My Weekly Book

Eleanor Rigby - Douglas Coupland

I am very cross about this book. Because I felt it was total, unreconstructed nonsense from start to finish – and in some way knowing, as if Coupland is off on some crazy new tack, deliberately writing rubbish in order to subvert the novel form in some terribly clever and ironic way that I haven’t quite fathomed, silly uncool me. My understanding is that he is not satisfied with this but, after following up the sublime Hey Nostradamus! with this tawdry excuse for a book, one that I found banal, disingenuous and ridiculous from beginning to end, he has actually started to deconstruct not just the novel in general but his own work in jPod. And I’m not having any of it. I loved Microserfs and persist in the belief that it was the high-water mark of his literary achievement. Sorry, mate, but you’re not ruining that for me too.

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This, the 50th book in my 50-book challenge endeavour, is the occasion on which Coupland has finally pushed me too far. As I started to read it the realisation dawned that I really, really disliked it – but I had to force myself to continue because I knew if I put it down I would never pick it up again and it is simply too late in the year and in the challenge to get thrown off course by a bad book. So I had to grimly persevere. This perseverance has led me to conclude that now I really am calling a halt and am not buying or reading anything else he publishes. This saga has gone on too long now and my life is too short, my patience and my bookshelves too limited.

To summarise and to explain the bitter tone of this entry: like so many other people I fell in love with this author’s early work, with the unique quality of his writing and the depth of his perception. I was horrified, like so many others, by the publication of Girlfriend in a Coma but persevered through it, seeing that there were good reasons for its writing and publication, believing there would be something on the other side worth hanging in there for. I struggled through the painful (in more than one sense) long haul of Miss Wyoming and started to feel a bit better about things after All Families are Psychotic. Having stuck with the author while he desperately tried to get his creative shit together, I cheered the arrival of Hey Nostradamus!, claiming that everything was alright again, because Coupland was back on form. Silly me. He was never going to give us that easy a ride and this is sheer, bloody-minded authorial awkwardness written down, if you want to know what I think. From someone who is determined not to be what people want and expect of him, to the extent of trying to claim back and reconfigure his own published works.

The result is that I am now asking myself why have I wasted my time reading anything he has written since Polaroids from the Dead in 1996. This has been going on FOR TEN YEARS NOW. How stupid am I?

Alright, ranting all well and good, now for some specifics. It has long been a feature of the Coupland oeuvre to have somewhat elastic and incredible plots but Eleanor Rigby takes this to entirely new lengths. If I were to summarise what happens you would laugh in my face – and, even in context, it is no better. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I heard myself say out loud more than once and it has the feeling of deliberately testing the reader to me. I don’t know whether the central character’s observations on human existence are meant to be profound, and are just plain banal by accident, or whether banality is supposed to be the point and Coupland is satirising me, the reader, for coming to his door looking for profundity. I suspect the latter. But staggeringly, breathtaking banality is what I experienced, on virtually every page I read. Even the character seems to be recycled – I didn’t have much time for the hapless Wendy the first time round in Girlfriend in a Coma and I’ve not much time for her seeing her re-used here. That’s plot, character and writing style down the toilet – is there actually anything else left to discuss?

Coupland has well and truly shot his bolt with this one. Just in case you hadn’t picked that up… I refuse to allow this to alienate me from his earlier works. I don’t intend to have much more to do with his later ones.

- - - - - - - - - -

It’s important to note that this is NOT the conclusion to the 50 Book Challenge, since I still have half of Don Quixote to read before I can claim to have completed it. Oh, well. Here goes… *screws up eyes*

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Rule Britannia - Daphne du Maurier

“This is the 51st state of the USA,” sang Matt Johnson in 1986 and, in this book, it is. With themes perhaps similar to the author’s famous short story The Birds, the members of a most unusual Cornish household wake up one morning to find that the Yanks have invaded, in the guise of a “friendly takeover” designed to help a Britain reeling from an unexpected withdrawal from the European project. Facing bankruptcy and economic collapse, the ‘coalition government’ feels it has little choice but to accept the American ‘proposal’. And, chillingly, the troops roll in. Many citizens welcome the union between the two countries: the main objectors are in the Celtic fringes of Wales, Scotland – and Cornwall.

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This book, written in 1972, was Daphne du Maurier’s last full-length novel. And I get the feeling that it hasn’t always been all that well-received. Certainly in the new Virago edition of this work Ella Westland, an academic at the University of Exeter specialising in Cornish writing who provides the introduction, appears to almost be apologising for it and I have no idea why. Apparently fans of the author were “bemused” on publication and uncomfortable with the larger-than-life central characters and slightly burlesque tone. Perhaps those people were still labouring under the impression, four decades into her writing career, that du Maurier was an author of romance novels or melodrama. In fact, she is so much more. Those of us that know her as an astoundingly versatile writer who can operate in any genre from historical romance and Gothic horror to science fiction and psychological thrillers, adopting a male or female persona with equal ease, will be prepared for anything. It’s crucial to remember that her plots never look good when written out on the back of a book jacket – but usually work brilliantly between the pages. And one quality of her work that I particularly admire is the way she never shies away from the difficult ending, the thing that is just right for the story but rather refuses to let her characters or readers off the hook easily by going for a kinder but ultimately less satisfying option. Prime examples (and strongly recommended reads) would be The Scapegoat and Frenchman’s Creek.

Rule Britannia, as Westland’s introduction demonstrates with some success, is also interesting for the parallels it has with the author’s life. She was, of course, a lifelong devotee and advocate of Cornwall and the Cornish. This book features a retired grande dame of the stage and the du Mauriers were perhaps the ultimate theatrical family of their era. There’s a slight lack of sensibility regarding racial stereotyping – a Welsh and a black character both fall foul of this. But, that duly noted, it’s a book every bit as much worth reading as her earlier work. I found it a compelling page-turner and a very welcome addition to my collection. It comes strongly recommended – but then I’ve yet to read a novel by this author that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed.

Some links:

• The Daphne du Maurier society
• Somewhat brief Wikipedia entry
• Bibliography
• Virago Press

Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

This is Terry Pratchett’s 28th Discworld novel - and the 28th that I have read. So I was very pleased to realise, about a third of the way through, that after all this time together he’s still able to surprise me. This is quite unlike most of the Discworld canon. It’s got a cold and very focused anger running through it, in the manner of Small Gods and possibly also Jingo. In those books the sources for that anger were war and religion. Come to think of it, they’re exactly the same here.

