January bukes

Gallows View (1987) by Peter Robinson

This is one of the early novels in Robinson's Alan Banks series of detective novels, and lacks the psychological depth and sense of dark claustrophobia that make the more recent entries worthy of their place on the shelf alongside books by the likes of Ian Rankin and Ruth Rendell. Still and all, it's a rattlingly readable yarn: I gobbled it down in little more than a day.

The Yorkshire town of Eastvale is being plagued by a peeping tom and by a spate of house invasion-style thefts, in which a couple of thugs push their way into the homes of old dears and petrify their victims into silence as they strip the place of cash and valuables. Then one of the old dears is killed in the course of such a robbery . . . or is that really what went down? In trying to solve any one of the crimes, Banks and his colleagues manage to solve all of them, while Banks solves also the problem of his adulterous yearnings for consultant psychologist Jenny Fuller. Some of the tying off of ends seems a bit contrived, as indeed does some of the rest of the plotting and characterization; I'm not sure that, had I read this back in 1987, I'd have guessed how good Robinson was going to become, but I'd certainly have felt myself entertained agreeably enough to have tried another.

Vinegar Hill (1994) by A. Manette Ansay

It's the 1970s, and James Grier has lost his job; accordingly, he takes his family to live with his elderly parents in the small Wisconsin town of Holly's Field. For his wife Ellen and their two children this is a descent into a pit of misery, for James's father is -- and always has been -- viciously abusive, and this has the effect of poisoning all relationships between those around him. In the course of Vinegar Hill we learn this and a whole string of similar secrets, many of which seem to share the theme that mere acts of Fate, and foolishly considered responses to them, can determine so much of our lives -- as for example the revelation that James and Ellen are married only because years ago she accepted a lift from him, the car got stuck overnight in the snow, and, even though they hadn't so much as kissed, the only course left open to them by the prurient faux-"respectability" of others was to wed.

In essence, then, Vinegar Hill is a sort of portrait of pain -- primarily Ellen's, but the rest of the cast are suffering too, mainly because of each other. There's some good writing, marred every now and then by something obnoxiously pretentious ("Sometimes he feels his mind swallow him whole, the way a snake swallows a plain, white egg" -- snakes presumably having quite different ways of swallowing eggs of other colours). While reading this book I certainly didn't feel I was wasting my time, but when I put it down I found myself a tad frustrated that I'd had to read an entire novel for the sake of what's really just a vignette.


The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994) by Laurie R. King

It's 1913 and Sherlock Holmes has -- aside from occasional special projects in the service of the nation -- largely retired to his cottage on the Sussex Downs, where he pursues his passion for beekeeping. Into his life stumbles 15-year-old Mary Russell, an orphan who's studying for university while waiting to come of age and into her inheritance. Holmes is enamoured of neither youngsters nor females (Mrs Hudson excepted, of course), but he's soon forced into the recognition that in Mary he's discovered another ratiocinative mind that's a match for his own. Over the handful of years covered by this novel (the first in a series), the pair solve several mysteries together, starting with the near-trivial and building to the case that's the book's prime focus, in which someone is going to extraordinary lengths to torment Holmes through the attempted destruction of all those who matter most to him -- Mary included.

I'm always in two minds about Holmesian recursive fictions -- indeed, I'm in two minds about the Holmes canon as a whole, even though I devoured it several times over as a boy. (None of this stopped me from eventually contributing to it myself, with the novelette "H-------'s Last Case" in Dave Hutchinson's anthology Strange Pleasures #3.) Nonetheless, Mary Russell makes an excellent companion in what's for the most part a thoroughly entertaining romp -- I say "for the most part" because there's a longish section about two-thirds of the way through which reads like the most egregious padding. (Leaving the reader with what's at best, I suppose, a one-pipe problem: Did Ms King suddenly realize her text wasn't going to reach the wordage stipulated in her contract?) To judge by what little I know of the period, the research is pretty well impeccable with the exception of a bizarre muddle (page 106) over British coinage that'll have Brits howling while others will likely be bemused as to what the laughter's all about. All in all, though, a jolly way to spend a few days' worth of one's spare time.


