Book Review – Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I could scarcely have been more enthusiastic about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas upon picking it up, nor can I remember being so enthusiastic about a newly discovered author. After reading Mitchell’s more recent Black Swan Green, I was eager to seek out his earlier books, and Cloud Atlas didn’t disappoint. To say I was impressed and enthralled by the first 200 pages of this book would be an understatement.

The first interesting thing about Cloud Atlas is its structure. What we have here is a series of eleven novella length sections, covering six different narratives. Each of the six narratives are set in different times and places, spanning from the 19th century to the distant future. But I wouldn’t call this science fiction. The six narratives are told, initially, in chronological order. They are: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing; Letters from Zedelghem; Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery; The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish; An Orison of Sonmi-451; and Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After. And then we get a second section of all but the Sloosha story, told in reverse order (i.e. from the future to the past).

If that seems confusing, don’t worry: Cloud Atlas is anything but. In the first half of the book, the narratives tend to end at particularly interesting cliffhangers, or even in one case in the middle of a sentence. This is fairly daring, as readers tend to love continuity, but it isn’t long before you’ve stopped pining for part two of a particular narrative and become engrossed in the next one. This is not to say that I enjoyed all the narratives equally, however. The way that the apparently unrelated narratives fit together is in the nature of one of those Russian Matyroshka dolls: each narrative encompasses the previous one, in the sense that someone discovers or is in possession of the manuscript of the previous section. Therefore, the young musician Robert Frobisher reads Adam Ewing, Rufus Sixsmith reads Robert Frobisher, and etc. This is surprisingly well done, much in the manner of Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (Part 1) is in diary form, detailing Ewing’s travels and travails through the Chatham Islands near New Zealand and onto a ship destined for Ewing’s native U S of A. Ewing has some appropriately racist views on the various native populations, but he’s a kinder man than those around him. We leave him mid sentence, shortly after having helped one of the last remaining Moriori tribesmen to avoid being thrown into the Pacific.

Letters from Zedelghem consists of a series of letters from young Robert Frobisher to his muse, known at this stage only as ‘Sixsmith.’ The setting is Belgium in 1931, with Nazi occupation still eight years away. Frobisher is a manipulative sort, managing to wheedle his way into a position of influence in the house of the composer Vyvyan Ayrs. In doing so, he helps to compose some new music with the old man, as well as sleeping with his wife and appropriating many of his clothes. There is a delicious scene where the old man bursts into Frobisher’s room in the wee hours, having been inspired to compose some new music. Luckily for Frobisher, the old man is too blind and enfeebled to notice his own wife hiding beneath the covers…

Half Lives – the First Luisa Rey Mystery is my favourite narrative in Cloud Atlas. It’s a seventies nuclear secret cover-up thingy, and it works really well. So well that it’s almost an ‘underpowered’ novel in its own right. This reminds me of a fairly recent novel that I doubt many people will have read – Carter Scholz’ Radiance. This story is full of deceit, murderous thugs and Rufus Sixsmith, previously Frobisher’s muse (i.e. 40 years before) and now a nuclear scientist. This is where Cloud Atlas shines brightest, for me at least.

I didn’t especially enjoy The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, but that’s probably because Mr Cavendish is a bit of a jerk. He’s a publisher suddenly propelled to fame by his best (and only) author’s murderous party antics. He reads the ‘Luisa Rey’ novel on his slushpile. Later on, Cavendish ends up in a kind of nursing home that reminds the reader of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Nor was I a fan of An Orison of Sonmi-45, which is an interview between an archivist and a fabricator. Turns out that Sonmi is a clone, forced to work in extremely degrading conditions in a restaurant in a future Korea. The fabricators gets fed a long line of bullshit, as well as something called Soap which seems to keep them in check. Of course, Sonmi ends up breaking out of this stifling world. Unfortunately, this was WAY too reminiscent of Brave New World. I would label this derivative. Instead of soma, we have Soap, but it’s essentially an updated vision of Huxley’s future. Additionally, there were a couple of things that really annoyed me here. One was the way the narrative dropped the letter ‘e’ at the beginning of words like xactly and xtraordinary, and the second was the fact that things are referred to by their brand names: cars become fords, coffee becomes starbucks. This is a bit too obvious, a bit too gimmicky, and not especially original.

The last narrative is Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After, and in terms of style it is reminiscent of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, as the title would suggest. It concerns a man called Zach’ry, who is retelling stories from his youth. Turns out Zach’ry accidentally led a horde of murderous bandits to his father’s home as a child of nine. Then, six or so years later, he had some dealings with the Prescients, a group of people who appear to be the last civilised society on the planet. This story is set in Hawaii in some far flung future. This turns out to be a harrowing tale of young Zach’ry and a Prescient woman trying to survive a barbarian incursion – perhaps the last such violence in human history.