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It uses a technique first aired very successfully in The Truth - using one of the major, defining series characters as a bit-part player. Then, as now, it’s Sam Vimes (I’ll stick to plain old Sam - I’m sure he hates all his titles to be taken in vain.) Presumably this allows Pratchett to continue working in the series structure (that most of the novels are based around one of the following: Unseen University wizards, Lancre witches, the City Watch or Death and his extended family) while introducing new and fresh characters. William de Worde, from The Truth, and Polly Perks, from this book, both being excellent examples. One of the book’s major delights is the incredible ear for speech and idiom that Pratchett possesses and his ability to both render it in writing and add to it himself. We expect Discworld books to be laugh-out-loud funny and this does not disappoint but when the jokes are made in such clearly-defined and distinctive voices as these, it’s also worth pausing to appreciate the skill that makes them function.

If I have any criticisms it’s that the central conceit of the plot feels mightily overused by the time we’ve marched a few miles down the road with this straggly band of new recruits. Also, the social background that sees women abused and discriminated against, and which clearly makes Pratchett very annoyed, is a bit sketchy and not very original. It seems to be made up of a few brief motifs and never really fleshed out properly. But these are minor matters. Pratchett, after what I thought was maybe a bit of a hiatus round about the end of the 1990s, has got himself so far back on form it’s untrue. And, best of all, he’s not resting on his, er, laurels but continuing to develop in skill and significance as a writer. So let’s hope he doesn’t get bored with Discworld any time soon. He’s been sneaking large helpings of political and social commentary under the wire for a couple of decades now and this is clearly becoming a more important aspect of his writing. Probably a reflection of the times we live in - but a welcome development too, I think.

Some links:

• L-space Web
• Terry Pratchet on Wikipedia
• Terry Pratchett on Wikiquote
• The Terry Pratchett Read Order

The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff

Phew. Straight from Marcus Didius Falco’s pre-Olympic adventures, set in AD78 or so, to the tale of a lost legion commander’s son, stationed in gloomy British Isca Dumnoniorum (that’s Exeter to you, mate) round about AD130. And, like the Falco series, this is seriously good writing packaged as something else. That is, if you happen to be narrow-minded enough to think that reading things like genre fiction and children’s fiction are somehow beneath you. There’s another connection apart from the fact that both heroes are called Marcus – Falco’s unlucky regiment, the Second Augusta, appears to have once been stationed at the very fort that the 18-year-old Marcus Flavius Aquila is busy defending at the start of this story. It’s a small world, that of Romano-British fiction, innit? Anyway, I digress. On to the book.

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It’s a remarkable book, actually; another one that leaves you struggling to understand how it got classified as exclusively children’s literature in the first place. Most distinctive is the visual, descriptive style of the writing with a powerful emphasis on colour. Rosemary Sutcliff was an artist, a painter of miniatures, as well as a novelist and this quality in her writing is usually ascribed to her being an artist. As well as the visual nature of her writing there is a powerful sense of place and a very well-crafted, absorbing story with an incredible depth of character and a marvellous exploration of the relationship between the protagonists – an injured soldier who will never march with the legions again and a captive British slave who’s got himself sent to the arena. The plot is very nicely judged – a long, slow build-up through the first half and then a race to the finish that’s fraught with suspense. Sutcliffe has the ability to bring history to life in a way that not many authors can boast. This is excellent stuff and it’s helped along nicely by the fact that much of the story takes place in Calleva Atrebatum, the Roman city of not-quite-Reading (well, Silchester, if you want to be strictly accurate). I’ve attended several digs, sat through many lectures and peered at mosaics and other artefacts in Reading Museum in the service of learning more about this fascinating settlement and have walked round the walls many times – so it was pleasingly easy to visualise these sections of the book.

But I have a confession. I chose not to read the last chapter, so ten pages of this book remain uncompleted. The reason? I’m very glad I picked it up – but I felt I could see the way the story was going to be tied up – it was fairly well-telegraphed – and I hated it. I found it so contrived and unconvincing in comparison with the rest of the tale that I preferred not to spoil my enjoyment by reading it. I chose to let the story lie where I felt it finished, with the fate of the lost Eagle resolved. Since I am free to apply my own rules to the 50 Book Challenge I intend to think about the 206 pages I did read, and not the 10 I didn’t, and count it towards the total. This comes strongly recommended whether or not you feel you’d choose to do the same as me. Whether this means I don’t read the rest of the series is something I shall now have to think about.

Some links:

• Rosemary Sutcliff’s Wikipedia entry
• Eagle of the Ninth Wikipedia entry
• About Roman Exeter
• Sutcliff fanblog with onward links

See Delphi and Die - Lindsey Davis

I appear to have approached this, the 17th Falco novel, in utterly the wrong frame of mind. Drawing very close to the end of the 50 Book Challenge, and faced with the possibility of completing it some three months early, I am impatient with anything I can’t knock off in 24 hours. Unfortunately this rather nice little murder mystery deserves a little more attention.

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It tells the story of a trip taken by Falco and Helena (minus their offspring, mercifully) to Greece. They go, partly at Imperial expense, in order to investigate the deaths (several years apart) of two young women travelling with the same dodgy tour company. This was the source of some of my reservations. I found the idea of the Roman package holiday, complete with annoying companions, pontificating guides, gimcrack souvenirs, half-built hotels, dodgy dinners and people speaking very slowly and distinctly in Latin just a little bit too knowing for comfort. And you could also argue that the story takes a bit too long to get going while all the protagonists manoeuvre themselves into position.

This book’s saving grace is that alongside the package holiday jokes and the vast comet-tail of an extended family that trails Falco to the Peloponnese is an absolutely cracking mystery. It reminded me strongly of Three Hands In The Fountain, another one in this series that I liked a lot – hopefully that doesn’t give too much away. It is, after a fashion, a locked-room mystery in that there is a tight, self-contained group of suspects from among which Falco must find the murderer. The writing is assured, economical, humorous and brimming with character. There is plenty of suspense plus a powerful hook for the next in the series (not sure what I think about this yet) and a horrible-funny ending which seems to make everyone exclaim with shock despite being (I thought) quite well-telegraphed. It got the balance of predictability and shock right on the nail for me. By this I mean that I came within a discus-throw of identifying the murderer, and thus feel complacent, clever and well-disposed towards Falco and Ms Davis, while still having been surprised by the actual twist.

All in all, another very creditable and enjoyable outing for Falco and one that leaves me keen to read Saturnalia, his next adventure. Also, I have a signed copy of The Course of Honour sitting on the shelf now…

Lindsey Davis official website:
http://www.lindseydavis.co.uk

Medusa - Michael Dibdin

It turns out that before this I hadn’t read an Aurelio Zen novel since April, which came as a shock to me. Earlier this year I was galloping through them, delighted to have discovered such a good series. Then there was a little blip – covering the ending of Cosi fan Tutti and the entirety of A Long Finish where I really wasn’t enjoying reading them as much as I expected. Things improved with Blood Rain and And Then You Die - but I did have the distinct sense of a series that had lost its way, wandered out of the scope of the author’s original conception or even ceased to be entirely a roman policier altogether and moved on to wider issues. Or it could just be that I know there are not many more in front of me – now Back to Bologna only, and it could be that I have been slowing my pace of reading simply in order not to come to the end.

