Dan
(I may be being a little unfair on this one, as it is only through coming to Goodreads that I've realised it is a prequel to another book, and so there may be context I'm missing, but I can only review what I've read. Although I didn't really enjoy this one, I will seek out Who Fears Death, because I really enjoyed Ms Okorafor's Lagoon, and to see if reading it affects my opinion of this book.)
This short novel explores the evils of capitalist exploitation and colonisation though the medium of superhero fiction. It's very passionate, well written and powerfully told, but it is almost entirely lacking in any nuance. There are no shades of grey here, and the bad guys are so ridiculously over the top bad that the no doubt heartfelt passion and anger fuelling Phoenix' rebellion just ends up seeming shallow and cartoonish. I get that Phoenix the narrator is young and certain of her beliefs in the way the engaged young are, but it makes for one sided storytelling.
Much lauded thriller that didn't live up to its billing. Preposterous hero who gets to sleep with every female character he meets, including the doctor who has just told him he's contracted gonorrhoea, and a narrative that skips a lot of potentially exciting elements in favour of extended descriptions of how to build a jeep. That said, it kept the pages turning and I wanted to know how it ended
This is an excellent book, something like a 50s boarding school romp meets Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. The shadow of death hangs over all the children we meet, but the novel is shot through with love and hope. It's engrossing and involving (I read it in an afternoon), and packs a strong emotional punch (I had to walk around on my own for a bit once I'd finished it). The young characters ring as true as I can remember at my advanced age, and I really cared what happened to them.
It doesn't quite get the full five stars thanks to a piece of authorial obfuscation over a crucial part of the ending that is a) far too obvious and b) doesn't ring true when the narrator has previously been so candid with us, but it's still one of the best books I've read in recent months.
A bunch of interesting anecdotes and facts around a loose theme told in an easy to read style with plenty of gags - John Higgs is the counterculture Bill Bryson! This is a really good read, fascinating and illuminating fir anyone who wonders how we got from the certainties of the late nineteenth century to today's fractured worldviews.
Very readable, as de Bernieres always is, but even for a 500 page book it feels slight and somewhat hackneyed - this is ground that has been covered many times before. It feels as if the book was written with one eye on the lavish Sunday evening BBC adaptation. An afterword suggests future volumes are to come, which may be a saving grace - I'd be intrigued to see a multi volume Dance To The Music Of Time style project from LdB.
Europe In Autumn is set in a near future Europe, where in the aftermath of pandemic and economic collapse nations are splitting and fracturing into smaller states and entities. Devolution is the order of the day, from a bunch of organised football hooligans who have commandeered an ageing tower block estate, to an entire transcontinental railway line that runs from Portugal to Siberia. As countries spin off ever more republics, duchies and polities, like glaciers calving icebergs, border crossings and controls have become very tightly enforced, which in turn leads to a black market in couriers who can transport data, documents and even people across lines the local authorities would prefer them not to. The lead players in this market are Les Coureurs Du Bois, a cloak and dagger organisation dedicated to an idealistic vision of a world without borders and complete freedom to move - the Schengen dream revived.
We are introduced to Les Coureurs through Rudi, an peripatetic Estonian chef working in a Krakow restaurant. An encounter with some drunken rowdy Hungarians ends with him being inducted into their ranks, and embarking on a series of training missions where we see him build his operational knowledge, from a bumbling beginner to someone who can assess a situation and work out all the angles in a matter of minutes. Ultimately things go catastrophically wrong, pitching him into an unknown world of shifting loyalties and double crosses straight out of the finest espionage fiction, as he travels across a fractured continent trying to discover exactly who wants him dead. The novel reads more like Le Carré than it does SF, along with a heavy dose of Kafka's Eastern European paranoia, before it opens out in the final few chapters.
This is a tremendous novel. Hutchison's writing is deft enough to keep the pages turning no matter how complex the plot gets (and boy, does it get complex), the espionage tradecraft is fascinating, and the evocation of a broken Europe seething with thousands of different cultural grudges is outstanding. I've just finished reading it for a second time, and it's still of the most invigorating, unputdownable books I've read in recent years.
For a long time Jonathan Carroll was my favourite writer. No one else could capture the numinous in the everyday the way he did. Unfortunately, his last few novels slipped away into New Agey lifestyle bollocks. I'm happy to report that, while not completely evading those pitfalls, Bathing The Lion is largely a return to form. Five people share a dream that leads to an examination of the workings of the universe, with plenty of Carroll's trademark takes on adult relationships, the small glorious wonders of life, and pit bull terriers along the way.
Family as a cross-pollination experiment. Thomas is great at moving you from one sentence to the next (I went through this one in two days flat), but the bigger story here falls a bit flat, circling round an unsatisfactorily explained void, both in the family at the books heart and the plot. It's very entertaining, with some smart characterisation, and may benefit from a reread, but right now I feel a little disappointed with it. Props for the robin, though. He's aces.
Eight or nine years ago, I was sat in a coffee shop in Roppongi reading the latest Interzone on my lunch break. The next story up was called Islington Crocodiles, by a Paul Meloy. I figured I'd have time to squeeze it in before having to go back to work. It blew me away, and I had to reread it, slower and savouring, that evening when I got home, something I rarely do. Since then it's been a long wait for his debut novel, only partially alleviated by more short stories and novellas concerned with this world of Autoscopes and Firmament Surgeons (come on, you know those names alone are whetting your appetite) and their shocking irruptions into mundane reality.
His work has the same sense of magic being loose in the world as, say, Jonathan Carroll, but Meloy's mythology is far grimmer and wilder, with apocalypse forever looming. This novel is the story of how one small group of people come together to stave that apocalypse off, for a little while at least.
Well written, positively fecund with grotesque imagery, this is essential reading for anyone interested in dark fantasy and horror. My only grumble would be to wonder how much is readily understandable to people who haven't read the preceding shorts (there was a small press collection, also called Islington Crocodiles, but it is long out of print), as a huge amount of characters from them make appearances. Doubling the length of the book and working some of those shorts in as a fixed-up first half might not have been a bad idea? Even without that prior knowledge this is still a superior read that fires the imagination.