Dan
Brian Staveley wrote one of my favourite epic fantasy trilogies of recent years, so I was excited to read this. It's a standalone novel set several years before the Chronicles Of The Unhewn Throne, focussing on one of the secondary characters from that work. When we meet her here, Pyrre Lakatur is approaching her final trial before becoming a fully fledged priestess of Ananshael, the god of death. She has a kill list to follow, and two older priests observing her at every moment. It's a relatively short book, but Staveley fits in an awful lot - the rituals and customs of the assassin priests, an occupied city reaching tinderbox levels of frustration and rebellion, a long suppressed religion with a nasty line in sacrifices, an enigmatic tribe living in the swampy delta nearby and mysterious old gods. There is a good sense of place throughout - you can almost hear the insects and feel the sweat of the delta. Pyrre is a very different character from the version we see in the later books, full of doubt and uncertainty. Unlike the Unhewn Throne, this is a first person narrative that stays in one person's head throughout. You don't need to have read those other books to enjoy this. It's a true standalone - there is a shared background, but no knowledge of the earlier (later, depending on your sense of time) books is necessary to get this story. In fact, it's probably a good entry point to decide if you like Staveley's writing before embarking on the thousands of pages in the trilogy. Well worth reading.
For the first half of this book I was getting ready to proclaim it as book of the year material. It's funny, and sharply written, with some brilliant sentences and one liners. Unfortunately I felt the second half ran out of steam just a little bit. Perhaps pruning fifty or so pages would have helped. It's still an excellent book and comes highly recommended, but in the end it doesn't quite reach the superlative bracket it was so close to.
This is a really strong novel, one that lifts the barricade of time and brings the blues from gentle historical curiosity under glass to a visceral beating bloody heart of a thing, a scream of outrage at injustice down through the decades. What starts as a tale of college boys messing with music swings into fullblown horror by the end, but there is none of the cosy distance of genre here. The only monsters are human, there are no silver bullets or crosses, no escape. In these years of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, it's a timely read, powerfully fuelled by passion and rage.
I was not quite won over by the first book in this series. Sometimes, it was a struggle, but there was enough there to make me want to read the next volume. And here it is. Sadly, I have much the same reaction, and I could almost copy my previous review over. Once again, there are a lot of machinations and intrigues that our characters are only partly privy to, if that, meaning that the first half of the book ends up as a load of disconnected scenes where nothing much seems to happen. We spend a lot more time in the dragon kingdom under the Seine this time, which is a good thing, as it is evocatively described and a genuinely unsettling location, fishscales and all. This stands in contrast to the Paris of the books, which should be a real winner - one of the most beautiful cities in the world ruined by magical war, peopled by enigmatic Fallen angels? I'm in. But somehow, this just doesn't come across on the page. It should be the defining feature of the books, a landscape that becomes a character like Gormenghast, but it is annoyingly vague throughout. This and its predecessor are decent books, but they could have been great, and they fall short of that. A frustrating read, but not a futile one.
An Adam Nevill book is always going to be a good read, but I don't think this one will ever be a favourite of mine. The first hundred or so pages borrow extensively from one of his short stories, and I read them with the feeling that I'd seen it all before. Once this platform is raised, the book does take on more of its own identity but for me at least, the threat was never as scary as the beast in the forest from The Ritual, or as visceral as No One Gets Out Alive. It's still worth reading, well written and atmospheric, but it didn't quite click with me like some of his others have.
I always enjoy a new Parlabane novel, and this is one of the best in recent years. As this one starts, Jack is still struggling post-Leveson, and about to flunk an interview with a hip online news site, while an ordinary young girl struggles with her grim domestic circumstances. The two come together in a murky tale of hacking and corporate espionage, with the usual mix of excitement, humour and whatever it is that makes you turn the pages faster and faster. The descriptions of hacking and social engineering are highly engaging, and should make you think about exactly what information you give out day to day. An interesting character from previous books is elevated to a bigger role this time round, and there's even a wee bit of Spammy in there as well. Good one.