The Young Unicorns (1968) by Madeleine L'Engle

It's remiss of me, I know, but I've never until now read any of L'Engle's work: I keep trying to get all four of her Wrinkle in Time novels lined up in a row on my shelf and never quite achieving it. (Right now I think I have three of them, all in far corners of the house.) The Young Unicorns isn't a part of that series but instead one in a string of standalone novels about the Austin family, primarily the Austin children -- here living in NYC and with young friends Dave (reformed ex-member of street gang) and Emily (blind musical prodigy). Their adventure involves a new laser that's being developed for surgical purposes but can equally be put to nefarious uses, and a crazed and murderous plot to take over NYC and make it a God-lovin' city by in essence brainwashing everyone. Needless to say, the kids prevail, even as they wade through quite a lot of ethical considerations, most particularly trust, whose nature is several times debated (both Dave and Emily have, for very different reasons, great difficulty in trusting, but others have their issues with it too).

I must confess, I had some difficulties with this book, and not just because the Austins and their circle are all a bit too bloody wholesome for my tastes. My real problem was with the narrative. I found I never really got close to any of the characters -- I never properly got into anyone's head -- so I had the constant sense that I was watching the proceedings from the outside rather than being in the midst of them, as if the story had been told not as a novel but as a stage play and I was in the audience. Just to strengthen this illusion of theatricality, the text has a scene-by-scene structure very reminiscent of a play's. To be sure, the stage is (as it were) very brightly lit, so that some of the characters and events stand out memorably . . . but at the same time they're standing out distantly.

My copy (Laurel-Leaf Dell 1980) is packed with typos and typographical glitches -- places where whole lines appear to have been missed out, etc. There's also a bizarre instance, presumably the product of hasty editorial rejigging at some stage, where L'Engle appears to have forgotten that she's already told you something (page 159) so tells you it all over again a few pages later (page 161).


Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse (translated 1951 by Hilda Rosner)

Forty-odd years ago, when everyone else my age was reading and quoting Hesse at each other (and me, dammit) interminably, I kind of missed out: I had perhaps three tries at The Glass Bead Game, but never got beyond about page 50. The turn of the year from 2009 to 2010 inspired me to redress this lack in my literary education, so I doughtily pulled from the shelf Siddhartha, purchased somewhere a few years back and having the considerable merit of being shorter than his other books.

Oh, my, what a treat I have been missing all these years.

Telling the tale of a religious seeker who meets but does not become a disciple of the Buddha, instead wending his own merry way through thickets of cod philosophy, this reads like the sort of book you expect to be given at airports by people in brightly coloured clothing. The translation is either godawful or should have been copyedited. Take this, from page 76 of my edition, for a flavour of so much more:

". . . But today you have met such a pilgrim in such shoes and dress. Remember, my dear Govinda, the world of appearances is transitory, the style of our clothes and hair is extremely transitory. Our hair and our bodies are themselves transitory. You have observed correctly. I am wearing the clothes of a rich man. I am wearing them because I have been a rich man, and I am wearing my hair like men of the world and fashion because I have been one of them."
    "And what are you now, Siddhartha?"
    "I do not know. I know as little as you. I am on the way. I was a rich man, but I am no longer and what I will be tomorrow I do not know."

Hands up anyone else who's reminded of that old MAD Magazine parody of Longfellow, in which Hiawatha sets out to make a pair of gloves: "First he turned the skin side inside . . ." and so on for about fifty similar lines in which the mittens are no closer to being completed.

I suppose Siddhartha was really the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of its day -- short, pretentious, ultimately empty, seemingly designed for those who want to absorb just enough off-the-rack metaphysics to see them through an outburst or three of gastric upheaval.


