bukes #40-#44

Time for the next roundup of probably inaccurate notes and generally half-baked yet arrogantly presented conclusions. I'm not going to be able to catch up entirely tonight with this record of books read, but I can at least make a start.

book #40: Notes on a Scandal (What was She Thinking?) (2003) by Zoe Heller

Sheba, a young and yummy female art teacher in a not marvelous London school begins an affair with one of her (male) pupils, Connolly, and commits the sin of enjoying it despite the fact the boy's an obvious turnip. Disgrace, public humiliation, possibly prison lie at the end of it all, but none of these things matter. The sole clouds on her horizon are her friends among the faculty, the troglodytic Fatty Hodge and the ghastly old spinster Barbara Covett. It's Barbara who's decided to write an account of the whole fiasco, supposedly to help her "friend"; in fact her narrative, which is this novel, is a document that reveals less about Sheba, her motivations and the affair than it does about Barbara herself, in particular her possessiveness, her need to dominate, and possibly (although this is a likely unjustified inference of mine) her suppressed lesbian yearnings for Sheba.

A lot of the time while I was reading this I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, another novel where the commentary is more important than the main narrative, and where the point is the unwitting revealing by the commenter of who the commenter really is. Heller isn't as skilled a player as Nabokov was at this sort of game and isn't up for the kind of narrative trickstery Nabokov managed as if by reflex, and Notes on a Scandal curiously loses out through making fewer and lesser demands on the reader than Pale Fire does; yet there's a huge amount of pleasure -- and a lot of laughter -- to be derived from this book. Notes on a Scandal is unlikely to turn out to be your book of the year, but it could very well turn out to be your book of the month.

book #41: Cold Case (2000) by Stephen White

A year or so before I grew weary of Jonathan Kellerman's increasingly tired Alex Delaware mysteries I came across Stephen White's Alan Gregory mysteries. At first I assumed I was getting just Delaware ripoffs (psychologist helps fat local police detective solve crimes; the telling was fresher and more enthusiastic, yet the scenario was hellish familiar) with an admixture of Patricia Cornwell (the fat local police detective is a bigot, yet somehow curiously gawsh-lovable for all that), and I suspect this was what the publisher initially assumed as well -- when I went back and read some of the early books in the series and their blurbs, I became sure of it -- yet White and Gregory soon developed a real voice and style of their own. This is not always a good thing -- a couple of the White/Gregory books have been pretty damn' silly -- yet for most of the time there's a great vigour in these books that you don't so much expect any longer from the corporate mainstream of US thrillerdom.

This is perhaps one of the sillier White/Gregory novels, but I enjoyed it anyway. Some years ago Colorado was shocked by the brutal mutilationary double murder of a couple of teenage girls; yet the case was never solved, thanks to the apathy and incompetence of the local cops. Now an organization of super-detectives and forensic poobahs called Locard (after the famed French detective), dedicated to picking up cold cases, decides to "adopt" this one -- and Alan Gregory and public prosecutor wife Lauren are called in to help. Natch, there are still plenty of rural numbnutses who want to keep the case forever dead, and some of these bozos are murderous . . .

There's 'way too much soap opera here, and the later sequences require your disbelief to be not so much suspended as floated away on a beautiful blue balloon, but all in all the brightness of White's telling made me willing to forgive a lot and to keep turning the pages.

Okay, so there were a couple of testing moments:

Dept of Mammary Bilocation: "She hugged me from behind, one of her breasts heavy on each side of my neck."

Dept of Optical Rodeo: "Her unpatched eye captured both of mine . . ."

book #42: A Certain Chemistry (2003) by Mil Millington

I must have laughed loud and long a couple of dozen times or more while reading the first 100 pages of this 404-page book; and I must have laughed about three times all told, and then only in a charitable way, during the rest of it.

