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Hi, thanks for visiting my blog. Please feel free to post comments. Don't take anything I have written too seriously, these are all off the cuff impressions of things I have randomly read rather than carefully considered judgments. With some obvious exceptions.
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Tuesday 28 August 2012

Ark - Stephen Baxter

"Ark" is the sequel to Baxter's "Flood", reviewed here a few days ago. This is a real doorstep of a book, as science fiction often is, which picks up the story several years before "Flood" ends. The central theme - a space rocket takes survivors to another world to avoid the apocalyptic flooding of earth - had already been heavily trailled in "Flood", and Baxter covers some familiar ground in opening, presumably for the benefit of readers who hadn't read the previous novel. (Incidentally, JK Rowling was a master of this - she always got the "what you missed" section out of the way early in the Potter novels, with considerable economy - although towards the end of the series she stopped bothering, on the grounds if you didn't know Harry was a wizard etc then you had been living in a hole in the ground for the last five years. Anyway, back to "Ark").

"Ark" has a very similar construction to "Flood" - short chapters following a large group of characters, with a few individuals at the core; occasional significant time jumps; a tendency to somewhat casually kill people off and usher in new generations quite regularly.  In fact this is probably best seen as a mirror novel of "Flood" with the only significant different being the terrain - space instead of earth and water.
Baxter indulges himself with a leisurely account of the early days of the flooded earth space programme, constantly threatened by the rising water and the human tide which accompanies it. The group of Candidates being trained to undertake the flight are examined closely, although I felt that the time jumps and the sudden deaths made it harder to care about any of them. Zane, the most vulnerable, was unconvincing - someone with his vulnerabilities and weaknesses would be unlikely to have passed the various vetting processes.

I think we all know without spending too much time considering the issue that long months and years in deep space would be terribly boring, and it is a challenge to the author to make them seem less so. He can fast forward decades in a page but we still return to the same setting with the same crew (give or take) and the same set of issues.


After ten years the crew reach Earth 2, which despite its flora and fauna and evidence of advanced intelligence is considered by most to be uninhabitable - leading to a three way split between them - some try to settle Earth 2, others decide to return to Earth, hoping that the waters had receded (they hadn't!) and a third group vote to push on another unimaginable 30 years to a possible Earth 3. I would have liked to hear more about what happened on Earth 2, but this group is not mentioned again. The group that returns to Earth find Ark 2, an unlikely underwater settlement, but the main focus is on the group that travels on to Earth 3, giving us a lot more of the same. Planet fall, when it comes, is almost as much a relief for the reader as it must have been for the passengers.

I have no evidence for this, as usual, but my hunch is that what really interests Baxter is the speculative science behind inter-stellar travel, colonisation of new planets, etc, and the plot and characters in this novel as simply window-dressing around this core. Which isn't really good enough is it?

Saturday 25 August 2012

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan

Read in the Jonathan Cape hardback first edition.

Any new novel by McEwan is something of an event, and this is no exception. Sweet Tooth is an ambitious novel. Set in the early 1970's, and rich with period material, the story follows a young woman, Serena Frome, in her first few months working for MI5. Sweet Tooth is the name of the operation to which she is assigned, designed to channel MI5 funding into sympathetic writers - in effect the cultural Cold War. Serena is tasked with providing funding for a supposed pro-establishment writer, without letting him know where the money is coming from. No doubt MI5 did something very similar, although the operation is plainly ridiculous, all the more vividly so when contrasted with some of her more incidental work supporting operatives under cover within the Provisional IRA.

Serena begins a relationship with the writer, Tom Haley, she is "running", without telling him she is a "spy". This provokes a strong reaction from one of her colleagues. Much of the novel is spent reaching this point, filling in Serena's early love affairs, including one with a professor at her university who in later turns out, to little surprise, was leaking information to the Russians earlier in the Cold War.