A frustrating read. A decent idea, but, to begin with at least, not that well executed. I found a sense of place lacking. The post war ruins of Paris didn't light up in my head like I'd hoped they might, and the HOuse itself was a missed opportunity - the frequent references to its enormous size set it up as a kind of Gormenghast, a location that could be a character itself, but this never panned out, and we only got a series of corridors and rooms, with no spatial relationship in the text. The actual characters aren't defined enough, and I had to keep flicking back to remind myself who the two characters in a conversation, and their relationship to each other, actually were.
Fairly damning criticisms so far, and yet, and yet....There's something about the book that kept me reading. The climax is genuinely exciting, and what had been a slog for the first few hundred pages turned into a sprint. I'll stick around for the next one.
This is a terrific book, a sweeping story of one American black man's life in the twentieth century. It starts in Georgia, moves to Harlem and Kansas City, then Paris before the war and somewhere much darker during it, before returning to the US. It's an easy read - the sentences almost fall off the page into your head - but it's a powerful one. It'd be an easy five stars, if it wasn't for one slip right at the very end, with a coincidence I just found too unbelievable (assuming it was real, and not just in Harlan's mind...). Nevertheless, very highly recommended.
An overview of the late great Iain Banks' work, with a few biographical details along the way. It focuses on the science fiction in his oeuvre, as a careful reading of the title will hint, but also includes the M-less books where they are relevant to a discussion, or borderline SF (like Transition). Kincaid has an interesting idea about RD Laing's theory of the divided self being the underpinning of Banks' novels, and his argument is pretty convincing. This is a concise and readable book, written for an intelligent reader but not drowning in academic language. As a fan of both versions of Banks, I'd have liked a bit more on books like The Crow Road, but they are understandably out of the scope of this book. It made me want to go back and reread the whole Banks catalogue, so that must be a recommendation.
4.5 stars rounded up to 5
After the events of the first book, the survivors of the Corta family are scattered among the other Dragons. They all react in different ways to the fall of their House, and this is what sets the book in motion. It's fast moving ride, and by the end there are major repercussions for the Moon, and for what I presume will be the next book (there's no official indication that this is a continuing series, but surely McDonald is savvy enough to realise there will be lynch mobs after him if he leaves this hanging).
It's not all slam bang action, although there is plenty of that. The depiction of life on the Moon focuses on sexuality and gender (in fact, with the emphasis on this as well as family and Wagner's wolf pack, you could make a case for saying that the whole theme of the book is belonging, not least expressed in the ties between the Earth and the Moon, but I digress...) as well as the brutal hyper capitalism that governs lunar society. There's also plenty of the nuts and bolts of just living on an inhospitable airless world - a bit like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, you get the feeling that this is how it will be.
McDonald is one of the very best SF writers around at the moment, and this book, while emphatically not a good jumping on point for newbies, does nothing to dissuade me from that opinion. The next volume has just gone to the top of my want list.
A new Tim Powers book is always worth reading. One of the most original fantasists around, he doesn't compromise. For this book he has invented an entirely new occult technique and a whole subculture around it, but doesn't give the reader an obvious way in. For the first fifty to a hundred pages you'll be scratching your head but the effort pays off. Once you get to grips with the spiders, this becomes a gripping ghost story (sort of) and haunted house tale (kind of). It's not as good as his masterpiece Last Call, but then very few books are. Still highly recommended
It's good to watch an author developing before your eyes. Jen Williams' previous books, The Copper Cat Trilogy were fun undemanding heroic fantasy, very clearly inspired by Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The easy road would have been to keep turning out the Lankhmar pastiches, but this new book is on a different level. I'm not going to go into plot (because spoilers) but this is a vividly imagined world, with a great sense of place and history, some original concepts and engaging characters. Fantasy is a field that is very prone to repetition and staleness, but this is one of the freshest books I've read in the genre for a long time. Part two is definitely going to the top of my want list, if I can stick waiting another year!