Tom Cartwright's a ghostwriter in Edinburgh, Scotland; he's a deft and willing hack and he lives with a girlfriend called Sara with whom I promptly fell in, and remained in, love. But, however skilled Tom is with the written word, he's an idiot. When the chance comes along to earn oodles of dosh ghosting the autobiography of TV soap star and public heart throb Georgina Nye -- "She's been voted the best arse in the UK by the readers of two major magazines" (quoted from memory) -- he grabs both chance and soon thereafter the admired arse with both hands.

Most of this refreshingly badly written novel thereafter is devoted to sexual rompery and Tom's difficulties in deceiving and later attempting to mollify Sara. The best character in the book is Tom's hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-swearing and all-round hard-as-nails agent Amy, who every time she appeared had me grinning (partly through recognition; I'm sure I've met her at BEA or the London Book Fair); unfortunately she didn't appear often enough.

I'm not sure quite why I became so irritated by this book. I think the reason might well be that Tom is such a depressingly nauseating, selfish, egocentric protagonist. Normally I like amoral protagonists, because they possess a certain detached wit; not so poor Tom. I imagine if you're 13 you'd love this book.

book #43: Cast Adrift (2004) by Peter Guttridge

"The King of Crime Comedy" -- Shots Magazine boasts the cover, so, natch, dreaming of Colin Watson and Simon Brett and Robert Barnard and a bucketload of others, I grabbed Cast Adrift. I can't tell you how disappointed I was. This has to be the ghastliest book I've read in a very long time. It's a late entry in the Nick Madrid series; I can only assume the earlier entries were a whole hell of a lot better, as described by various worthies, plus trade journals like Publishing News, who're quoted on the back of the book. Heaven forfend all the praise might have anything to do with Guttridge's job as Crime Fiction Reviews Editor for The Observer.

Nick Madrid and his frightful pal Bridget are in Mexico on the set of a budget-strapped pirate-movie musical. Everyone's screwing everyone else and that's jolly hilarious. Nick's not very good at screwing -- how much more hilarity can you bear? -- but he manages to bed all sorts of wonderfully lovely babes anyway: reader, my ribs are just one big solid ache. There are homosexual, Rastafarian, Elgar-loving modern-day pirates. Oh, spare me, spare me; nothing like a few prejudice-reinforcing jokes about gays, eh? And I'm just mentioning the good bits.

Oh, and there are appalling displays of ignorance/carelessness. The dinosaurs apparently died out a mere six million years ago (page 100; and, no, it's not a typo, because this wrong datum is repeated on the next page). Our hero listens to the end of BBC Radio 4's Today programme at 9am (page 162) . . . which might seem reasonable enough until you realize he's doing the listening in Mexico, which is displaced by several hours from GMT. And so on. In the normal way, this is the kind of stuff you expect the copyeditor to have picked up, if no one else did; but on the basis of a few scattered evidences I suspect the copyeditor here was confronted by a nightmare, and performed something herculean to clear up as much as s/he did.

Why didn't I just throw Cast Adrift at the wall after the first 50 pages or so? I'd have proved my manly stamina by then. Well, I guess I kept going because, perhaps half a dozen times during the book, I did actually laugh. That was enough to delude me into the futile hope that surely things must get better. Er . . .

'Course, maybe I'm just being jealous.

book #44: Circle of Assassins (2007) by Steven Rigolisi

I shared a panel with Steve Rigolisi a couple of weeks ago, and was intrigued enough by his descriptions of his books that I decided I had to get hold of one. This is it.

The novel is #2 in his Tales from the Back Page sequence, whose conceit is that each story starts with a small ad in the back of The Clarion -- which is essentially Manhattan's famous Village Voice. In this case the ad reads:

REVENGE IS SWEET!
Every day we are brutalized by those who hurt us, take advantage of us, steal what is ours [. . .] Enough is enough! It's time to turn the tables. Write to A care of Box 270. (For entertainment purposes only.)

What "A" is setting up is, if you like, an elaboration of the old Strangers in a Train plot: five people will each murder the foe of one of the others; because there's no logical connection between each of the five murderers and their victims, they'll surely all get off scot-free -- especially since the scheme that's being set up ensures that no one, not even "A", knows the true identity of anyone else.