And then we get the earlier narratives in reverse order. I am not entirely won over by this technique, as it presents some peculiar problems. As I was not a fan of Somni’s story, I felt the book sagged in the middle. The strongest three narratives, in my opinion, are the first three, and thus the last three as well. Luisa Rey’s story is perhaps the best of all six, closely followed by Adam Ewing’s misadventures in the Pacific. And it is curious to read a novel in which causality is utterly irrelevant. The moral of the story appears to be as the poisoner Henry Goose has it: “The Weak are Meat; the Strong do Eat.” So it goes. There’s a weary cynicism about all of this, which is only slightly tempered by Mitchell’s more whimsical flourishes: the unique birthmark that many of the protagonists seem to share; the fact that the narratives seem to be mystically linked. In the second half, protagonists keep stumbling upon the ’second halves’ of earlier narratives.

In summary, I think Mitchell has bitten off a little more than he can chew here. He doesn’t want for ambition, I’ll give him that, but in the end Cloud Atlas is hampered by some of the decisions that went into its composition. The narratives seem too dissonant and, in the context of one another, irrelevant. I couldn’t help but think that Mitchell was much more at home with the Pacific and Hawaiian narratives than with the futuristic dystopian Korea. Half Lives – The First Luisa Rey Mystery was so strong that it could have been the basis of a reasonably good novel by itself, and Letters from Zedelgelm had its own quaint charms. Mitchell may yet write a great novel (and I think his less ambitious Black Swan Green is more successful) but Cloud Atlas is not it.

Book Review – Praise by Andrew McGahan

Praise is a fairly famous novel and I’ve been meaning to read it for years, since someone recommended it to me in 2000 or 2001. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting-some kind of gritty realistic novel about being on the dole-but Praise exceeded those expectations and bewildered me at the same time. The first thing to be said about McGahan is that he has an unusual but highly effective writing style; his book is full of short, declarative sentences and straightforward passages. Coupled with this is the personality of the protagonist, Gordon, who is extremely forthright and frank in his insights. This works very well, and I found myself gripped by the narrative.

Praise is an exhausting book, in many respects, but I found myself racing through it (in something less than 24 hours). Gordon lives in a seedy flat in Brisbane alongside some old men, and he’s just quit his job at a drive-through bottle shop. He is twenty three. In fact, his life and my own were similar at this age in some respects, but not many. Gordon is a mess. He can’t be in relationships in the normal sense because he is emotionally fucked up, full of self-loathing and hatred for everything around him. And then he gets into a relationship with Cynthia, who is even more deranged than he is.

This is a story, primarily, about that sick relationship, which is full of sex, drinking, drug taking and occasionally violence. There is no attempt to glorify these matters here, nor is there any attempt to shy away from the more degraded and degrading aspects of this lifestyle. This is a novel about hopelessness, nihilism, and self-destruction. The characters in it spend an awful amount of their time fucking themselves and each other up, both in a sexual sense and in terms of alcohol and substance abuse. This isn’t a novel for the faint of heart, and it’s revolting in places.

Gordon is an interesting character, and a fairly unique protagonist. I can’t remember a book with a character quite like Gordon. He’s friendly (but harbouring some nasty passive aggressive feelings toward those around him), ineffectual (and yet he manages to get away with doing very little indeed), and confused (and yet strangely at peace with his slovenly state). In short, he’s a paradoxical young man. This is very true to life. I think we have all known Gordons and Cynthias. This is realistic writing at its best.

There is a sickness at the heart of this novel, however. It stems from a lack of ambition, an absence of understanding for and of other people. It is about boredom and despair. McGahan is well aware of these ills, and his characters wallow in them. There’s nothing cathartic about the ending. After Gordon finally manages to get rid of Cynthia, he has an even less fulfilling relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Rachel, and manages to turn this dirty as well. He ends up in hospital, paying the price for his extravagantly self-destructive lifestyle. If this book has any sense of catharsis at all, then it is in the sense of an emetic: we are vomiting up something nasty indeed. Hopefully, afterward, we will feel better.

In my opinion, Praise deserves the accolades it received, for it does something quite unique. It describes the fucked up lifestyle of a bunch of no-hoper twenty-somethings in a way that neither valorises nor downplays it. This is a rare gift to literature, as not many writers would have the courage to write as openly and frankly about such putrid matters.