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The most striking thing about this particular Zen novel was a welcome change of mood and pace – at the outset the emphasis is off Zen’s personal life, which appears to have finally settled down a bit, and onto the case he is investigating. The case itself is a cunning and imaginative one with a twist that I didn’t see coming. For once, Zen is at the top of his game - what he intends to happen, happens, with just a little grease applied by him to the wheels of events. After novel after novel where he was stitched up, outmanoeuvered, humiliated or even the victim of another attempted assassination, this comes as welcome relief.

Perhaps the fact is that Dibdin and Zen are finally coming to terms with each other and are now able to happily co-exist rather than fighting each other. All the good things about the Dibdin oeuvre are here - sensuous language and description, an eye for the gothic, humour and a wonderful feeling of having penetrated a very dense and foreign culture. It would be nice to think that author and hero have made their peace - and I’ve heard very good things about Back to Bologna, so maybe it has the additional advantage of being true.

Some links:

• Contemporary Writers: Michael Dibdin
  
• Guardian review of Medusa

The Chrysalids - John Wyndham

This is the second John Wyndham I’ve read this month – after a gap of some 20 years – and it has completely vindicated my decision to pick up his work again. And this particular book is startlingly relevant, dealing as it does with a post-Apocalyptic society desperate to preserve its norms and values and classing anything that doesn’t measure up to the ideal (the Image of God) as a Deviant, an Offence or (in the case of humans) a Blasphemy. It is what we now know as a dark future novel where environmental catastrophe is a reality and ‘deviants’ are sterilised to stop them polluting the gene pool before being left to take their chances in the Fringes, land that is still powerfully affected by radioactive fallout, where nothing breeds true. Religious mania abounds and women are forced to wear a cross sewn to the front of their dresses to spare them from the shame of breeding a ‘mutant’. It was impossible to read this and not see powerful parallels with sections of contemporary American society.

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This is a rare combination of things – a deeply intelligent and intellectually-satisfying read combined with a believable world and an exciting story. I can’t express myself better than by quoting the introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition that I read:

In 1953 a new social class was emerging in Great Britain. Increased funding for higher education had encouraged a stream of working- and lower-middle-class adolescents into the redbrick universities. In a country where education was still considered a privilege, they went to another town for three years, and were maintained there by public funds, and compelled into an exchange of ideas; and when they came back they were irrevocably changed. They had more in common with each other than with their parents. Their career expectations were raised. Their social expectations were raised. They had politics, they had sex: they were in possession of new languages. They ate different kinds of food. They knew more. Their parents were horrified: the umbilical cord had been cut again, this time by what seemed like sorcery. Would parental values now mean nothing in the face of book learning? Not if they had anything to do with it. Cultural confrontation was inevitable. The Generation Gap – which would widen within ten years into outright rebellion – was opening up. If the educated young were beginning to feel like strangers in their own homes, their elders were beginning to see them as dangerous, out of control: deviant.

Perhaps the fact that this is so uncannily like my own experience of being the first member of a large, and largely working-class, family to get to university more than 30 years after the book was written is part of the reason why it speaks to me so strongly. And we are undoubtedly now, more than 50 years after The Chrysalids was published, in an age where cultural confrontation is a defining characteristic. On the other hand, it might just be that it is a very good book. It’s well-written and full of acerbic wit; scary, affecting and unsettling by turns. If I have one criticism of the writing it is that the telepathic characters do speak rather too much like a group of undergraduates sitting round in a common room at Cambridge in the 1950s. But, in a book that manages to be very largely timeless, this is a tiny niggle. I would strongly recommend reading this – and at less than 200 pages you’ll get plenty of reward for the effort you are asked to expend.

Some links:

• SciFi.com review
• The book’s Wikipedia entry
• Amazon reader reviews

The Lighthouse - PD James

Standing in Borders at the weekend, I found I had to interrupt my plans to continue reading about the adventures of Aurelio Zen. This was caused by the sudden, if not entirely unexpected, reappearance of Commander Adam Dalgleish (who almost certainly outranks him, anyway). What I am trying to say is that I found PD James’ latest, The Lighthouse, out in paperback and lying right there on a table in front of me as part of an enticing stack on a three-for-two offer. Rejecting a book by Louis Theroux and a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go I managed to part with a mere £6.99 for just the single volume. A good thing that the new PJ Tracy isn’t out in paperback yet. I must admit that I probably succeeded because that Ishiguro book feels like something that I should be reading rather than something that I want to read. Not so the Theroux, however. That was pretty hard to leave behind.

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Anyway. On to the substantive point. PD James’ speciality is the locked-room mystery – where you have a closed community and a tightly-controlled ring of suspects. This means no messy distractions to upset the good Commander’s intellectual puzzle for him and enough complications to ensure that there’s at least a second murder for him to agonise about. Over the years we’ve had a nurses’ hostel, a seminary, legal chambers, a nuclear power station, a psychiatric clinic, a nursing home for the disabled, a police laboratory, a museum and (featuring Cordelia Gray) a Victorian Gothic island castle. This must inevitably mean that the author, some fifteen detective novels to the good, is casting around to some extent for new settings. Does the fact that this seemed to me to be a synthesis of several of the previous ones make me a bad person? This story is set on a private island retreat off Cornwall and I was powerfully reminded of both The Black Tower and The Skull Beneath The Skin. I am a huge fan of PD James and have every one of those 15 novels occupying rolling acres of space on my bookshelves, as well as Innocent Blood and The Maul and the Pear Tree. But I am acutely aware that she is nearly 86 years old and I have the unwelcome literary fate of Patrick O’Brian post-The Yellow Admiral in front of my eyes. James’ last three novels, A Certain Justice, Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room, have all been at least as good as anything else she has written and a convincing attempt at engaging with the modern world. Certainly the reviews of The Lighthouse I have looked at do not appear to support my opinion. Baroness James is accorded the deference and respect commensurate with her status as a major Establishment figure and the ‘queen of crime’ (even by The Guardian). But – well, I wonder. Especially as a major character in this novel is a writer bemoaning the decline of his powers.

By now you’ll have gathered that I found this disappointing and felt it had nothing new to say to me. I sensed a retreat to former themes, plots and characters rather than a novel that moves the James canon on, in the manner of the three books I mentioned above. That said, I did find it a comfortable, enjoyable, page-turning read, and set firmly once more in that unique early-60s-displaced-to-the-present world of all the author’s novels. In this world people have first names like Francis, Dennis and Rupert, almost everyone speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences and - this was a telling detail for me – grinds coffee beans every time they want a cup of the beverage. Never mind instant, even ground coffee is overly proletarian for this lot. The novel has a slow start characteristic of James – I think she likes to get the pieces arranged on the board before the starting gun is fired – and we are treated initially to an almost soap-opera-like summary of the lives and loves of the various police officers in Dalgleish’s special investigations squad before moving on to a similar exercise with the suspects. Someone must have put something in the coppers’ freshly-ground coffee. And, as I have said before, I find Dalgleish-in-love extremely tedious and regard this entire aspect of the plot as an unwelcome deviation from the matter in hand. I also found it deeply amusing to see them rather pretentiously referred to as Dalgleish and Emma, as if they were Darcy and Elizabeth, which they are certainly not. I’m afraid I saw the villain coming a mile off – and I realised early on the significance of the piece of evidence that would condemn them. There was a topical twist that I thought was masterful and that made me catch my breath and I thought the plot in general was wrought with great skill.