Well, yes. An English prof wishes her supposedly sexist, misogynist head of department to go permanent bye-bye. A subliterate Italian youth can't bear the thought of his idolized sister marrying the guy she loves. The elderly resident of a shabby-genteel area would like to see the demise of the recently arrived drug dealer whose presence is threatening to turn it into a slum. A priest despises the sociopathic hypocrisy of a local cop. And "A" himself wants to see a murderous paedophile rubbed out.

For a while I wasn't sure I was going to get on with this book. Its first 50 pages or so forgo straightforward storytelling in favour of reproducing relevant documents; this can be an enthralling narrative technique, but I'm not sure Rigolisi quite pulls it off. Thereafter, though, I was completely engaged. This book isn't really a thriller -- more like a dark comedy of manners -- but it's as engrossing as one. I have to confess I quibble with the morality of Nick Lang -- the partner of the murdered cop, latterly trying to clear everything up in the wake of all the killings -- but that was an irritation I found I could live with.

I'll be keeping an eye open for more of Rigolisi's Tales from the Back Page.

=====================

Next: books by Sarah Langan, Ian Watson and Will Clarke.

a typo idea wot you may steal

Just now I was attempting to type the word "fratboy".

And instead I typed "fratbot".

I thought, There's a story in that. But I also thought, It's a story I'm never going to write.

So, if you'd like it, it's yours. On the other hand, if you sell the movie rights to Steven Spielberg for a seven-figure advance, I'd like me a cut, okay?

bukes #45-#49

Here are the five (or, as quietselkie might describe them, four) books I didn't get to last night while writing up my notes on recently read books. Oh, in common with grown-ups everywhere, I assume you don't mind "spoilers": I'm talking about books, not laying out a few tantalizing teasers for the new Adam Sandler movie, okay?

book #45: Audrey's Door (2009) by Sarah Langan

Lots of folk, including several on my LJ friends-list, have recommended that I take a look at Langan's work, so -- although I can't really be described as a regular reader of horror -- I eventually decided to follow their advice. On the whole I'm glad I did so.

Audrey Lucas, suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and decidedly frayed round her mental edges as consequence of her hellish childhood and young adulthood because of a seriously mad mother, is nonetheless a potentially brilliant architect. Arrived in NYC and regarded as a rising star at a posh architectural firm, she eventually -- because needing distance from her on-off fiance, slobbish Saraub -- moves into a suspiciously cheap apartment in Morningside Heights. It's in a bizarrely constructed building, The Breviary, designed according to the precepts of the late-19th-century architectural school and quasi-religious cult Chaotic Naturalism: the few other buildings erected by the cult have long since fallen down, but The Breviary still somehow stands -- as do its residents, almost all of whom are nearly as ancient and decrepit as the building itself, and have as many odd angles. Soon Audrey finds her new apartment was previously occupied by a mother who went nuts and murdered her young children there. But there are far, far worse secrets that will be revealed to her within The Breviary . . .

I had a sort of rocky start to this book, and by page 87, when I came across the anatomically perplexing description of Audrey sitting with her "knees pulled under her butt" (try it), I was just about ready to put the book aside: I was quite enjoying it, but I wasn't sure I wanted to remain in its company for the full 412 pages. Yet soon thereafter the text started redeeming itself in a big way, and I'm now very pleased I kept going.

As a horror novel this is very Straub, and Langan seems to be making a conscious effort to write elegantly as well as grippingly. Because of the OCD, Audrey can sometimes be a slightly rebarbative lead character, but some members of the supporting cast, in particular the excellent Saraub and Audrey's boss Jill, compensate for the time we have to spend with her. In terms of background, I very much liked the conceit of Chaotic Naturalism; but what I especially liked was that this novel, set a few years hence in 2012, is, unlike many horror novels, aware of the world in which its events are taking place -- for, while much about 2012 is the same as in 2009, not everything is; in particular, climate change is beginning to kick in . . . and occasionally with a vengeance.