Los Alamos (1997) by Joseph Kanon

It's the height of the Manhattan Project and one of the security officers at Los Alamos is murdered in circumstances which suggest a gay quarrel. But the project's military head wants to cover all possibilities and seconds intelligence officer Mike Connolly, an NYC investigative journalist in peacetime, to check that everything is as the cops think it is and there has been no security breach. Connolly does indeed find the waters are far murkier than anyone had thought possible; and in the process of his investigation enters into a very physical adulterous liaison with Emma, the English wife of one of the German scientists engaged in the project. While the historical details seem extremely authentic, including the portrayals of Oppenheimer (a major supporting player in the story) and some of the other physicists, and while the detection part of it all is absorbingly handled, I could have done with a little less of the love story; while that obsessive mutual infatuation is extremely convincingly depicted, I could have done with a bit less wordage devoted to it -- on grounds analogous to the truism that lovers' conversations and banter are a lot more interesting to the lovers themselves than they are to anyone else.

One theme extremely pertinent to us today that came through loud and clear concerned the deadening effect of paranoid, over-eager security: historically, as we know, it hindered work on the project (and later Teller, shown in this book as an egocentric shit, was able to use it to destroy Oppie's career in a foretaste of Swiftboatery); here we see it having the effect of psychological handcuffs on Connolly as he attempts to solve the case, forcing him much of the time to be working against the efforts of the official security hierarchy.

I've made a note to go looking for further novels by Kanon, because I did enjoy this, despite the qualification mentioned above.


The Discovery of Chocolate (2001) by James Runcie

Diego de Godoy is one of the lesser lights of Cortez's expedition to the New World. There, amid the treachery and carnage, he discovers chocolate and the love of its supreme artisan, a woman he calls Ignacia. After a passionate retreat together, filled with chocolate- and love-making, they are separated by war -- but not before she tricks him into drinking an elixir of life. It's an elixir whose effects are stranger than merely conveying immortality, in fact, because his life seems thereafter to incorporate sudden slippages between one era and another, with intervening periods being spent at the same rate as the mortals with him he mingles. Needless to say, his intervals of ordinary history have a chocolatey theme, and he works with such luminaries of chocolate's tradition as Fry (in the UK) and Hershey (in the US; his opinion of Hershey's chocolate is much the same as mine, and in the book you'll find the technological reason for the judgement).

This is all pretty jolly, with plenty of entertaining sex and lashings of chocolatey lore. Since I'm not particularly a chocolate fiend, I know that some of the book's attractions must have gone right past me; but it was an amiable read all the same.


Death at the Chase (1970) by Michael Innes

It's a very long time indeed since I've read a Michael Innes novel, and I'd forgotten his extraordinary self-satisfied pomposity of narrative and the fact that it was for good reason that I'd never been able to make any headway with the non-mystery novels this Oxford don wrote under his real name, J.I.M. Stewart. If you want a flavour of the tone and exaggerated plundering of vocabulary, you could do worse than read the sections of Michael Innes parody interpolated by Dave Langford into our spoof disaster novel Earthdoom (1987; shortly to be reissued by those enterprising folks at DarkQuest Books). (Generally speaking Dave did the Innes parodies in that book, I did the McBain ones.)

In Death at the Chase the style does ease up a bit in places, usually when Bobby Appleby, son of series detective John Appleby, is taking centre stage in place of his father; but certainly the first few chapters read in themselves like a parody. This may have been because Innes realized he was having to stretch a short story's worth of plot quite extravagantly in order to fill out a novel, and thus resolved never to use one word when a score or more -- or preferably a few paragraphs -- would do every bit as well. The plot is certainly pretty simple. John Appleby, now Sir John, has retired from the force to enjoy rural splendour. He discovers that one of his neighbours, the eccentric Martyn Ashmore, believes that an attempt is made on his life once a year by vengeant members of the French Resistance, still enwrathed after all these years because he gave up information to the Nazis under torture. In due course Ashmore is indeed bumped off, but the solution to the mystery proves to lie a lot closer to home.