I just came away with the very strong feeling (certain topical details excepted) that I was reading a book that was at least a decade old.

PD James links:

• Contemporary Writers page on James
• Guardian review
• Times review
• Boston Globe review
• Read an excerpt

The Antipope - Robert Rankin

If I asked you to tell me what book this quote was from, I bet you’d get it wrong:

“Enough!” The red-eyed man pushed back his chair and drew himself to his full height, his eyes blazing and his shoulders spreading to draw out his massive chest. His hands formed two enormous fists which he brought down onto the table with titanic force, scattering the food and shuddering the candelabra. “Crowley,” he roared, his voice issuing from his mouth as a gale force of icy wind, “Crowley, you would know who I am. I am the man to whom fate has led you. From your very birth it was ordained that our paths would finally cross, all things are pre-ordained, no man can excape his fate. You would know who I am? Crowley, I’m your nemesis!”

No, this isn’t our old friend Anthony J, though I’m absolutely sure the choice of surname was arrived at by exactly the same means. It is, in fact, a low-grade villain in a velvet suit by the name of Brian. But you’d have to be in the know to realise you weren’t witnessing his comeuppance when the Legions of Hell finally got their claws on him following the Incident in Lower Tadfield. Or maybe I’ve just read too many of this sort of book in rather close proximity.

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This is, in fact, Robert Rankin’s The Antipope, the first in the famed Brentford Trilogy and the second work of his that I have read. It is remarkable for its ability to weave all kinds of terrible apocalyptic damnations into a story which is, essentially, about a lot of unemployed layabouts drinking together in the local pub. And the pub is naturally situated in Brentford:

From Neville’s eyrie high in the upper eaves of the Swan he was afforded an excellent view of the surrounding district. With the aid of his spyglass he could see out between the flatblocks as far as the roundabout and the river. He could make out the gasometer and the piano museum and on further into the early haze where the cars were already moving dreamily across the flyover.

Thing is, several of these landmarks have been known to me since early childhood. I have relatives who, to this day, live in the flatblocks (or, at least, some that are adjacent). The piano museum – originally, I believe, an organ museum in a redundant church close to Kew Bridge but that’s a hard joke to put across in passing - and the gasometer were features of every visit to my grandmother’s. The flyover is, of course, how the M4 enters London. It’s an odd thing seeing part of your longstanding mental map of the world turn up in a book like this – especially one not written by you. The wiper factory mentioned in earlier chapters was real; it was called Tryco I believe, and used to be at Gillette Corner. It had a thrilling sign with an operative wiper on it which, as a child, I used to loudly anticipate seeing all the way down the Great West Road. Great disappointment would ensue if it was turned off. I think my father actually used to work at this factory in his youth. Earlier we tried to compile a list of Brentford pubs we have patronised (almost always on the very odd occasion with older male family members) – we came up with the Brewery Tap (off London Road, very much a river pub), the Princess Royal (near the football ground) the Pottery Arms (right in the middle of an estate and my relatives’ local) and the Penny Flyer (on Ealing Road, now apparently ‘gentrified’ into the Ealing Park Tavern - my dear, dead uncle who was a regular there must be turning in his grave). I once narrowly failed to meet a greatly-liked cousin-once-removed of mine (a nephew of said dear departed uncle) in The Beehive and I was quite a regular drinker in that former Irish pub close to Kew Bridge and the Steam Museum – I used to work nearby. Now I think it might even be a restaurant and not a pub at all. The Bricklayers has been a refuge for generations of my family but I do not recall having been in. A shame, because this is the one that is actually supposed to be the original for Rankin’s ‘Flying Swan’.

Anyway, enough of these tedious personal reminiscences. I enjoyed this more than The Greatest Show Off Earth because I found the plot more engaging and credible and I liked all the local colour. I will be reading on, although I still find his portrayal of women thoroughly objectionable, because the combination of my manor and my preoccupations has me hooked (this time we have a villainous homosexual just to frighten the horses a little bit more). However is possible that one day he’ll go that little bit too far and make me fling the book over my shoulder in disgust, never to resume.

Enough of this. Dibdin up next. And with that, on to the next book. Don’t you realise we’re nearly at the end?

Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

I had a sudden urge to read this. I used to read a lot of John Wyndham as a teenager – the school library was stuffed with his books and I was rather self-consciously aware that I ought to like science fiction. I wanted to find out how well the books had stood up to the test of time and how much they really were what we would now call ‘young adult’ books. Accordingly, I got out my trusty library card and made a couple of reservations – my local authority has actually made it into the 21st century vis a vis the Interwebs and an online reservations system. I chose to read one book I remember enjoying from childhood, The Chrysalids, and one I had never read before, Trouble with Lichen.

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And it was a fairly remarkable read, albeit one that has very little to do with young adult fiction. It is ’science fiction’ in a very tightly-defined, rather domestic sense. Two people arrive independently at a scientific discovery that will change the world – with social implications that are so great its inventors can hardly comprehend them even after years of trying to think them through. The book examines what happens when word of this discovery, inevitably, gets out. It’s very much of its time – in the same way as something like the Famous Five or Arthur Ransome books – which is something that doesn’t exactly increase its accessibility. But it’s also ahead of its time in that the author puts forward some strong pro-feminist ideas about the role of women in society.

It takes some stylistic risks – passages made up of sections of newspaper articles, snatches of conversation or discussions between characters who are never introduced or seen again made up some sections. It’s quite an expositional book – leading characters have passages in which they make speeches setting out arguments – but since this is a book about ideas this is not the problem that it might have been. All in all I found it interesting, challenging and quick to read – which may have been why Wyndham was tagged as a ‘teen’ author when I was a teenager. I’m glad I read it and will keep on reading.

Some links:

• John Wyndham’s Wikipedia entry
• The Guardian: John Wyndham
• Online short story: Consider Her Ways

A Trouble of Fools - Linda Barnes

One of the big headlines from my 50 Book Challenge year so far is my wholesale adoption of a genre that we might call “hardboiled female American PI”. OK, what I really mean to say is that I’ve read a few books by Sue Grafton, and now this enjoyable offering from Linda Barnes, and that I really, really mean to come to terms with Sara Paretsky’s Vic Warshawski in the next couple of months.