So: thanks to those people who told me to go read myself some Langan.

books #46-#48: The Book of the River (1984), The Book of the Stars (1984) and The Book of Being (1985) by Ian Watson

Ian Watson is arguably the most important science fiction writer of the past few decades. I was extremely honoured recently to be asked to write the profile of him for this year's Fantasycon programme book; by interesting coincidence, my wife currently has one or two of Ian's early novels on her nightstand, my having recommended them to her. The request to write the profile reminded me there were gaps in my own reading of Ian's work, so I decided to go some way towards rectifying the situation by getting myself a copy of his Yaleen trilogy, one of the high water marks of 1980s sf and a series of novels which I really, really ought to have read at the time.

Because Yaleen is a trilogy, one expects the three novels to be like each other -- just a single tale split up into three. No. This is Watson, remember. The three have each their very different character and concerns. There's an overarching story, but it's nothing so simple as a routine quest or whatever.

The Book of the River presents us with, we're lured into thinking, one of those strange colonized planets Sheri S. Tepper is so expert at depicting: where the human colonists, despite having been there for centuries and having lost contact with the rest of the spacefaring species, still have to solve their world. What needs solving in The Book of the River's case is that it's effectively a world split into two parts, the two banks of an enormous river; on one bank there's a feminist flawed utopia; on the other, observable only through telescope from civilization, is a barbaric male-dominated dystopia where they have enticing habits like burning "witches" alive (rather like much of our own world today, come to think of it). What keeps the two apart is not just the river but the black current (yes, I groaned) that runs down its centre; the current -- which we soon discover is not really a current but a sentient entity, a "worm" -- exercises very strict control over human interactions with the river. Men can travel on it just the once, which typically they do when they journey to the towns where the women who have chosen to wed them live; should a man try to sail the river twice, he goes mad and dies. Women have significantly more freedom -- hence their dominant role in civilization: they're the traders who can sail up and down the river at will, perhaps with a boy in every port. But even women must be wary of the black current, because if they try to be in direct physical contact with it -- as they might be in an attempt to cross the river -- they suffer the same fate as men who try to sail twice.

Our guide to this world is the gossipy, somewhat hyperactive Yaleen, a young woman who's initiated into the sailing guild by drinking a draft of the black current and who basically sees little amiss with her world until her beloved brother, one of a band of male scientists who (because what else is there for drones to do?) are trying to find out what goes on in the barbaric community on the far bank, succeeds in crossing the river by walking along its bed in a sort of primitive diving suit; natch, he's not long among the primitives before they burn him at the stake. The trauma of witnessing this from afar is enough to set Yaleen off on the quest to solve her world, and in particular to solve the worm.

The Book of the Stars starts off as a continuation of The Book of the River. However, just when you're settling yourself in for what you've come to assume is a fairly straightforward trilogy (inasfar as anything written by Watson could be described as straightforward), it goes somewhere completely different.

One result of Yaleen's efforts to solve her world is that for a while the black current retreats from the river, so that the barbarians may invade civilization; their actions are hideously brutal, although the campaign is finally unsuccessful. Perhaps more importantly, the current/worm decides to befriend Yaleen, and from it she discovers that it's in effect a minor deity, implanted here in the world by a human- and later self-created deity, a computer complex back on earth that has directed the entire human galactic colonization program in order (as she learns later in the book) to construct what might be regarded as a sort of super-telescope that'll solve the universe even if its single use will annihilate the human species.

(Have you noticed what a lot of solving there is going on? That's what Yaleen -- and much of the rest of Watson's fiction -- is all about. It's also what quite a lot of my own fiction is about. I blame Watson, and my somewhat-youthful exposure to his work.)

Yaleen is murdered by one of the primitives and, thanks to her friendship with the worm, is transported to earth and into the continent-wide compound where the Godmind retains all the "souls" it has drawn in unto itself for observation, so that it might learn from the widely varying experiences they've had on widely varying planets. It's there that Yaleen learns quite how radically the Godmind is prepared to modify the human colonists it delivers to different worlds; while the humans of her own world are much like you and me, other freshly incarnated "souls" around her tell her of their existence as near-static lumps on high-grav planets, or as winged fliers elsewhere, and so on. Whatever their past existence, here in the compound they're incarnated as orthodox-human infants.