Serena reads Haley's short stories, and we are given detailed synopses of them, including extensive quotes. This gives us the stories within stories which gives the novel a complex structure. Eventually the details of the MI5 funding come out in the press, no doubt leaked by this jealous colleague, and the relationship reaches at crisis.  In the final chapter there is a revelation which reframes the rest of the narrative in a very similar way to the disclosure at the end of Atonement, and prompts the reader to look at the novel in a completely different light. This technique could be irritating - it's not really necessary - but the successes of the novel elsewhere outweigh this distraction.

The central character appears to be an open, slightly delusional, slightly dishonest, and not very likeable character, and prior to the final chapter revelation I (and I think most readers) thought this was simply a flawed narrator of the kind we are very familiar with in much contemporary fiction. The fact that McEwan has gone further than this doesn't I think take us anywhere particularly new - one kind of flawed perspective in a narrator is very similar to another; it is not as if we get any closer or indeed further away from "the truth".

A couple of other moans before I try to get to why I read this novel in little over 24 hours. First, the period detail which McEwan tries so hard at getting right. The problem with this is that his trying is just too apparent - for example telling us the price of a pint of beer in 1974 (13p). Period detail needs to be accurate and appropriate, but not flaunted. Second, the plot developments, other than the final twist, and too obvious - the Cambridge don who turns out to be a spy is just a bit of a cliche, and can be seen a mile off; like-wise the boyfriend who is not just that much into sex with his hot girlfriend, who shockingly turns out to be gay. And so on. Lastly, the Monty Hall problem, which McEwan doesn't spend too much time on, thankfully, has already been done in Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident" and comes across as tired here.

So why did I keep reading with such interest? McEwan's prose style is mature and well crafted - there is rarely a false note with the language (as opposed to the plot). The central character is a bit wet and dim, always a few pages behind the reader and her associates, but is generally likeable and pleasant. Some of the period and geographic detail also struck a personal chord, and many of the other writers referenced were familiar. In itself that's not enough to account for the interest, so I think what I am going to do is let the novel settle in my mind for a bit, maybe read some reviews and reread a few chapters, and come back to it in a few weeks.

Thursday 23 August 2012

Flood - Stephen Baxter

Working on the basis that anyone Terry Pratchett decides to work with must be pretty damn good, I decided to give Stephen Baxter another try after "The Long Earth" (see review last month). "Flood" appeared to stand out from the other recommendations for reasons I haven't decided upon. The name really tells you most of what you need to know about the premise of the book - the world floods in genuinely biblical proportions. The novel opens in the very near future with the release of a small group of hostages from their captives in Spain, a release facilitated by the Gates/Jobs/Branson like boss of one of the hostages. FloodFrom this point the waters begin to rise, and never stop, and we follow the lives of the hostages as they try to adapt, along with the rest of the world.

You can probably pencil in most of the main events along the way - the gradual breakdown of society, the development of enclaves of the rich, the move to a floating society - didn't Kevin Costner cover this in Waterworld? There is little to keep you reading beyond the inevitable and unending succession of watery disasters. I didn't identify with any of the principal characters, and I got the impression Baxter didn't either, so lightly did he ink them in and so casually did he kill them off. The episodic nature of the description of the flood is reinforced by regular time jumps - several years pass between chapters, and if this is an attempt to avoid any boredom with the inevitability of the progression of the flood then it doesn't work.

As a highly regarded science fiction writer the very least I would have expected from Baxter is some coherent science, but that is probably the most disappointing part of the novel - the attempts to explain the causes of the flood are pretty risible. There are some successful things about this novel - the description of a generation growing up never having known land for example worked well for me - this is a small consolation to what is otherwise another hugely disappointing work. I am going to persist however and have ordered the sequel "Ark" as something stubborn within me wants to know where Baxter is going with this.

Thursday 9 August 2012

The Woman Who Died a Lot - Jasper Fforde

Read in the Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition.

This represents a return to fform ffor Fforde, after the disappointing "One of Our Thursdays is Missing". The seventh in the Thursday Next series, eighth if you count "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", sees Thursday recovering from injuries sustained in a kidnapping attack, and feeling her age. Offered a post in the Wessex Library Service we spend around 75 pages catching up on life in 1980's Swindon, during which I was a little worried that the inventiveness of earlier books remained missing. But the scene setting is worth the time, because the book kicks in with a puzzling attack on Thursday's family which is clearly the work of Aornis Hades, Thursday's nemisis. From there the action never flags.