Praise won the Vogel Award in 1991.

Book Review – Road Story by Julienne van Loon

The first thing to be said about Julienne van Loon’s Road Story is that it’s short. At 150 first pages of generously spaced print, this is a slight novel, one that took me about two hours to read. This is not to say that it wasn’t worth reading, however. Road Story is about an eighteen year-old girl called Diana Kooper. We see her in medias res, running from the scene of a car crash she has caused. Thereafter, the narrative unfolds in two directions: the first strand covers Diana’s flight from the scene of the crime and subsequent life; and the second charts her earlier life leading up to the crash. If this sounds simple, it is. But herein lies the charm of Road Story: it is an unpretentious and intelligent novel which achieves everything it sets out to achieve.

The major narrative, concerning Diana’s life after the crash, is the more interesting of the two. It transpires that Diana has left her friend Nicole Clarke unconscious in the passenger seat of the crashed car. Diana runs away, catches a train and then a bus, before getting a job at a roadhouse on a major truck-route. Okay. This is the first novel I can think of which takes place primarily at a truck-stop, but it proves to be an effective location for Road Story to play out against. Diana’s new boss is called Bob Davies, and he turns out to be a somewhat shady character with a love of betting on horse racing and a problem with some bikies. At first, the truck-stop provides excellent cover for Diana (who is essentially on the run from the law), but things start to catch up with her sooner on later.

The second narrative concerns Diana’s life from the time that she ran away from home (at age fourteen) until her car crash at age eighteen and a half. And it’s a grim tale indeed, full of drug-taking, lecherous sailors and general decreptitude. Oh, and heroin. Nicole becomes a junkie, Diana doesn’t, and of course it is the latter who ends up caring for the former. There was something very depressing about all of this, for me at least. I don’t usually mind reading hard luck tales of drugs and despair, but van Loon makes no attempt to sugar-coat any of this, nor does she provide any kind of redeeming denouement or moral. Life, van Loon seems to be saying, is nothing like the ersatz lives led in the pages of novels. Fair enough, but we need a reason to read this or any other novel. I had a feeling that 150 pages was the optimum length for this kind of material. Any more would have become even more depressing.

The narratives converge, of course. We come to see that Diana was actually doing the best she could for Nicole, and that in a sense she was correct to flee the scene of the crash. But the dark realism of this novel is unrelenting. We never discover whether Nicole has lived or died, although it would appear that she has perished. Worse, Diana had fallen pregnant to a youthful trucker earlier in the novel, and that doesn’t end well either. Many novels and novelists would have used the theme of pregnancy to suggest that while things are bad today, they may be better tomorrow, or somesuch thing, but van Loon doesn’t try to soothe us like this. The novel ends with her running again, after having received some back pay from Bob (and having stolen another $1500 out of his safe). The future is uncertain, but almost certainly bleak. It would appear, on the final page of the novel, that Diana is miscarrying. The end.

And yet I still don’t dislike Road Story. I imagine a fair few people would dislike it for some of the reasons stated above. It’s bleak, it’s unremitting, but it’s genuine. So many writers try to lie to us and themselves by tacking on false-dawn endings and Hollywood twists, but van Loon doesn’t insult our intelligence like this. Perhaps next time van Loon will write a story with a little more thirst for life in it.

Books on the Agenda – 18/5/08

Ah, poverty. It’s times like these that I must resort to the dreaded ‘l’ word – library. It’s not that I dislike libraries per se, but that I love to collect (read: hoard) books, and thus don’t like giving them back. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, I have borrowed the following from Edith Cowan and UWA universities. Expect to see reviews of some or all of the following in the next week or two.

A Whispering of Fish – Christopher Murray. TAG Hungerford Award winner in 2000. This will be my fifth Hungerford winning novel out of a possible seven (with an eighth soon to be published).

Sixty Lights – Gail Jones. I wanted to read Jones’ “The House of Breathing” but it was out, so this was the next best thing.

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell. I recently enjoyed reading “Black Swan Green,” and thus I am enthusiastic about reading more of Mitchell’s work.

The Alphabet of Light and Dark – Danielle Wood. I don’t know anything about this novel, except that it was a winner of the Vogel award, but I love the title so much I had to pick it up. Outstanding titles are hard to come by, and often adorn mediocre novels. For instance, there is a science fiction writer by the name of Philip Jose Farmer who once published a novel called “To Your Scattered Bodies Go.” That’s my favourite title of all time, but certainly not my favourite novel.

The House of Breathing – Gail Jones. 1991 TAG Hungerford Award winner.