When the toddler Yaleen is sent out to spread her farworld-derived wisdom among the peoples of Europe, she's soon recruited by one of the groups rebelling against the Godmind. This leads her (after much not noted here, including a direct confrontation with and terrorist strike against the Godmind itself) into an astonishing toppling through various astonishingly diverse worlds and their likewise astonishingly diverse cultures as she serially occupies a number of individuals embedded in those cultures. In the end she gets back to her own world, but not in any way she might have expected: she's born as her own (much) younger sister Narya, which is why, as we've already seen, Narya, a toddler at the time of Yaleen's "death", was always so odd.

The Book of Being, the third in the cycle, is in effect Narya-Yaleen's story, as she tries to prepare her world to resist the effects of the Godmind's genocidal effort to use its "telescope". This is also by far the most bewildering of the three novels, with for much of its extent a fragmented narrative that often seems to be throwing up more internal inconsistencies than the reader's mind can easily cope with; the novel, and the narrative(s), are eventually in their turn solved for the reader by a footnote on the penultimate page of the book's Afterword, dammit! It's a typical example of Watson's playfulness, which playfulness, you always later discover, is anything but . . .

Much of these three books is written in the fashion of a light-hearted, almost frivolous romp -- thanks to the breathless voice of the somewhat amoral yet at root gutsy Yaleen -- but in fact the trilogy belies its tone, being extraordinarily inventive, full of genuinely challenging ideas, and willing to tackle head-on some fairly weighty philosophical/ethical considerations. All of which is what the purported "literature of ideas" is supposed to do but far too rarely actually does.

So, within three novels you get a Tepperesque planetary romance, a Stapledonesque cosmic re-evaluation, and a whoknowswho-esque piece of New Wavery. I would regard that as a bargain, no? It's also one of the more significant achievements of fantastic literature that you're loikely to come across. And I loved it.

By the way: The copy of the trilogy that I bought is the natty BenBella one-volume version, called just Yaleen; it appears to be a direct reprint of the earlier SFBC omnibus The Books of the Black Current, and has a spiffy cover painting (illustrating a scene in the final pages of The Book of Being, yet!) by my old pal Jael. Apparently the painting was used on the cover of an earlier incarnation of The Book of Being and BenBella's Glenn Yeffeth thought it'd be ideal for the trilogy as a whole. All of which I mention just because it goes to show how this is a small world, etc.

book #49: The Worthy: A Ghost's Story (2006) by Will Clarke

If you enjoy Christopher Moore's books, you'll enjoy this: it's not as laugh-out-loud as Moore, but I had a big grin on my face much of the time while reading it, in between those times when I was horrified by the events of the novel. The ghost story part isn't horrifying; it's the college fraternity part that is.

LSU fratboy Conrad, recently murdered by fraternity supremo Ryan -- a sadistic sociopath who, who knows, if left unchecked might one day become President of the United States -- is a ghost who cannot leave this mortal coil entirely behind: dead Conrad wants revenge against Ryan and he also wants a general release of others from the extraordinarily violent hazing the fraternity inflicts upon its pledges. Oh, and if it were only possible, he'd like babe girlfriend Ashley back . . . though an extended dalliance with Ryan's babe girlfriend Maggie would be pretty okay, too. Trouble is, the only people who can detect Conrad's presence are the elderly cook Etta and the evangelical born-again student Sarah Jane . . . and occasionally the good-natured Jolly-Green-Giant-like fratboy pledge Tucker, into whose body Conrad can plunge for a brief burst of possession should Tucker get sufficient drunk.

The Worthy is a great romp with serious undertones. I'd buy it like a shot if I hadn't already bought it . . . or is it Conrad who's already bought it, hm?