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I’ve enjoyed the Sue Graftons a lot and that’s what led to a recommendation from Mr Random to read this. It’s superficially lighthearted, humorous and easy to read with a heroine who has a full life outsider her PI-ing and a superb, irreverent, I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude (in contrast to her somewhat more serious, driven and uptight contemporaries). Having said that, the story also has plenty of meat and atmosphere and most of the elements for the denouement are in place right from the start. There are some great, off-the-wall characters, lots of local Boston colour and a plot twist I didn’t see coming. The heroine is forced to face up to the consequences of her actions in a painful scene following the book’s climax. The plot event that allows the story to resolve itself made me wince a little – a touch of the deus ex machina who drops from heaven (or rises from hell, possibly) to resolve everything neatly, but it wasn’t enough to spoil a very engaging and entertaining book.

Having said that I liked this book, and feeling that I will definitely want to read The Snake Tattoo, the next in this series, I was struck by some powerful similarities between this and the Grafton oeuvre. I’m not accusing either author of borrowing from the other, that’s just boring and a waste of time. But I am very interested in the common elements that may define this genre. Both Kinsey Millhone and Carlotta Carlyle are ex-cops who couldn’t quite buckle down to the discipline for one reason or another and so ended up going solo. Both of these women are fiercely independent, to the degree where each will make her own life uncomfortable rather than surrender an iota of that independence. Both are prone to carrying guns, both practically live in a small, battered, foreign car full of all kinds of useful things that could really help a girl out of a tight spot. Each of them is a dab hand with a lock-pick, each still has a few useful police contacts and indeed each knows a nice, steady, well-built but slightly boring police officer that apparently wants more than just friendship. (Admittedly Kinsey’s is married and she has, so far, been sensible enough to stay away from him. But I’m only on the third book, OK, so don’t take this as gospel.) Both women have a taste for dangerous men who are rather too heavily implicated in their cases for comfort. Both can turn a hand to ‘regular’ work to help them out when times are lean in the detecting game - Kinsey does insurance investigations while Carlotta drives a cab. Each woman is a little too prone to become emotionally invested in her cases.

One scene in particular really stood out. In C is for Corpse Kinsey is attending a posh function in a floaty tunic top and a pair of trousers that have seen better days. On arrival she feels severely under-dressed. She ditches the trousers, converts the floaty top into a dress with the help of some accessories she finds on the back seat of her car – and a pair of abandoned heels which she finds underneath a seat. In this book, Carlotta uses *exactly the same* props and method to convert herself into a hooker and carry out a sort-of undercover surveillance. Well, as undercover as you can get when you’re six-foot one before the heels, with hair described as “beggaring adjectives like flaming” and dressed as a hooker with your bra left behind in the glove compartment. See what I meant about don’t-give-a-fuck? I can’t see Kinsey doing this. But the scene had me shaking my head in disbelief because it was so familiar the second time round. Best to re-state that I’m not accusing either author of borrowing from the other one. But it was a very odd experience. And perhaps it does demonstrate the perils of reading too extensively in the same genre over too short a period of time…

Some links:

• Brief Wikipedia entry with good bibliography
• Thrilling Detective: Carlotta Carlyle
• Track this book on Bookcrossing.com

Tomorrow Stories Book 2 – Alan Moore et al

I’d read book one of Alan Moore’s collected Tomorrow Stories after finding it on the shelf at my local library. Notwithstanding the fact it hadn’t received a very good critical reaction I enjoyed it a lot. I thought it had plenty to say about narrative and the comic form and I found it a really interesting read. So I ordered book two confident that I would enjoy it. I’m sad to report that I did find book two pretty disappointing after the first volume. I was prepared for more of the same – still experimental, still doing unexpected things with the format. While this does go on there also appeared to me to be a big drop in quality right from the outset. While there are some flashes of brilliance there’s an awful lot that doesn’t work too.

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Jack B Quick is missing from nearly the whole volume – I believe there was an issue with the artist and turning the story around – but when he does appear towards the end the stories are as good as in the first volume. Similarly Splash Brannigan, a story that didn’t have time to go anywhere in book one, and which hadn’t really made a very good impression on me anyway, comes out quite creditably. There’s one episode where it pastiches different art styles from Picasso and Dali to Impressionism to American Gothic – I liked that a lot.

My favourite stories from Book One, Cobweb and Greyshirt, fall through the floor. The problem with Cobweb appears to be that Melinda Gebbie stops drawing her. Dame Darcy’s art I disliked. Joyce Chin’s was gorgeous to look at – but the stories simply didn’t seem to have anywhere to go and degenerated into being worse than a parody of their original selves. A couple of good, noirish Greyshirt stories – but similarly, the feeling of a real dearth of ideas behind it. (Although there is one that references cabaret in the way you see Moore doing in V for Vendetta.) And then there were the complete misses, like ‘Vermin’ where the lettering style was so difficult to read that eventually I stopped bothering. First American, like Splash Brannigan, holds a steady course without either doing anything either spectacular or missing its mark completely.

Had I read this first then I wouldn’t have bothered with volume one. And that would have been a shame because I still think it’s worthwhile reading with plenty to say. But perhaps… stopping there would have been the best idea.

Here’s the link to my original post: 50 Book Challenge: book 24

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (re-read)

Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home.

I have no excuse for quoting this. I am merely doing it because I find it extremely amusing. In fact, let’s go really wild. Here’s another one:

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions. That he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong. Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent.

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I decided I would re-read this book, having read it once in a bid to come to terms with the entirety of the vast Pratchett opus, and not really having taken it in properly. I’m now just starting to really read things by Neil Gaiman so that was another good excuse. And it was brilliant. Fun, entertaining, hard to put down and full of lovely little linguistic flourishes and games of the kind you would expect from both these authors. True to my memory, it did seem to have rather more happening in it than is reasonable in one 400-page paperback volume, so the re-read was definitely worthwhile. Lots of familiar Pratchett motifs - a Death who wears a cowled robe and talks in capital letters (and never laid a finger on Elvis Presley, honest); a witchfinder’s pin with a nice big knob on the end; Leonard of Quirm, no, sorry, Leonardo da Vinci; Azrael; and an importunate hot-dog seller to name a few obvious ones. I’m sure that if I was equally familiar with Gaiman’s work I would find as many of his usual motifs - just from reading his blog and one or two comics I can see lots and lots of his writing style on the page.

Many of the criticisms of this book seem to be aimed at the fact that, as a collaboration, it is not absolutely the best thing either author has produced. OK, point taken, but this seems to me to be a logical absurdity. Is it therefore the case that they should *not* have collaborated? That some magnum opus that would have delighted the world and won every literary prize going was *not* written because of the existence of Good Omens? I doubt it. Some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are, er, a long way from being the best work he has ever produced as well. I would say this is far better than, for example, Eric (to pick a thematically appropriate example). I found it thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining and was glad to have read it. It has hosts (sorry) of delightful characters and quite a serious point, actually, underneath all the irony, laughter and wordplay.