Road Story – Julienne Van Loon. 2004 Vogel winner.

Praise – Andrew McGahan – 1992 Vogel winner. A famous book, but I’m yet to read it.

These should keep me busy for a while…

Book Review – Climbers by M. John Harrison

Let me try to explain why I think M. John Harrison’s “Climbers” is one of the greatest novels of the last twenty years. Harrison has had a strange career: from science fiction to mainstream and back again; and he transformed himself from a bad writer into an outstanding one. After writing some run of the mill science fiction and high fantasy (“The Centauri Device,” “The Pastel City,” and to a lesser extent “A Storm of Wings”), Harrison produced the best piece in his ‘Viriconium’ saga, a short novel called “In Viriconium.” After that, his next novel was “Climbers,” which I assert to be not only Harrison’s best novel but one of the best novels you or I are ever likely to read.

What’s it about? Rock climbing in the north of England in the early eighties. Am I interested in rock climbing? No. Does it matter? Not at all. Harrison’s genius is that he has found a way to compress mundane existence into an amazingly rich reading experience. The key word here is compression. There isn’t a loose sentence or paragraph in “Climbers”; it’s as taut and lean as a climber on a bare rock face. Somehow, Harrison manages to turn everyday life into something worth reading about. After reading “Climbers” for the fourth or perhaps fifth time, I’m still not entirely sure how he does it. And the results are extraordinary.

The prose in “Climbers” is exquisite. Harrison has a way of describing things in exact detail without getting bogged down in insignificance. The language is as precise and emotionless as a scalpel cutting through flesh. Harrison has a gift for describing environments and states of mind. We are introduced to a range of colourful characters, who enliven what might otherwise have been a sterile novel: Normal, the dithering ex-employee of High Adventure; Sankey, the aging climbing icon, eccentric and parsimonius; Gaz, the young butcher; Mick, the gloomy steeplejack, and each of them is memorable.

The novel’s narrator Mike (which is the author’s first name), is ‘recovering’ from a failed marriage, a flight which takes him to the north of England and the world of rock climbing. That’s about all you can say for the plot of “Climbers,” incidentally. If there is a narrative in the normal sense at all, then it is one that skips backward and forward in time repeatedly. I liken the effect to the process of remembering, with its alinear movement along lines of association, not chronology. In theory, the novel moves forward in time from ‘Winter,’ through ‘Spring,’ ‘Summer’ and ‘Fall’ (the last of which is rendered in American terminology for a specific reason), but in reality, we are moving backward and sideways in time as well. This is a book that demands careful reading.

There are shades of J.G. Ballard here, in the way that the novel’s narrator seeks to find the magic of the everyday, to somehow travel through reality. An important early passage serves to highlight this point:

“When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. [...] After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence.” (p 18 )

Hypnotised by the ghostly reflections in a window of people in a cafeteria, onto the backdrop of a rainy day, the eight year-old Mike walks straight into a plate glass window. And this is what “Climbers” is about: a failed attempt to travel through reality to somewhere more magical and more real.

Harrison uses an effective but sometimes startling technique I have decided to dub the ‘imaginative leap,’ in which the narrator’s imagination enters the secret worlds of other characters, such as when Sankey stops to speak to a young retarded boy. Harrison seems to be saying that existence is about the actual specific details that are in front of your face every moment of your life, precisely the things we normally tune out in pursuit of whatever we think we are doing or achieving. This results in some astonishingly specific passages that cannot be seen to be representative of anything other than themselves. And yet the author makes extensive use of metaphor in the course of his narrative.

As I’ve already said, nothing much happens in “Climbers,” and yet there’s never a dull moment. We get a handful of climbing stories (and a lot of climbing terminology to boot), as well as stories about the various characters Mike meets. Interspersed with this is a narrative about Mike’s earlier marriage to a woman called Pauline, whose two year-old daughter Nina lives with her grandmother. The material appears to have been arranged in chaotic, even bewildering fashion, and yet there’s an inner logic to everything here. As Mike says:

“How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination.” (p 58-9)

The climax of “Climbers,” if there is one at all, is Sankey’s death from a fall on an easy climb. His mysterious death reminds me of nothing if not Paul Baumer’s demise at the end of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in that he dies alone from something seemingly innocuous. But this is an inscrutable book, and I can appreciate why some readers might not see the point of it at all. To demonstrate just how inscrutable this book can be, consider Nina’s accident. The child falls through a glass coffee table, and a shard of glass stabs her in the small of the back. This has already happened at some unspecified time in the past. Mike retells how he spent time at the hospital with Pauline and the child’s grandmother, and that Pauline insisted on not waiting for news of Nina’s condition at the hospital. When Mike confronts her about this, she rebuffs him. The next sentence says, “We went back to London by train a few days later.” (p. 90) The reader, already accustomed to the way this novel jumps around, puts the incident out of mind, only to read these words much later in the book:

“‘Nina was never that spoiled,’ she [Pauline] maintained, ‘though I daresay my mother would have liked her to be.’ She went on to describe a dream of her own – ‘I had this while Nina was still alive” – in which she had seen the little girl standing alone in a corner of an empty room, pulling faces at nothing.” (p 169)

Shortly after this, the narrative moves on to something else. So are we to assume that Nina died from her injuries? Surely this would merit a mention earlier? This infuriates me for some reason (possibly because I have a two year-old daughter myself), but it is symptomatic of how this novel works. Incidents are partially recalled, only to be interrupted be other events, and then picked up again later. Overall, I would say that this technique works extremely well.

There’s something very odd about Mike’s behaviour in “Climbers.” He is friendly and yet detached, observant but often preoccupied. It’s an eerie novel, actually, and one that partially eludes my understanding. But this is a truly brilliant novel, and Harrison is a brilliant writer, as writers such as China Mieville, Iain Banks, Clive Barker, Jonathan Carroll and Graham Joyce have observed. “Climbers” may not be Harrison’s most well-known novel, nor his most successful (the book was out of print until it was reissued in 2004), but I have read them all, and I say that it is his best.

Book Review – Hunter’s Run by Dozois/Martin/Abraham

*This review is chock full of spoilers. You have been warned.*

Collaborative SF novels aren’t all that common, and novels by three authors are virtually unheard of. At first glance, this seems like an unlikely triumvirate: Dozois, the famous editor; Martin, the successful fantasy author; and Abraham, the newcomer. But at at the heart of this story there is something that every SF novel needs, and not that many have: a really, really good idea.

The idea goes like this. What if it an alien species could take a small part of a human being-a finger perhaps-and grow it into a replica of the original human? Would that replica be more like the original human, or more like the aliens that created it? Could you use the replica to hunt the original, given that it would share the original’s memories, desires and ambitions? That is the idea of “Hunter’s Run,” and it’s a beauty. At first, this does not appear to be an especially promising story. Basically we’ve got a fairly run of the mill SF future on what might as well be called ‘Mexico-world’ (the capital is Deigotown). And our protagonist, Ramon Espejo, is a whisky-quaffing, knife wielding, girlfriend-beating asshole. First we see him hanging around in a strange limbo world (a harbinger of things to come), and then we get to scene him in his ordinary life. Unfortunately for Ramon, he gets in a drunken fight which leads to the death of someone important, so he has to split for the wilderness.

And there’s a LOT of wilderness on this newly-colonised planet, so much that Ramon doesn’t feel he has much to fear from the relevant authorities. He might even make some money if he can find gold or something even better in the virgin hills…It isn’t long before he sets off a charge that accidentally causes a landslide, revealing a long buried alien structure. At this point my brain is screaming ‘cliche alert!’ but it’s okay-this is an interesting twist on an old motif. Some strange spinning thing comes out of the hillside in pursuit of Ramon. And then he gets captured, or does he? More on this shortly.

Somewhere in here we get the traditional SF ‘backfilling,’ in which, one way or another, we get some kind of narrative about what type of SF future we are inhabiting. In “Hunter’s Run,” there are various species of advanced aliens which use humans as kind of advanced recon teams, sending them out to backwater planets so that they can set up some infrastructure. Not exactly a new idea, but fairly refreshing nonetheless. In this universe, aliens are to humans as Americans are to Mexicans in our current time. And the fact that Ramon is both a human and a Mexican makes him doubly underprivileged. Hence his anger and frustration. This ‘backfilling’ goes across quite smoothly, because the authors manage to make the unfolding of this information relevant to the story’s main plot.

After Ramon’s encounter with the alien spinning thing, which destroys his ‘bubbletent’ and his ‘van,’ we presume that he has been captured and put in a dark void place. We get to see him awakening from this limbo and led through a strange and disorientating underground alien city. Incidentally, I didn’t think this undercity was done especially well, but no matter. It transpires that Ramon is to hunt for another human that has discovered the alien lair, and that he will be accompanied by an alien called Maneck. Even worse, Ramon is on a kind of ‘flesh leash,’ a bit like an umbilical cord. And so we get to the main narrative of the novel, which involves Ramon and the alien Maneck in pursuit of the unnamed human.