Very enjoyable. It's a big family saga, spanning decades, starting with a tiny fishing village in Korea and ending up in the financial markets of late 80s Tokyo. We follow several generations of a family as they suffer under the Japanese occupation of Korea, move to Japan in time for World War Two and then the turbulent post war years. There's a lot of sadness and grim outcomes over the course of the novel, but the thing I remember most is the acts of kindness throughout. The plot hinges on a remarkable act of sacrifice, and there is a sense of, I don't know...decency? throughout. It's a very pleasing book, and one I was sorry to finish.
I picked this up because I've enjoyed Scarlett Thomas' adult books, and I have a magic obsessed nine year old. I read it it through first, and I liked it. It captures the minutiae of school life well, as well as having enough excitement and adventure to keep the attention. The principal characters feel like a real gang of school friends, and I think it will really appeal to young readers who want a bit of fantasy and magic. There are certain sequences and passages that as I was reading I was thinking “this would really hit a chord with my little girl. She (nine years old) is 20% through so far, and says it is “epic”and “awesome”.
Great hook - the incoming President reads the traditional handover letter from his predecessor, and learns there are aliens in the asteroid belt. I'd imagine that might mean a few policy changes. This is proper sense-of-wonder science fiction, with humanity small and powerless in the face of huge alien artifacts. There's a reason why the book is littered with Arthur C Clarke references. There's an on-Earth storyline as well, with political skullduggery and dirty tricks. This strand doesn't advance as much as the outer space one, but it's clearly going to be important to future books. I enjoyed this a lot, and I'm in for volume 2 and beyond.
I didn't want it to end like this.
Truth be told, that's a lie. It implies that I could possibly have predicted where the last long storyline in Cerebus goes, but I'm not sure anyone could have seen the last 200 pages of this one coming.
It starts promisingly enough. After Cerebus' trauma at the end of Form & Void, his life goes off the rails, he blinks in and out, and finds himself as a shepherd, and then a professional five bar gate player. This brief prologue serves to jump us forward to the point where Dave wishes Latter Days to kick off, with Cerebus returning south in order to get himself killed by the Cirinists. Opening a strip club to provoke their wrath, he ends up kidnapped by The Three Wise Fellows, and bound in their Sanctuary. The Fellows are religious fanatics, inspired by the teachings of Rick. They're also the Three Stooges. These Fellows believe that Cerebus is the One True Cerebus whose coming was foretold by the Prophet Rick, but to prove it, they must test him. There's some great slapstick stuff here, which is really difficult to pull off in a static medium like comics, and some strong visual gags.
I said earlier in this thread that I remembered Latter Days being the worst of the Cerebus books. For the first hundred pages or so, I was revising that opinion. The prologue is funny and entertaining. I've always been more of a Marx Brothers man than I am a Three Stooges fan, and in memory I disliked this section. On rereading I enjoyed it a lot. Their characters and shtick are bought across brilliantly, and the end to their story is properly heartbreaking.
But things soon take a turn for the worse, as Cerebus becomes a fascist dictator and instigates a policy of shooting women who are too ugly and / or annoying to live which he then extends to lawyers and “complete dicks” (uh, Dave, we know you don't really mean it, but this isn't exactly going to help with those misogyny allegations, you know). Along the way he has overthrown the Cirinists. This should have been a huge event, a focal point of the last third of the saga, but it's handled as a silly throwaway, that doesn't even make any internal sense, let alone provide any satisfying drama. That said, the sequence where a dying Cirinist is briefly animated by Cerebus' magnifier quality is great. It indicates what could have been done here, and that's really the story of the first part of the book. There are marvellous little moments, but they are stand outs in a big mess that only serve to cruelly highlight how deficient the rest of it is. It just doesn't feel like Cerebus anymore. It's rambling and disjointed, the storytelling discipline that has previously served Sim in such good stead has gone, and the leaps forward in time mean we've shucked off the previous supporting cast, and even the landscape they inhabited. The Spawn parody is awful. Not only does it feel dated in 2016, it doesn't sit right against the rest of the book. This is the sort of thing we expect from Elrod or the Roach, not Cerebus himself. I'd much prefer it if Dave had laid the superhero parodies to rest along with those two characters.