Put simply, it’s about humanity triumphing over prescribed notions of both good and evil. Quite an atheistic point in a book so heavy with religious symbolism and in which both the Metatron (think presidential spokesman) and Beelzebub make an appearance, as well as the angel and demon occupying substantial places in the ensemble cast. We see a good number of characters resolutely refusing to occupy their prescribed roles - Adam, Anathema, Crowley and Aziraphale and, eventually, Shadwell, being among them. And the last lines of the story proper give the best explanation of its theme:

“And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”

A fantastic motto for life. But not one that sheds any light on why I seem to spend so much time reading books about the coming Apocalypse…

Some links:

• Metafic: Crowley and Aziraphale’s 2006 New Year’s resolutions
• Good Omens Wikipedia entry
• The re-release
• Good Omens quotes from LSpace, including those reproduced at the top

Not Abba: the real story of the 1970s - Dave Haslam

I wasn’t quite born at the dawn of the 70s but I came along pretty quickly afterwards. And Dave Haslam’s book has convinced me that it’s not so much the decade of your childhood that shapes you as the decade of your teenage years. That makes me squarely one of Thatcher’s Children, going on a Gen Xer, and I’m not so sure I feel altogether comfortable with at least the first part of that. Of course I remember the strikes, the power cuts, the IRA bombs, the shortages in supermarkets, the National Front marches and naturally the long, hot summer of 1976 when we were sent home from school so as to not die of heat exhaustion. The Silver Jubilee, the birth of skateboarding, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, the Rhodesian elections, Mary Whitehouse and the Iranian revolution all managed to impinge on my pre-teen consciousness. However the underlying trends in racial and equality politics, the social divisions, the musical trends like Northern soul, the first stirrings of punk and, thankfully, the worst of the fashion trends went straight over my head. (Although there are some childhood photos I definitely won’t be making public any time soon.) Similarly I remember virtually nothing first-hand about the Vietnam War, the Rock Against Racism movement (though I was certainly keen enough on bands like The Clash once I’d got a bit older), Steve Biko’s death, Watergate or the Baader-Meinhof gang.

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All this means that Haslam’s book, which is an interesting mix of national and international politics, music, counter-culture and first-person social history, with the occasional nod towards other art forms, feels like it’s filling in a number of important gaps in my mental landscape. Things that I can just about remember going past but didn’t understand at the time – and certainly haven’t be able to fill in from the 70s nostalgia shows that Haslam is railing against in this book’s title. I’ve already managed to turn this into a list of my personal recollections and this is exactly the crime that Haslam is accused of in many of the reviews – too anecdotal, too personal, trying to deal with too much by cramming a decade of music, culture and politics into a little over 300 pages.

I can think of a couple of responses to this. Firstly we are barely 30 years out of the 70s – and, if blogs are history’s rough draft then I think that a book like this might fairly be called its publishers’ proofs. What it lacks in balance and distance it more than makes up for in immediacy, enthusiasm for its subject-matter and first-person recollections, not only by the author but by the various people he interviews. Certainly it could prove an excellent source of primary-source material for later historians. The other point I think the reviewers miss is that this is an intensely political book with a strong left-liberal slant. I remember being taught in my first term at university that history is never told from a neutral perspective. And this book certainly isn’t. It’s a rallying cry for music and counter-culture as forces that can really change society for the better. In an age when it appears that the sole ambition of many young people is to be a Big Brother contestant or a ‘celebrity’ famous for not very much.

Where’s the rebellion now? The counter-culture, the political engagement these days, I ask you? I look around and I can’t see much of it. Feminism’s a dirty word; sexuality, music and youth culture are commodities; being gay is a marketing demographic and racial politics are perhaps in the worst state that they’ve been in since the decade this book deals with.

Maybe this is the most important point that it has to make.

Some links:

• Author’s website
• Things that dropped out of the final edit of ‘Not Abba’
• Dave Haslam on Myspace
• BBC Collective review
• The Times review
• BBC Manchester Q&A with author
• Guardian review by Gary Lachman (ex-Blondie)
• New Statesman review

C is for Corpse - Sue Grafton

The third volume in this author’s series of Kinsey Millhone mysteries and I am glad to say that I noticed a distinct deviation from the formula established in the first two before it had time to get tired. Since the salient stuff is set out in the first few sentences of the book I have no compunction whatsoever about quoting them here:

“I met Bobby Callahan on Monday of that week. By Thursday, he was dead. He was convinced someone was trying to kill him and it turned out to be true, but none of us figured it out in time to save him. I’ve never worked for a dead man before and I hope I won’t have to do it again. This report is for him, for whatever it’s worth.”

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So, a nice little premise to be going on with. Of course, we spend half the novel waiting for Bobby Callahan to die and I was caught by surprise when it actually happened, which I count as an authorial achievement. Other things thrown into the mix are a moneyed social milieu that leaves Kinsey distinctly uncomfortable, the unexpected and unwelcome rearing up of an old romance and a new woman in the life of Henry Pitts, the 81-year-old landlord that our heroine carries a flaming torch for, despite the 50-year age difference between them. Heady stuff, all juggled expertly by the author, as I had come to expect after just two previous instalments of this series.

Unusually for Sue Grafton I did successfully spot her murderer this time round. Usually she lays so many false trails and red herrings that she gets past me. But I don’t mind, because there is a nice, warm, compensatory glow in being right. It was just the way that one particular name kept coming up again and again… Look away now if you don’t want details of the ending… I was impressed by the way that Kinsey managed to get herself out of the lethal situation set up for the last few pages without any need for a deus ex machina-style intervention. I was sitting on the Tube thinking: “I just can’t see who is going to come riding to the rescue,” and then no-one did, which I liked. This had a flavour of the locked-room mystery about it – a group of people from a tight social set and you just knew it had to be one of them. All in all a fun, easy, satisfying read that had me almost looking forward to the daily commute. These books always have laughter and intelligence mixed in with the action and it’s a winning formula for me. Off to the library to reserve D is for Deadbeat…

The Greatest Show Off Earth - Robert Rankin

Go and read it yourself. That is simply the only intelligent thing I can hope to say about this book. It is all-but-indescribable and, if I did try to describe it, it would sound so ridiculous that you’d write it off without another look. And that would be an awful shame because it is, actually, rather enjoyable if you like a certain sort of fiction, as I do. Its scope ranges from the aggressively local (think ornery devil-worshippers in a country village) to the galactic (think a conspiracy theory as to why we’ve never made contact with any other life-forms in our solar system).