And then we get the really, really good idea, which elevates this from a fairly routine ‘B grade’ novel into something genuinely interesting. The man they are chasing is Ramon Espejo. What does this mean? It means that the character we have known as Ramon Espejo is in fact a duplicate, whom we discover has been created from the original Ramon’s finger (which had been severed in an earlier battle). The duplicate shares Ramon’s memories, but he is also partly alien, in that he has been spawned in some godawful vat. This is sophisticated and intriguing SF all of a sudden. And then we get into the complex world of motivations. What will the duplicate do? Should he sacrifice himself so that the ‘real’ Ramon might escape? Work together with him to defeat the duplicate’s captor? Or kill the original and replace him? The idea of clones or duplicates is not a new one, but I do believe that this is an original variation on the theme. And so the hero of “Hunter’s Run” is not the original Ramon, not the duplicate, but the main idea. A lot of classical SF is like this.

I won’t divulge any more of the plot, except to say that this is an interesting tale and one well worth reading. I still don’t think this is ‘A grade’ stuff, not really, but it’s pretty solid throughout. My main criticism of ‘Hunter’s Run’ is that the setting is overly generic, almost to the point where it’s irrelevant. But the plot is a ripper, and as such it gets the thumbs up from me.

Book Review – Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Part of the joy of books, for me, is in the hunt. Discovering new authors, tracking down their books in secondhand bookstores or publisher’s discard piles, reading reviews of their work on the net – all of this is almost as fun as actually reading. As I’m a poor teacher, I can rarely afford to buy new books. Consequently, I almost never buy new books by authors I’m not familar with. Furthermore, I make sure I research the novel in question on the internet first, to make sure I’m likely to like it. All of this serves to defeat what bookstores are supposed to be about, namely going in, picking up a title that looks interesting, handing over some money and leaving. And here’s the rub. Books in this country are FAR too expensive. These days a b size paperback (i.e. a small or ‘mass market’ paperback) will set you back around $22. An a size, or trade paperback (i.e. the hardback sized paperbacks) cost in the vicinity of $30-35. Considering that most novels (with the exception of epic fantasy) are somewhere in the order of 250-400 pages long, this does not necessarily represent a sound investment. Therefore, I just don’t buy new books by new authors. This is surely poison to the entire publishing industry, and I doubt I’m the only person who can’t afford these kind of prices.

Given all of this, then, I was trawling the remainder stand at Collins Booksellers in Midland on Saturday in the hope of finding something interesting. For those who don’t understand what remaindered books are all about, here’s the deal. Publishers print a certain number of copies of a novel, and then if the print run fails to sell out in a given time (usually a few months), then the book is ‘remaindered.’ This means that the books are sent back to the publisher, where they are marked, usually with a vertical line across the top of the book. Then they end up on these discard piles at the front of your local bookstore, where the price is drastically reduced. I’m fairly sure that remaindered books don’t net the author any royalties, which is a shame for them, but it’s generally good news for the book-buyer. While there isn’t the selection of titles you’d find on the main shelves of a bookstore, you can expect to pay $5 for a small paperback and perhaps $10 for a large one. This is the kind of price books ought to cost. If books were as cheap as this, then I suspect the publishing industry, and reading communities in general, wouldn’t be in such a parlous state.

It was on that discard stand at Collins that I picked up two books, “Hunter’s Run” by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham, and “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell. Some people hate trade paperbacks, but I love them. Only problem is, $30-35 is an absurd amount of money to hand over for something that might take me four to six hours to read, depend on the length. $9, however, is much more like it. And I’m glad I did pick up “Black Swan Green” because it was a very interesting book indeed. Upon completing it, I did some research on David Mitchell, a British author of three other novels, a couple of which were shortlisted for the Booker prize. “Black Swan Green” was so good that I am now determined to track down copies of Mitchell’s earlier novels, even if I have to…ahem…pay full price for them. And this is why publishing is broken. If books are this expensive relative to the amount of money one is likely to have in one’s pocket, then said reader isn’t likely to take a chance on a new author. If not for the remainder pile, which publishers and authors alike regard as a sort of ‘last chance saloon,’ then I would not have heard of “Black Swan Green” or David Mitchell at all.

