latter-day Alice to challenge with wit, courage and a cast-iron skillet.

A Hat Full of Sky picks up the story two years on, with Tiffany heading off to begin her apprenticeship as a witch with Miss Level, a woman with two bodies. The Chalk is short on witches, but in the mountains there are many, and Tiffany meets a circle of other apprentices who are very keen on black cloaks, silver jewellery and doing proper magic rather than all this going around making poultices and cutting people's toenails for them. Unfortunately, magic can be risky business, and carelessness can cost you everything.

Once more aided by the eager and occasionally competent Nac Mac Feagle, Tiffany must face a Hiver, a being of pure memory seeking a mind to think with and a body to act with. It possesses her, and uses the coolness and ruthlessness that makes her a good witch to make her a bad person.

Even more than The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky is about the making of a Discworld witch, with wisdom from the great Granny Weatherwax almost secondary to Tiffany's own internal revelations. It's about being the person who does when others say something should be done and about the difference between being tough and being a bully. It's actually a pretty rugged how-to on being a good person (which is not the same thing as nice; not the same thing at all.)

Both audiobooks are narrated by Stephen Briggs, who seems to be one of Audible's go-to guys. He gets the job done, without being outstanding.

Pines

Hello tie-in cover!

Ethan Burke, Gulf War veteran and Secret Service agent wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

Pines is the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy (now adapted as a 'major television event' as the tie in cover informs me excitedly) and lays out a surprising number of its cards by the end of its relatively short length: What the deal with the town is, who is behind it; all revealed by the final page, so the following books are presumably going to be very different, and it's kind of a shame. Pines is a deliberate tribute to Twin Peaks, and although more SF at heart, has a vein of almost Lovecraftian horror running through it, with its road that leads back on itself, the eerie perfection of the town and its brutal and macabre immune response.

It's on the level of weird fiction that Pines works best, and the high concept but ultimately mundane reveal at the end was actually a slight disappointment, for me at least. That said, I think there's enough potential to look into the other books in the series, but I'm going to miss the weirdness.

Letters to Zell

What is it with everything being 'a novel' again? It's
oddly 19th century.

All is not well in Grimmland. The princesses Rory, CeCi and Zell (Briar Rose/Aurora/Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Rapunzel) have all finished their pages and get to live the rest of their lives as their happy ever after, but Bianca (Snow White) is troubled by her own pages and chafing at the restrictions on her freedom. When Zell and her family suddenly up sticks to Oz to run a Unicorn Sanctuary, it is the start of a major upheaval in the group which wil have potentially catastrophic consequences for all the beings in the lands of imagination.

Camille Griep's debut novel treads the well-worn yellow brick road of fairytale reimagining, but the quirky, backstage antics approach - the tale itself is represented by a princess's pages, the book is about what happens around and after them - is fresh. These fairytale characters exist in a world created by human imagination, and they know it, having the ability to cross into the real world to visit Disneyland for giggles and culture shock. The truth of their 'happy ever after' is that Rory is traumatised by the loss of her actual true love and his replacement with a boorish lug, CeCi deplores the loss of cooking from her life, and Bianca is a bi-curious free spirit whose pages require her to plan an execution into her wedding.

Griep expands on this through an epistolary format, presenting the unfolding events in an overlapping series of letters, each one providing an alternate point of view on something in the last before adding something new. It's a not unsuccessful mechanism - it was the primary means of writing for a century or so, after all - but it has flaws, and while the relationship between the princesses is portrayed as sufficiently close that the sometimes confessional tone is appropriate, for my money the immersion falters from not including any of Zell's return correspondence, especially when references to it are made and have to be in the counter-naturalistic format of 'as you say in your letter...'

Or is it just that email has changed epistolary expectations? In retrospect, it could be that. After all, it's less unreasonable to reiterate something said in a letter that someone might have written a month ago and may well not have a copy of.