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The only things I have ever come across that are remotely like it are Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. I am far from being the first person to say this: it has been pointed out that Rankin’s attempts to create a new genre called ‘far-fetched fiction’ and therefore win a shelf to himself at the bookshop have been frustrated by people lumping him in with the other two in a most uncalled-for way. Not that they are similar in any specific sense, no, not at all. And comparisons between Adams and Pratchett, and Pratchett and Rankin have been known to get on people’s nerves, not least those of the authors involved. But the three do have this in common: that a good deal of their action takes place off the planet or on a fantasy world and that at the same time they manage to be peculiarly and extraordinarily English in their characters and settings. Oh, and all three have a wonderful facility with language, too.

Readers of this book will find themselves subjected to all sorts of authorial devices to remind them of the absurdity of what they are reading. Characters discuss the running gags from time to time and occasionally take an executive decision to drop them if they are not working. The author makes the odd bracketed comment himself – you can feel him hovering over your shoulder most of the time. A man with a clipboard points out he’s got a bit of exposition pencilled in for this scene. It’s almost Brechtian in its attempt to shunt the reader out of the narrative and remind them that this is just a rather far-fetched story, dammit. Another annoying comparison with Pratchett would be the cinematic nature of some of the big set-pieces. It’s a very visual book and you can sense the camera panning across the bows of the Victorian steam-punk space liner or jump-cutting its way through the circus parade. The difference here, however, is that it feels as if the author fully intends to make the reference rather than being influenced by popular cultural mores etcetera. It’s another level of irony, knowingness and distance.

It was inevitable that I was going to have to come to terms with this author eventually, as someone with a horribly intense family connection with those districts of west London where he bases much of his work. Apparently he was once writer-in-residence at a venue where I used to work – although this was some considerable time before I was there. They couldn’t afford such luxuries by then. He has a preoccupation with a lot of my favourite subjects – alien visitations and abductions, the End Times, the apocalypse, things of that sort. This encounter was absolutely inevitable, which may be one of the reasons that I put it off for so long.

Well, here I am, reading and enjoying, this first one, at least. I have one criticism, which may prove to apply only to this book or may be turn out to true of Rankin’s work as a whole. This is by, for and about men. There a couple of minor female characters - hopelessly objectified and/or one-dimensional. And that’s your lot. Now, this is not a criticism I have ever felt it necessary to apply to either Adams or Pratchett. In Hitch-Hiker’s there are women; one of them is both an astrophysicist and a major protagonist, for God’s sake, what more could you ask for? Pratchett writes in entire matriarchal societies; seldom has an author been safer from the claim that he can’t do women. But this, for me, is uncomfortably male in its tone and outlook – the psychic equivalent of smelling like the urinals in a rugby club’s locker room. Not unlike Tom Sharpe, now I come to think of it. That’s not enough to stop me reading either this or others (or indeed Tom Sharpe), but perhaps enough to stop Rankin being elevated to my personal list of absolutely essential authors, Brentford connections and millennialists notwithstanding.

Some links:

• Wikipedia entry
• The official Rankin fan club
• H2G2 article (contains the quote about the bookshelf, I think)
• The Bookseller: Life Among the Alien Chickens
• Explaining that reference to Brecht

At Risk - Stella Rimington

This is a thriller with an impeccable pedigree. The author is a former chief of MI5, the first person ever to publicly hold the post, and she also served as Director of each of its three major branches – counter-subversion, counter-terrorism and counter-espionage. Her appointment to the top job topped off a career of some 35 years in intelligence. When a figure like this decides to write a novel their credentials are not in doubt – but their ability to string a plot and a sentence together sometimes can be. So fans of thrillers like me can come to books like this with some trepidation.

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If you pick it up, and hold it, and look at the cover you find nothing but reassurance. It’s fat and comfortably heavy and my edition, at least, has a blurb from The Observer saying “A cracking good thriller.” The colours are nice and bold and the font one of those distressed ones that looks as if someone has been at the cover with sandpaper. So all the elements for this to be very good appear to be in place. Just one final question to be answered. Is it actually any good?

I have worked out that I read more crime fiction but prefer thrillers. The reason for this is it seems that there is a better chance of picking up a random crime novel and finding it enjoyable. It is no secret that there are an awful lot of bad thrillers in this world and that anyone spending a few quid on a bookshop three-for-two offer has an unreasonably good chance of finding themselves in possession of one. But the experience of reading a really gripping thriller, the edge-of-your-seat page-turner that stops you concentrating on anything else until you’ve finished it, that’s one of the best experiences that reading has to offer me. And it’s why I like Dan Brown, incidentally, but that’s another set of arguments.

This book, I am happy to report, is an edge-of-your-seat page-turner. It deals with a nightmare scenario for the intelligence services – an ‘invisible’, a terrorist who, while being indoctrinated in jihad on the north-west frontier, is an ethnic native of Britain and a UK passport-holder. It deals with the attempts of the intelligence services, personified in the heroine Liz Carlyle, to track this invisible before she can wreak havoc. She must fight attacks on various fronts in order to do this, including emotional and political ones.

The story is well-paced and the writing style nicely underplayed and unobtrusive with the author showing an excellent ear for dialogue. The plot’s nice and twisty and keeps you guessing until the last few pages. I had a slight problem with the establishing chapters – I felt too many different characters and situations were being introduced in too short an order – but that is honestly my only problem with it. It was a nice, quick, satisfying read with oodles of lovely but at the same time entirely innocuous detail about intelligence work.

Even though there are various lovers on the horizon, real and potential, the fact the heroine is a woman is not used as an excuse for the story to descend into a lot of silly mush. As I have said loudly and often, if I wanted to read romances, I would go into a bookshop, find the romance section and buy books with pink covers and twizzly fonts. I want to read good, gripping, tense and action-packed thrillers and luckily that’s exactly what I got here. Not the best I ever read but competent and entertaining. And what more could you really ask for?

Don Quixote – Book 1 - Miguel de Cervantes

So, I made a list by genre of everything I had read this year. And it didn’t look too impressive, to be perfectly honest with you. A very good amount of thrillers, noir detective novels and other crime fiction. Graphic novels and a bit of fantasy and sci-fi. Lots of things bought on three-for-two offers. Admittedly there was a lesser-known novel by Charlotte Bronte in the mix but that was not, on its own, enough to save it. I was doing pretty well on speed of reading, having got more than 60 per cent of my way through the 50 Book Challenge by the halfway point in June. So I decided to burn a little bit of the leeway I had built up by reading something serious. My whole and entire ambition for July was to read Miguel de Cervantes’ classic of Spanish literature and work with a seminal influence on the novel form: Don Quixote.