Still, at least this one's better than Appleby's End, memory of which still strikes a chill in my soul even decades after I read it . . .


The Alienist (1994) by Caleb Carr

This was a book I became desperate to read on the strength of its reputation, but for some reason never quite bought until, not long after moving to the States, I bought it, its sequel The Angel of Darkness (1997) and Carr's subsequent skiffy novel Killing Time (2000) all in one frenzied blurt. I then read Killing Time first, because it's a lot shorter than the other too and because it's, well, skiffy, innit, and discovered it was a complete stinker. This put something of a damper for some years on my plans to read the other two.

I'm glad I finally got over this, even though The Alienist is far from a perfect book.

It's 1896, and New York City is being plagued by a murderer who's killing children, primarily young male prostitutes, and leaving their hideously mutilated bodies in venues that clearly have some significance to him. Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner of the city, calls in controversial psychologist Laszlo Kreizler, who in turn deputes his old school John Schuyler Moore, now an investigative journalist with the New York Times. The team is soon expanded to include two Mutt'n'Jeff cops, the Isaacson brothers, as well as Roosevelt's secretary Sara Howard, who's determined to become the USA's first female cop. Between them, Kreizler and the Isaacsons effectively invent profiling and forensics, while also exploring areas of scientific detection that the NYPD -- still reeling under the effects of the purging Roosevelt had introduced in an attempt to rid it of its extraordinary corruption -- regarded at the time as purest gobbledygook . . . such as fingerprints. (In a section that excellently brings home to us the huge gulf that exists between our time and then in terms of scientific criminology, even the Isaacsons deem it worth trying to photograph the image of his killer that might still be retained on the back of a murder victim's eyeballs.) After perhaps rather too many plot twists and turns, the killer is eventually tracked down and confronted. Overall, this is a very satisfying novel, and The Angel of Darkness has moved closer to the top of my to-be-read list.

However.

While a triumph of the novel is the way Carr conveys the true misery undergone by most of those living in the hellhole that was late-19th-century NYC, one of the devices he uses, presumably in the belief that it was a means assisting him to that end, comes close to undermining his efforts. Quite frequently, almost every time the characters have to move from one part of the city to another, the progress of the narrative ploughs into quicksand as Carr devotes paragraphs to a seemingly obsessive description of the architectural landscape through which they're travelling. It's as if you were trying to hurry along with a companion who's always stopping to insist you admire the Doric columns on the left or learn a little bit about the history of the restaurant on the right. Interesting, I kept finding myself wanting to bellow at Carr, but NOT RIGHT NOW.

Another running sore is that Carr has a few spelling maggots (to use a very old term), and his copyeditor hasn't picked them up. There's "superintendant", there's "repellant" (as adjective) and there's even "yolk" for "yoke". And there are a few instances of textual infelicities so obvious they probably turn up in Copyediting 101 manuals: "a possibility so unlikely as to be impossible", for example. (Just before you pounce, that comma is correctly placed for UK English, which is what I primarily use. Besides, this is a bleedin blog, innit, not something formal.) I do feel that, while Messrs Random House were planning their big megabux marketing rollout for this novel, they could have scattered some small change in the direction of a competent copyeditor/proofreader.

Those are the nitpicks I had with the text, and cumulatively, although small individually, they actually took a significant toll on my enjoyment of the book. Luckily the rest was more than enough to balance out.


Choke (2001) by Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone and their auntie (well, probably not their auntie) has been telling me I should read some Palahniuk, and so finally I've gotten around to it.