The span of the novel plays out over a week in which a lot happens in Thursday's life. God has decided to cut out all the potential confusion about his existence, and make himself apparent to man. Mankind seems to have taken this in his stride, even when God gets a bit truculent and starts smiting some cities out of existence, downtown Swindon being next in line. So there's that to sort out, as well as Thursday's new job in the library service, investigating mysterious attacks on book collections by Goliath, her other nemises, if global corporations can be nemises, and indeed if the plural of nemesis is nemises. Her brother Joffy is now in effect mankind's chief negotiator with God over the difficult "meaning of life" question. Aornis has escaped, and needs tracking down. And the lives of her children get more complicated as the grow up - Friday is due to murder someone at the end of the week, Tuesday (keep up there) is investigating how to deflect God's wrath via an anti-smiting device, and Jenny doesn't exist.

How Fforde keeps all these balls in the air, adding in jokes about Dark Matter (setting up the next book in the series nicely) and a range of wacky ideas about time travel, avatars, parallel worlds (thrown in and lightly thrown away) and of course the Book World, is hard to describe, but he does, masterfully.

The acid test of a good read is if you don't want it to stop. I read this in a couple of days flat, and didn't even notice that it was over 350 pages (just checked) - whereas Wolf Hall (for example) was on a slow countdown. I know that probably makes me a sucker for light comic fantasy (and a good dodo joke) - guilty as charged.

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall won the Booker prize in 2009, and its sequel, Bringing up the Bodies, is the Bookies' favourite for the 2012 prize. If it weren't for this accolade I very much doubt if I would have read it, not being an historical fiction fan, and I certainly would not have persisted to the end of the 650 pages.

This is very much the "anti-Booker" - instead of the usual slim volume of sensitively crafted, flawed memories, this is a detailed recreation of the life of Thomas Cromwell. As always the best and first question to ask is "Why?" - which Mantel helpfully answers in a short Q&A published at the end of this Fourth Estate paperback edition. Mantel found Cromwell a mysterious figure, and decided to give him a voice. This she does very well - his portrait is well rounded and convincing. He comes over as a sympathetic figure, caught up in turbulent times, trying his best to follow his conscience whilst at the same time to survive and prosper.

Mantel draws heavily from the historical record, which is of course legitimate - Shakespeare did very much the same - and we get a detailed insight into the key characters from this crucial period in English history. There is, as you will have guessed, a faily big "but" coming. In fact, several. Where to begin?

First, everything takes such a long time to happen, and while we wait for Henry to divorce Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn the material used to fill the gaps is not interesting enough to carry the reader along - I confess I took a two week break half way through reading this, and only returned out of a sense of duty or stubborness.

Second, the author's much criticised use of the male singular personal pronoun is deeply irritating. Usually, but not always, "he" is used to refer to Cromwell. The idea no doubt is to pull the reader closer into identifying with him, but it generates huge confusion virtually on every page, which is compounded by large blocks of dialogue and the use of the present tense. You can usually work out in the end who is being referred to, and devices to make the reader pause and think are often no bad thing, but here the main impact is one of irritation.

This confusion is made worse by the huge cast of characters, many with the same name, who are often lightly sketched. I gave up bothering to try to work out who was who, who was related by birth or marriage to who, and so on - the investment of effort and time wasn't proportionate to the reward.

Finally, the title is simply a teaser for the second book in the series, (I am assuming it is a series - there are a lot of wives to go), Wolf Hall being the home of the Seymours. It is an evocative metaphor for the dog eat dog world Henry created amongst his court, but it is a bit of a cheat.

In the end, do we care enough about the central character to justify the 650 pages? I didn't I'm afraid, and unless you are a big historical fiction fan (think Philippa Gregory or Alison Weir) I would not recommend this.