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.