I get the idea that “Black Swan Green” is a departure for David Mitchell from the kind of book he usually seems to write. Mitchell’s third novel, “Cloud Atlas,” is apparently an epic, genre-spanning, time-hopping saga, with something like six different narrators. This sounds very interesting. But “Black Swan Green” is a fairly straightforward tale of a thirteen year old boy in early eighties Britain. There are 13 chapters, set in 13 months spanning the period Jan 1982 to Jan 1983. The boy, Jason Taylor, lives in a Worcestershire town with the unlikely name of Black Swan Green. So this is a coming of age story, except that it deals with the period leading up to adolescence, rather than the normal age of sixteen or seventeen that usually seems to be favoured. Jason has a stammer which he calls ‘Hangman,’ an older sister named Julia, and a lot of difficulties with the local bullies. All of this reminds me of my own childhood in England, although I left those gloomy shores long before I was Jason Taylor’s age.

What is it that makes a book interesting? Sometimes it’s a cracking plot, sometimes an author’s ability to create interesting characters or memorable dialogue. Sometimes it’s harder to define. I’m wondering about this because on the surface, “Black Swan Green” shouldn’t be an especially interesting novel. I mean, it’s about a young boy going to a speech therapist, being initiated into a secret society only to be turfed out again, etc etc. And yet this is fascinating. I can only conclude that it must have something to do with the author’s ability to shape ordinary experiene into something memorable. It must be to do with selection of detail. I think of novels as ‘compressed time’ – as though the author has squeezed the oranges that are our months and years into a potent juice called an interesting novel. An author who does this incredibly well at times is another Brit, M. John Harrison. I contend that his novel “Climbers” is one of the greatest in the English language in the last thirty years. What is it about? Well, being unemployed, doing some rock climbing, drinking some coffee. It’s a mystery to me, but “Climbers” is an outstanding novel, and “Black Swan Green” is too.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that I’ve managed to write 1000 words barely mentioning the plot of “Black Swan Green,” but no matter. David Mitchell is surely one of the best writers I have had the pleasure to read in recent years, and as soon as I can find two pennies to rub together, I will send off for a copy of “Cloud Atlas.”

Book Review – Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak

Clifford Simak is a name that few people these days have heard, whether they profess to be readers of SF or not. This is sad. I know about Simak because I’ve spent a lot of time studying the history of the genre. Briefly, Simak was an American writer of gentle, pastoral SF (if that sounds confusing, try one of his books – they aren’t confusing at all). Best remembered for two books, “City” and “Way Station,” Simak is mostly out of print these days, as are most but not all of the popular writers of his era (roughly from the forties through the sixties). Sad to say, I hadn’t read a Simak novel before I picked up “Ring Around the Sun,” which has been sitting on my bookshelf for perhaps five years.

Firstly, Simak writes in an appealingly straightforward fashion, both in terms of his sentences and the plot of his novel. This is clear writing, easy to digest. And the plot is straightforward almost to the point of childishness, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. In addition to the transparent writing, Simak’s chapters are very short (51 of them in a 200 page novel), and there’s rarely a difficult or boring passage. This is important, because I tend to get bored easily when reading, especially when the story itself isn’t amazingly interesting as such. But what “Ring Around the Sun” lacks in action, it makes up for in descriptive passages and the general good-naturedness of everything here.

Jay Vickers is a lonely man with a vague sense of dis-ease. He doesn’t have any close friends except for a kindly neighbour by the name of Horton Flanders. And something odd is happening: the market is being flooding with some exceptional and unique items: razors that never need replacing, light bulbs that never go out, a Forever car to replace all normal vehicles. Something is afoot, but Jay doesn’t know what it is. Consequently, the first half of the book is a gentle mystery, in which Vickers tries to find out what is happening around him. The pace is sedate but not slow, and characters are warmly drawn.

Horton Flanders disppears suddenly and Jay is blamed for the murder. A lynch mob forces him to leave town, but not before he gets a note from Flanders telling him to ‘rediscover his roots.’ This note leads Jay back to his hometown, where he discovers that the whole area is laying fallow (I have neglected to mention that super carbohydrates have virtually solved the need to grow crops). He goes back to his old house, where he finds a spinning top in an old barn. I kid you not-this spinning top becomes the pivot around which the novel turns. It’s even featured on the front cover of the edition I bought. And that’s a first for me in years of reading SF: a spinning top as a major plot device.

There isn’t a plot so much as a series of intuitive gropings on Jay Vickers’ part. I say ‘intuitive’ because the concept of intuition becomes extremely important in “Ring Around the Sun.” It turns out that intuition is in fact a kind of higher thinking ability that only a handful of people possess. I found this stimulating as it deals with one of the key questions for secular thinkers such as myself: how to explain intuition, premonitions etc? In response, Simak gives us telepathy, mutants, androids, and alternate Earths. And that’s where “Ring Around the Sun” began to lose its shine, for this reader at least.