In a world where urban legends very likely have a factual basis and you might actually meet the guy who stuck a live hamster up his rectum, Victor Mancini is working as one of the historic characters at a colonial re-enactment tourist attraction while making his real money going to restaurants in the evenings, pretending to choke on pieces of food, being saved by fellow-diners proud of their knowledge of the Heimlich manoeuvre, and thereafter sponging off them on the grounds that, as the old custom dictates, if you save someone's life you're indebted to them for ever. He needs the dough because his mother who turned his childhood into a years-long madhouse, is now in the madhouse herself -- stricken early by senile dementia or some semblance thereof, and likely to die soon -- and her medical treatment ain't cheap. For his sex life Victor largely relies on trawling around the sexaholic-recovery groups, where at any particular moment there are bound to be plenty of women attendees in the process of relapse. Then he meets one of the psychiatrists working at his mother's clinic, the sexually provocative Paige Marshall, who deduces that his mother bore him in consequence of a DNA-recovery experiment using Christ's foreskin, stolen from a European cathedral.

And so on.

After a while, I found reading this to be rather like watching a stand-up comic who hasn't worked out when to stop milking one joke and move on to the next. Crammed willy-nilly into Choke are stacks of ideas -- most of them based in real or perhaps sometimes invented urban legends -- that someone like Roald Dahl might have used individually to produce a whole string of superbly caustic, incisive, well honed stories. When Dahl combined such elements into a novel, he produced the endlessly entertaining -- and spectacularly smutty -- My Uncle Oswald (1979). One senses Dahl put a whole lot of effort into crafting that novel; I didn't get that sense at all from Choke. Rather, it seemed to me that Palahniuk decided he'd found a formula for pandering successfully to the fashionistas, and was adhering to it. All in all, the book seemed more faux-cleverness than substance, an empty codpiece of a text. The plentiful sexual; passages seemed introduced as a form of writerly freewheeling ("If I can't think of anything else to add today I could always rattle off fifteen pages of smut"); sometimes they're very amusing, but most are awfully tedious. The text in general is of the kind that's exceptionally easy to write assuming you have a basic gift of the gab, which Palahniuk quite evidently has.

Elsewhere my pal Andrew Hook has given the thumbs-up to a different Palahniuk novel, so maybe I'll give it a try. "Or maybe not" is perhaps not the right phrase, but it's the one that comes first to mind.


River of Darkness (1999) by Rennie Airth

Back in the days when I reviewed a lot for the late lamented Infinity Plus and Crescent Blues, I made a point of offering the small-press and even self-published titles the same level playing field as the stuff emanating from the big boys. This meant that, of course, in the pursuit of many undoubted pearls (the entire Akashic list, the stories of C.S. Thompson, etc., etc.), I also had to wade through an exceptional amount of, er, swine. In addition, I had to get used to the text that was fundamentally strong and filled with the kind of vibrancy you'd never hope for in a conglomerate-published novel, yet was packed with typos and grammatical howlers.

And then there were the ones that offered the latter characteristic while also being abysmally plotted and written as if in crayon. In general, I quietly didn't review those. (One of the ghastliest of them I later noticed had been reviewed elsewhere. I found the reviewer hadn't shared my milquetoste compunction. "THIS IS THE WORST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL I HAVE EVER READ," he thundered.) And, on the same grounds, I probably wouldn't have reviewed River of Darkness, which differs from other outrageously badly written and edited novels I've read only in that it was published not in POD by the (since defunct) Snotwrangler Press of Poughkeepsie but by Viking.

And it looked so good from the outside!

We're in the immediate post-WWI years in Surrey, UK, where there's just been a spectacular massacre in a country mansion. Scotland Yard sends Inspector John Madden to investigate. He's a man with a tragic past and so psychologically deep he can hardly get his trousers unbuttoned without a rigorous routine of introspection ("By fuck, this man's interesting in all directions," I thought as my head hammered irrevocably into the pillow), but unbutton 'em he does pretty promptly in the company of local dreamboat doctor Helen Blackwell -- proving, I suppose, the old adage that some women will do anything to stop you talking about your tragic past (op. cit.). Madden suspects there'll be other massacres along these same lines in the Home Counties, and sure enough he's right. Obviously Blackwell is going to have a lucky escape thanks to Our Man's relentlesss pluck.

