American Gods

And there it is again. Do American publishers worry a lot
that readers will mistake a novel for, say, a boa
constrictor?

Shadow is looking forward to getting out of prison, seeing his wife, getting his life back. The news that Laura is dead hits him hard; the news that she died in flagrante along with the friend who was going to give him a job is devastating. There seems little to do except take up the offer of employment given him by the mysterious Mr Wednesday. This job leads him on a journey that falls somewhere between a spirit quest and a road movie, to rally the old gods brought to America by generations of immigrants for a final battle with the new gods of technology. America is a bad country for gods, and there isn't enough to go around.

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."
Aptly enough, Neil Gaiman's biography of the American soul dances among the great American genres: Part beat novel, part noir, part war story, part sting, it defies even the many layered label of magic realism. It is what it is and that's probably all you can say without an essay. It's a big ass, slow moving read, but none the worse for it, and it is absolutely full of beautiful prose moments that thumb their noses at any snide presumptions as to the quality of fantasy writing. The story is rambling, its turns deducible, but not predictable. At its heart, it is a series of vignettes in which Shadow meets gods who tell tales of how it used to be, and of tales of the many migrations that made up modern America.

In the audiobook, Neil Gaiman reads the 'Coming to America' interludes - plus a foreword and an afterword - while George Guidall, an Audible favourite, reads the main narration, but the character voices are read by separate actors, which is something that I always like in an audiobook. The performances are all good, although there is always something a little odd in the juxtaposition of Audible's preferred dry, measured style and scenes of sex and violence, the narrator describing the crunch of bone or a post-coital ecstasy with the same impassive tones he used to describe the dented paintwork of a car or the window of a diner.

Ark Royal

When first contact becomes a shooting match, the divided forces of humanity's many national space navies are hastily united to face the alien aggressor. After the first full-scale engagement turns out a slaughter, Earth's only hope may be a handful of ageing and outdated vessels, led by the Royal Navy's oldest carrier, the Ark Royal.

Ark Royal is the first book in a series by Christopher G Nuttall, of which three are now published. It's a nuts and bolts interstellar war story, with a conveniently predictable means of FTL travel and insanely fast intra-system transit to get around the problem of depicting a defensive fight in space. There are some nice conceits, especially those used to centre the action around the oldest ship in the fleet, and in fact those conceits are the best part of the book.

Unfortunately, the technological conceits (which, by the by, are plain bad physics, so let's just accept that and move on) are surrounded by a story full of stock characters and poorly edited drama. No character transcends his or her TFC summary (he's a stubborn, recovering alcoholic navy captain struggling to retain his command; she's a plucky junior officer caught between duty and loyalty: they fight crime aliens.) The female characters are particularly egregious, consisting primarily of said plucky junior officer, a sexy young pilot, a marginally shrewish wife and a reporter whose sole defining characteristics are blondness, stupidity and an 'inhuman' thinness'.

It is, however, only when it comes to relationships the book really takes a nosedive. The sole sexual relationship of the book is between the CAG (Chief of Air Group, for those not either aux fait with military parlance or just following Battlestar Galactica, as Nuttall would appear to be doing) and a much younger squadron leader (said sexy hotshot pilot). It is not noticeably worse than any one of a hundred other literary sexual relationships, except that every encounter is prefaced or followed by the CAG musing that he shouldn't be cheating on his wife, and anyway the squadron leader is young enough to be his daughter/he is old enough to be her father.

Which brings me to the editing, and the fact that there isn't any. There aren't many spelling errors, but repetition is the book's greatest flaw; occasionally just within sentences, but also both repetition of information several times in a given passage, or repetition of the same phrasing every time a similar situation comes up. The squick-making reuse of 'old enough to be her father... almost' before every poorly-written sex scene* is one example, but also the aliens noses were so bloodied by the end of it it's a wonder they weren't all anaemic, and I think if one more ship had opted to 'rig for silent running' and 'lie doggo', I would have screamed.

The next book in the series will not be making an appearance on my Kindle; not unless I get desperate.

* If I genuinely held poorly written sex against an author, I'd never read anything past the 12-14 age bracket.