I won’t explain too much of the plot of the second half. I did read it, but not with great interest. It transpires that there are perhaps millions of alternate Earths, most of which are apparently devoid of human life. And travelling to these other Earths is as simple as looking at the spinning top and wondering where the colours go…it’s a nice fantasy, to think that there might be enough Earths for us all to live like kings, but it’s a wish fulfillment fantasy par excellence. I am deliberately ignoring much of the plot here, which deals with the shenanigans of a man named Crawford, who represents big government on our own Earth. There is a conflict brewing between the mutant world-hoppers and the Earth-bound government men. All right. It works out in the end.

While “Ring Around the Sun” didn’t exactly hit the spot for me, I was interested enough to keep reading. Simak reminds me a little of Philip K Dick without the paranoia and wild inventiveness. I will read “City” next and see if I like that better.

Book Review – Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch by Simon Haynes

“Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch” is the fourth installment in Simon Haynes’ series, and it’s another strong showing for Hal, Clunk and co. For the uninitiated, Hal Spacejock is an interstellar freight trader running cargo to and fro, but he rarely has enough credits for a nice meal, or a change of clothes for that matter. Clunk is Hal’s robot sidekick, and much of the humour stems from the banter between them. There’s nothing very futuristic about the “Hal Spacejock” series, but what it lacks in gee-whiz it makes up for in laugh out loud.

“No Free Lunch” sees Hal and Clunk arriving on the planet of Dismolle (a pun on dismal perhaps?), which resembles nothing if not a Mandurah retirement village, replete with tea cosies and knitted sweaters and whatever else. There isn’t much crime on Dismolle, so little in fact that the Peace Force consists of a brain-dead robot and a beautiful young recruit by the name of Harriet Walsh. Hal thinks it’s his lucky day, and it is: for once, something goes right for him from the start, and Ms Walsh invites him to dinner.

Unfortunately, dinner is to be served in the presence of Miranda Morgan, a high-profile Dismollean who wants Hal to take a shipment of goods to the planet Forzen for her. Harriet Walsh and Miranda Morgan loathe one another, so it’s only natural that Harriet should end up with an assignment to Forzen herself. Somehow, Clunk has been conned into carving the roast. This is exactly how the “Hal Spacejock” novels work. The plot is cleverly engineered so that the lives of seemingly unrelated characters are thrown together in the most unlikely of circumstances which, on reflection, seem perfectly logical. And, of course, trouble is never far away.

“No Free Lunch” offers us the kind of helter-skelter storyline we’ve come to expect from this series. There’s a familiar-faced stowaway, a lecherous rival for Harriet Walsh’s affections, a mine complete with some very unusual miners, and even a murder mystery to boot. Much of the action takes place on the very cold planet of Forzen (ah…Frozen?). Haynes sketches in just enough detail so that the reader can picture the setting, but not so much as to slow the story down. Settings in Spacejock novels are usually rather generic anyway. Like in Star Wars, where you’ve got the Desert planet, the City planet, the Jungle planet etc., in “No Free Lunch” we have the Dismal planet, the Frozen planet and so on.

Haynes has cranked up the ‘ribald meter’ a notch or two as well, and there are plenty of coy sexual references and double entendres. You could hardly call this racy, however; it’s all good, clean fun. Things tend to go wrong for Hal Spacejock most of the time, and the situation in “No Free Lunch” is often grim indeed. A common theme in these books is for Hal’s ship, the Volante, to be stolen or be otherwise out of action, and for Hal and Clunk to be chased around by gangs of thugs and other shifty characters. “No Free Lunch” follows this pattern, but takes the sense of danger a little further than previous books.

This sense of danger is important, because after four Spacejock novels, the reader cares for Hal and Clunk’s welfare about all else. In addition, “No Free Lunch” develops the character of Harriet Walsh in a way that earlier Spacejock novels didn’t. Another review mentioned the possibility of adding Miss Walsh as a regular character in the series. While it is true that Harriet is the best developed of the secondary characters in the Spacejock series so far, and while I can understand that readers might desire to give Hal a ‘happy ending,’ I think much of the humour comes from Hal’s bachelorhood. But it remains to be seen what role Miss Harriet might play in future Spacejock novels. And this is where the Spacejock series rises above most humorous SF: it manages to be amusing and genuinely warm at the same time.

One of the best things about this series is that each book stands alone as an individual story. Therefore, it is quite possible to start with “Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch” without having read the earlier books. There are references to the earlier books, of course, but nothing essential. However, you might find that upon completing this book, you feel the urge to read books 1, 2 and 3. The Hal Spacejock series is highly amusing and addictive fare, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.