As implied above, the text is littered with typos, not just of the kind where a letter has been transposed or a word omitted but including instances of sentences of dialogue being inadvertently run together; a specialty is the omission of quotation marks at the opening of a paragraph of dialogue, or even in the middle of a paragraph which mixes dialogue and narrative. All of this you expect in PODville; you don't expect it in a Viking hardback. You also don't expect the plot imbecility whereby (a) Our Man knows the villain makes dugouts near where he observes the next targets of his attacks; (b) the villain has made such a dugout and is observing a family; (c) Our Man and his team have discovered such a dugout on a hill overlooking that family's home; (d) they capture the dugout digger but it's the wrong man, because in the whole of England he chose the same hill in which to dig a dugout as the bad man did, and it just happens that the cops, given a million hills in England they could have found dugouts in, found one here. Even the Snotwrangler Press of Poughkeepsie might have balked at this sort of nonsense.

I hardly need to add that, when I checked the Amazon listing of the book to see if, curse the thought, there had been sequels, I found not just that this was so -- there's apparently now a successful John Madden series -- but also copious reader reviews saying what spiffy, impeccable storytelling this was. Well, I don't care: the book's a complete mess and should never have been published in its current form.


Spin (2005) by Robert Charles Wilson

Leaving aside all other considerations, Robert Charles Wilson is probably the best writer currently at work in the whole of science fiction; I can think of a few challengers, so let's say he's most certainly in the top five, and those five are a long way ahead of the rest of the pack. As with the books of another of those select few, Christopher Priest, I tend to ration my intake of Wilson books to one every year or three, lest I spoil my palate.

And then, whenever I do jump in, I wonder why on earth I've left it so long.

Spin is told so well you hardly realize it's being told at all. One night, round about now, the stars disappear and all that are left in Earth's day and night skies are simulacra of the sun and moon. In a sense, this doesn't seem such bad news until space probes reveal that time on Earth has been slowed to a tiny fraction of its rate in the rest of the universe: within about forty years, Earth-time, the sun will swell up and swallow our world. The human species thus has a fairly determinate deadline to get everything it wants to do done. Jason Lawton is at the forefront of humanity's efforts both to cope with the Spin and somehow counteract it; his childhood friend Tyler, who tells the story, is deeply involved with both Jason and Jason's wastrel sister Diane, whom Tyler has adored, largely unrewarded, through thick and thin.

One way for humanity to survive would seem to be to terraform Mars and establish a colony there, something that could be done in a few months or years Earth-time even though it might take thousands of years for the colonists and their descendants; thereafter the Martian humans would surely share the same rate of time flow as the rest of the universe, and could go off to colonize the galaxy and all that glamorous stuff. Just after the Martians send an emissary back to earth, though, the creators of the Spin erect another around Mars. This emissary bears the key whereby the mystery may finally be solved and the future of our species salvaged.

The parallel between the Spin's 40-year deadline for humanity and the not too dissimilar one we face in real life because of global warming is a pretty obvious one to draw, and I assume Wilson meant it to be drawn. What he underestimated, back in those ancient days of 2005, was the level of public denial there would be as an infantile means of refusing to confront a harsh truth: his US public and politicians respond in various imbecilic fashions to imminent extinction, but they don't pretend that claims of the universe's onetime existence are nothing but an elitist liberal conspiracy.

Another concern in the novel is that, when terrestrial and Martian strains of humanity encounter each other after 100,000 years (Mars-time) of separate cultural evolution, they're really not so very different; indeed, their social and interpersonal relationships are virtually identical. Consider the social and interpersonal changes that have occurred here on a single planet within just the past half-century and you'll realize the improbability of Wilson's scenario in this respect.

These are small objections. This is one of the most beautifully written novels I've read in a long while, and its ideas sing. Nuff said.