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It’s another one of those books I should have read as a student and didn’t – hence the fact I own a copy in the first place. But we all know very well by now that buying a book and putting it on a prominent bookshelf to impress visitors is not the same as reading said book. The thing about Don Quixote is that everybody thinks they know the basics already – a noble bloke following the lone path of heroism and high ideals even when it is poignantly pointless, hence the tilting at windmills and the invention of a brand new adjective for the purpose: quixotic. The reality is a little different. Senor Quixana (as he may or may not be called) has led the quiet life of a country gentleman until he suffers what can only really be viewed as a major mid-life crisis. He reinvents himself as Don Quixote and does the equivalent of buying a great big Harley Davidson and a set of bikers’ leathers quite inappropriate for an elderly gentleman. He sets off in hopes of impressing a much younger woman and proving he’s not past it only to get in trouble with the law and end up breaking both his legs on some death-defying country road. The twist is that reading books of chivalry, the premier genre fiction of Cervantes’ day, has addled his brains to such a degree that he’s no longer able to tell fact from fiction. Rather than a rather wistful, nobly-motivated character, as I had always imagined, the Don is in fact a rude, stubborn and belligerent old bloke with a nasty temper who does some incredibly stupid and antisocial things in the pursuit of his chivalric ideals – freeing dangerous prisoners who go on to rob and assault him and others, defrauding hostellers, laying hands on women, beating up itinerant barbers and stealing their equipment… the list goes on and on.

His squire Sancho Panza, likewise, is a thoroughly venal figure, knowing somewhere deep down that the whole charade of knight-errantry is essentially nonsense but so blinded by promises from his master of earldoms, islands to rule and populations to sell into slavery that he abandons his wife and family to play along, desperately hoping that the myth will turn out to be reality. In many ways this reminded me of nothing so much as a particularly earthy Tom Sharpe farce – tales of hilariously-mistaken identities, wrongly-swapped beds and trousers at half-mast, knockabout humour and an almost Shakespearian fascination with ingénues of both sexes who are forever falling importunately in love, abandoning family and fortune and wringing out their hearts. From which you may gather that, so far, it has been fantastically readable. The famously picaresque nature of the story means the scene is always changing, new characters are constantly introduced, tales are told within the narrative and there’s always more than enough incident and colour to keep you turning the pages. Of course, when you’ve got more than a thousand pages of rather close text, this is quite important. It does cast a fantastic light on many other books as well – once you have read this you can detect its previously unsuspected influence everywhere.

At the end of book one the Don has been persuaded to give up his life of chivalry and delusional knight-errantry and return home for a cure. I pronounce myself well-satisfied and ready (after maybe just a couple of detective novels) to embark on the second part.

Some links:

• The Guardian: Authors – Cervantes
• Oxonian Review of Books: Cervantes’s Stepchild Turns 400
• Prospect Magazine: A Rational Quixote (requires subscription)

The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading this book and quite a while to get through its slim 240-odd pages. I found it in a second-hand bookshop that is a particular favourite of mine, The Book Bug in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. It was sitting on a shelf with another book by the same author, called At the Edge of the World, both in very attractive old paperback editions, and something told me that I ought to buy them. I have a lot of faith in my own first impressions, of things and people, so I did.

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Then I spent a lot of time putting off reading them. I’m not sure why but that first rush of enthusiasm just couldn’t carry me through to actually starting either book. Partly is was a huge backlog of books bought and not read, partly my recent library-joining decision, which has hurled a huge wild card into this reading challenge business. The King of Elfland’s Daughter sat on the to-read list for months, alongside a particularly doorstoppy Grisham, until I decided to shame myself into tackling both of them by taking them on a walking holiday. My reasoning being, that if I was going to carry them in a rucksack for 60 miles along the south Devon coastline, then I would damn well have to read them.

It worked to a point. There was this Sue Grafton, A is for Alibi, which I couldn’t put down and which I ended up taking even though I was more than halfway through it (a very bad use of resources). It was posted back home from Salcombe, in the event. The Grisham wasn’t quite the draw I was expecting and took a good while to get through. Which means I’d more or less saved the Dunsany for the train journey home. But that was enough to get me started and convince me that I wanted to read it – and it is, as I said earlier, a nice slim little volume which weighed exactly 150 grams.

And so to the book itself. It’s a charming read, although not an easy one. I can see why it’s compared with Tolkien and I would say that, although quite different, it is possible to appreciate why people who like Tolkien would like this. The dreaming, immortal quality of the elves is very familiar, and some of the most endearing trolls in the history of fantasy fiction make an appearance. Not much in common with Hobbits but somehow I was reminded - perhaps the facility for coming up with charming and convincing otherwordly species? The prose is dense and poetic and highly visual – and needs a lot of concentration to take in. The story is quite spare – in one sense there is little unnecessary detail. There is an overarching plot, to do with a vain wish of the elders of Erl to have a magic lord:

The old lord sent word to his eldest son, bidding him to come before him.
And very soon the young man stood before him; in the same carven chair from which he had not moved; where light, growing late, from high windows, showed the aged eyes looking far into the future beyond that old lord’s time. And seated there he gave his son his commandment.
“Go forth,” he said, “before these days of mine are over, and therefore go in haste, and go from here eastwards and pass the fields we know, till you see the lands that clearly pertain to faery; and cross their boundary, which is made of twilight, and come to that palace that is only told of in song.”
“Is it far from here,” said the young man Alveric.
“Yes,” answered he, “It is far.”
“And further still,” the young man said, “to return. For distances in those fields are not as here.”
“Even so,” said his father.
“What do you bid me do,” said the son, “when I come to that palace?”
And his father said: “To wed the King of Elfland’s Daughter.”
The young man thought of her beauty and crown of ice, and sweetness, that fabulous runes had told were hers. Songs were sung of her on wild hills where tiny strawberries grew, at dusk and by early starlight, and if one sought the singer no man was there. Sometimes only her name was sung softly over and over. Her name was Lirazel.
She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening, and the fairies too would have gone, but that they were frightened to see on their dewy fields the long dark moving shadows of the gods, so they stayed hidden in crowds of pale pink anemones and thence blessed Lirazel.
“My people have demanded a magic lord to rule over them. They have chosen foolishly,” the old lord said, “and only the Dark Ones who show not their faces know all that this will bring: but we, who see not, follow the ancient custom and do what our people in their parliament say. It may be some spirit of wisdom they have not known will save them yet. Go then with your face turned forth to that light that beats from fairyland and that faintly illumes the dusk between sunset and early stars, and this shall guide you till you come to the frontier and have passed the fields we know.”

It would be fair to say, and not in any sense either a surprise or a spoiler, that the moral of this tale is “be careful what you wish for.” While the overarching plot is addressed in the occasional chapter along the way, the actual text of the novel is extremely episodic, almost picaresque in some senses (this is what comes of trying to read *anything* alongside Don Quixote). I’m not a great consumer of fantasy although it’s something I do enjoy reading occasionally. I found this one delightful, inspiring in its unique voice and challenging – in other words, well worth reading, and recommended. After a decent break I’ll definitely be moving on to the second of the two paperbacks I picked up in that bookshop.

Dunsany links:

• Infinity Plus review
• Powells.com: synopsis and review
• SF Site review
• Wikipedia entry