Battles over, Cerebus is ensconced as the head of a religion bearing his name. He fills his days with birdwatching and collecting issues of the Rabbi comic book. An old interview with Rabbi's creator fries his brain once more, and he takes to shuffling around in a dressing gown, his only words “darr, pretty sunsets”. And then there's a knock at the door, and the message that Rick had promised would come all those years ago in Cerebus' dream back at the end of Form & Void is delivered. This is a great example of the way Dave can pull the reader's strings and get you excited to see what comes next, just like the last sentence of Guys. The rest of the book emphatically is not.
The promised visitor is Woody Allen, and the book he brings is the Torah. And so the scene is set for almost two hundred pages of buttock clenching boredom as Cerebus treats us to an interminable sequence of Biblical commentary. In really really small type. And of course, this being Cerebus, it isn't your normal Bible commentary. Cerebus (or Dave, the two being interchangeable at this point) has discovered the hidden truth of the Bible and recast it as a struggle between God and the upstart entity YHWH (or Yoohwhoo). It really is terribly hard going and I'm not ashamed to say I skipped large chunks this time round (hey, I read it all in the serialised issues and then the first time I read Latter Days. Life's too short to do that again). The side story is the Woody Allen character's struggle with Freud, accompanied by illustrations lifted from the films of Fellini and Bergman. I promise you I am not making this up. The usual Cerebus caveats about artistic excellence apply, but they can't save this from being a tedious self indulgent mess. Latter Days was already a bit wobbly before the epic exegesis, but this sends it plummeting. Almost half the book is unreadable. In the addenda to Melmoth, Dave noted that he couldn't find a workable equivalent to “Jew” in Estarcion and so skipped those elements of the historical record. I wish he'd remembered that.
So yeah, I still reckon this is the worst of all the phonebooks. Not to worry, there's only one left, and it gets a lot better
An addictive thriller centred on adultery and mysteries from the past. Keeps the pages turning quickly until the climax. And as for that climax....well, a huge amount of the book's publicity has been about the twist ending, so I was reading the whole thing with that in mind, going through all kinds of permutations of “aha, it's him!” or “She will really turn out to be XXXXX”, but I got nowhere near it. It's very good, and very hard to spot coming. Good work.
An enjoyable tale of an enduring friendship (with a few ups and downs) between two misfits, set right on the border between fantasy and science fiction. The only real flaw is that for all the catastrophe towards the end, there's little real sense of danger for the lead characters. But that's okay, what it lacks in drama it makes up for in charm.
There's an old Oysterband sleeve quote that goes something like “to love this land and its people while hating how it's ruled and a lot of what it stands for is a contradiction many people will find strange”. It's this contradiction that is at the heart of the Devices trilogy, the struggle between authoritarian rule and anarchist do as you please. It's very political, not in a partisan way, but in exploring what it means to be British, what Britain could and should represent. That may sound rather po-faced, but Purser-Hallard writes with warmth and wit, and he keeps the pages turning. There are weighty questions of national identity, personal responsibility, and the nature of stories below the text, but there are also swordfights, explosions and secret fortresses disguised as Civil Service offices. The idea of a modern day King Arthur sparring in the shopping centres and coffee shops of modern Britain could easily have fallen prey to cliche and silliness, but the books manage to sidestep that and offer a thought provoking and very entertaining read.
We've jumped on from the end of ‘Fall And The River'. Cerebus and Jaka are now travelling with Ham Ernestway and his wife Mary. Ham is of course a Hemingway pastiche, and Cerebus, who we shouldn't forget is still a little gender confused after Astoria's revelation back in Reads, hero worships this manliest of men. It's nor reciprocated though. Ham is taciturn and uncommunicative at the best of times, and it is left to Mary to do most of the talking.
And that's where things go wrong for this book. What Mary largely chooses to talk about it is a journey she and Ham took to a continent that doesn't half look like our Africa , whereupon Dave embarks on his reinterpretation of the real Mary Hemingway's African journals. It is, of course, brilliantly composed and drawn, but it has no connection at all to the Cerebus story, not even the tangential brushed kiss of Melmoth.