Anyway, it's not going to turn the genre on its head, but Letters to Zell presents a relatively fresh approach to fairy tales, with princesses learning to define themselves outside their relationship and happy endings and princes who are varied and realised characters in their own right, but serve primarily as props to the princesses' stories.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Fresh off the back of the recent TV adaptation, I went back to Susanna Clarke's first - and to date only - novel, this time in audiobook format, read by Simon Prebble.

Clarke's work tells of the restoration of English magic, some three or four centuries after the disappearance of its founding father. It is set in an alternate history, in which the familiar Kings and Queens of  our own history are only the rulers of Southern England, and latterly the stewards of the north following the disappearance of the King in the North (a magician taken by fairies as a child, who as the Raven King laid the foundations of English magic.) Gilbert Norrell, the first practical magician in three centuries, is determined to be rational and respectable, but his first and only pupil Jonathan Strange is of a more romantic bent.

Norrell craves the favour of great men and an order of law to bind magic to his own pattern; Strange longs for grand magic and the notice of the Raven King. The two magicians break with one another even as a sinister and otherworldly foe moves against them, and those around them are caught up in the conflict to their own detriment. At last, the two come together for what many believe will be a duel to the death, but which has far greater stakes than that.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a grand and sweeping work (weighing in on Audible at 32 hours), full of footnotes and digressions laying out the history of English magic in tantalising snippets, from the rule of the Raven King in the North and the golden age of the Aureate magicians, through the decline of the Argentine or silver age, to a time of mere theory, when gentleman magicians scorn the idea of casting spells in order to excuse the fact that they can not do so. It is a world in which northern magic threatens southern rule, and even the potential existence of female magicians is seen as a threat to a typically Regency social order in which women have no place in politics and power.

As the story of the beginning of the return of English magic in this era, and the story of two gentleman magicians, the book is quite light on strong female characterisations (I complained of this in the first episode of the TV adaptation, but on revisiting the book it is striking how much was done to beef up the female characters there.) Arabella Strange is strong-willed, but ultimately becomes a victim to be rescued, and even the more dynamic Lady Pole is driven largely by emotion rather than the presumed masculine preserve of rationality. In part, this is due to the nature of the text as a facsimile of a period manuscript, but especially given that one of the key differences between the two magicians is that Mr Norrell considers women entirely unsuited to magical study while Mr Strange is noted to be more comfortable in female company than male, it is a shame not to see more of women.

It has been argued that the narrator - the pseudobiographical nature and scholarly layout of the text is suggestive of a specific narrator, rather than an authorial voice - is one of the new breed of female magicians who emerge alongside their male counterparts from the novel's climax, and there are hints of this even through Prebble's reading in the narrative's hints to the folly of men, and especially of men who do not pay mind to the value of women (see also and especially the short story 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' in the collection of the same name, Clarke's only other published work of fiction, and the audio short story 'The Dweller in High Places' for a strong, period female lead from the same author.)

Not without its flaws then, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is however still an impressive work, and most of those flaws are answered by its place in the wider canon of Clarke's short stories.

The Folklore of Discworld

I've never been all that interested by books about 'The Science of Star Trek', for example. It seems to me that wherever and to what extent I don't already understand the science involved in Star Trek on the basis of my A-level in Physics and general scientific curiosity, I'm probably never going to get it. I maxed out on science at A-levels. I'm also afraid that the really interesting bits will turn out to have been made up. The Science of Discworld was a different proposition. Since it was based around a fantasy series, and not science fiction, it didn't offer to immediately get mired in the hinterland between my own understanding and things far beyond my ken. I very much enjoyed the first two, and look forward to reading the others some day. It was thus with some anticipation that I picked up an audiobook of The Folklore of Discworld, read by Michael Fenton Stephens.

Sadly - and I've been putting this review off for weeks because I didn't want to say this - I found it lacking. I think this is my own fault in part. The book is an exploration of the Discworld's folklore and an expansion on its sources, where I was hoping for something which more looked at our folklore through the eyes of the Disc, as the Science series did. I also found the repeated suggestion that Earth folklore mirrored the Disc to be disingenuous after the third or fourth repeat.

The Folklore of Discworld is not a bad book, it's just much more a book about the Discworld than it is a book about folklore.