For a good chunk of this book, it feels as though Cerebus has become an encumbrance to Dave, and he is telling the story he wants to tell while inwardly cursing his 300 issue promise. It's a hint of how Dave's post-Cerebus career could have turned out - he could have pioneered and mastered the biographical comics form. The sequence goes on for dozens and dozens of pages. It's very well done, but it's not particularly interesting, and it tells us nothing about Cerebus, nothing about Jaka, and nothing about their relationship.
After the tale is told, the party retire. Later that night, Cerebus hears a gunshot, and finds Ham dead from a shot to the head. It is strongly implied that Mary has, at the very least, facilitated his suicide. This sends Cerebus into deep shock, and he blinks in and out of coherent thought for a while. When he regains his balance, we find him and Jaka in a raging snowstorm, trapped in a flimsy tent with dwindling supplies. Things are looking bleak, until Cerebus dreams of Rick, looking like he did back in Jaka's Story but with wounds to his hands that suggest the Cirinists have crucified him (I'm pretty sure this was hinted at earlier in Going Home, but I can't remember where). Dream Rick tells Cerebus how to reach safety, and also tells him that someone will come to him with a book. Oh my, will they. Will they ever.
Cerebus follows the advice, and, buoyed by the miracle, the couple progress through an increasingly desolate northern landscape until they reach Sand Hills Creek. Cerebus does not get the welcome he expected. His parents have died during his long absence, and his not being there to attend them makes him anathema to a small town rooted in old ways. An angry Cerebus drives Jaka away, back into the arms of the Cirinists who have been shadowing them all the way. A solicitous Mother hands her Missy (who had been left behind in the tent), Jaka clutches her to her breast and is driven off, inconsolably weeping. And that is the last we ever see of her.
Goodbye, Jaka. Wherever you ended up, I'm sure you came to like it more than you would have Sand Hills Creek. It was never going to work out with you and Cerebus, and I think both of you knew it. All the little nags and needles you threw at each other over the last two books showed that, no matter how good a game you both talked. That's the story of these last two phonebooks, really. A doomed romance, with both parties telling each other it's working. I don't know if Dave is writing from experience, but it feels painfully true. We always talk about his technical artistic skills, but he's not too shabby as a writer either.
Cerebus, meanwhile, is overcome with rage and grief. He rends his clothes, he prostates himself in the dirt, he howls. Aaaand that's where we end this book. It's interesting that there are a number of natural endpoints built into this last third of the storyline. You could choose to finish at the end of Minds. If you want a happy ending, then stop when Cerebus and Jaka walk off into the sunset at the end of Rick's Story. Or finish here, with Cerebus alone, broken and bereft. It's certainly the end of the storyline in some ways, with the next volumes moving us well away from the Estarcion we have known so far. But I've been promised Cerebus dying alone, unmourned and unloved, godammit, and I'm sticking around to see it.
The first half of Going Home was pleasantly better than I remembered. I can't say the same about this one. For me, it's the tipping point where Dave's magpie tendency to put whatever caught his fancy at a particular moment into the book finally overwhelms the story, exquisitely produced as it may be.
His decision to add an appendix detailing all his research into Mary Hemingway and her journals doesn't add to my enjoyment. He uses it to launch a sustained attack on Ernest's literary merit, and Mary's - well, everything. It comes off as nasty, a vituperative character assassination, and is exactly the sort of thing that gets him labelled as Dave The Crazy Evil Misogynist. Once again, it's also not reflected in the book itself. In the appendices, Dave is clear that he considers Mary domineering, self important and almost totally lacking in self awareness, while in the book she comes over as a strong woman, with good advice for Jaka on gender equality, dealing with a depressed and useless man. I don't know how he does it, but it's a hell of a trick.
(There are nuggets in the appendices, especially the translation of the guides' Swahili. Worth wading through the other stuff for)
On to Latter Days, then. In memory, it is by some distance the worst of all the phonebooks. Ulp.