mtvessel | Recent Entries

Nov 2023 - Jan 2024
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, tr. David Coward – Oxford World's Classics, 2008
* * *
This is an oddly structured book. The first 200-odd pages is an exciting adventure tale starring Edmond Dantès, a dashing midshipman promoted beyond his years for his heroic qualities, and featuring evil conspirators, lovers torn asunder, Napoleonic spies, family secrets, a prison break and an Arabian Nights-style quest for fabulous treasure. But then it bizarrely veers into social comedy set in Rome at carnival time, introducing two characters, Albert de Morcerf and Franz d'Epinay, who have nothing to do with what's happened previously, and featuring what is perhaps the most insouciant kidnapping by bandits in literature. The rest of the book (around 800 pages) remains firmly focused on the French upper classes, with the action transferring to post-Napoleonic Paris where Edmond hatches a set of improbable plots (in even more improbable disguises) to ensnare and bring down those who have wronged him.

Apparently this was an editorial decision. Dumas wrote the opener at the request of his publisher to explain Dantès' motivations, and it evidently got away from him. It's a shame because it is by far the most compelling part of the book.
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Oct 2023
Some Desperate Glory – Emily Tesh – Orbit, 2023
* * * *
In my previous review of this author's work, I expressed the hope that she would try something at novel-length so that her characters could breathe a little. I'm pleased to say that she has delivered. This is a thoughtful novel about a soldier learning that the universe is not what she thought, and what it lacks in subtlety is made up for in good characterisation, world-building, and plot.
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Jan-Mar, Aug-Sep 2023
Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare – Isaac Asimov – Wings Books, 1970
* * * *
So this is a bit outrageous. It is a 1500-page commentary on all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays and two epic poems, written by an author most famous for stories about robots and intergalactic politics. What could a science fiction writer possibly have to add to the centuries of analysis and criticism that have been lavished on these texts? I can almost hear the sneers of the literary establishment from here.

Well, to some extent the establishment is right. If you want deep insights into Shakespeare's language or his characters, you won’t find them here. What you will get is a refreshing new approach which focuses on explaining the mythic and historical contexts behind the plays. It’s not entirely successful, but it is interesting.

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Aug 2023
Uproar! - Alice Loxton – Icon Books, 2023
* * *
I have always enjoyed political caricature, particularly when it is imaginatively venomous. Gerald Scarfe's and Steve Bell's drawings of Margaret Thatcher and John Major are engraved on my memory and were a comfort during the long years of Tory rule in my youth. In a functioning democracy, political caricature and satire are essential to express the frustration of those whom the electoral system has left unrepresented, and it is saddening to see that the mainstream expressions of these are becoming increasingly tired and anodyne. While I refuse to accept the definitions of "cancel culture" promulgated by right-wing critics, I do worry that the calling out of violent, racist, misogynistic or homophobic opinions, necessary though that probably is in our social media-dominated landscape, might be inhibiting caricature's crude energy.

This is an interesting history book that is let down by its style. I strongly suspect that it will be unreadable in twenty or thirty years' time. Which is a shame, for its story of the rise of eighteenth century political caricature, and the popular if ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against an overmighty state that it represented, is as relevant today as it was 250 years ago.
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Aug 2023
The Three-body Problem – Liu Cixin, tr. Ken Liu – Head of Zeus, 2014
* * * *
I'm amazed he got away with it. This novel opens with a depiction of the Cultural Revolution that is decidedly less than complimentary towards the Communist Party, emphasising the brutal repression and shaming that forced Chinese academics into conformity. It motivates one of the main characters, Ye Wenjie, though she isn't the main viewport character. That is Wang Miao, a materials scientist who, along with crude but effective detective Da Shi, is co-opted into an international investigation of the deaths by suicide of several prominent scientists. The trail leads to a mysterious organisation known as the ETO and a virtual reality game called Three Body. Wang becomes increasingly obsessed with the game, which may hold the key to the mystery.

This is a hard science fiction novel that reminded me strongly of my teenage explorations of the books of Arthur C. Clarke. Like them, it suffers from cold characterisation and an overly talky plot that only occasionally bursts into action, but the ideas on which it is based are top notch and the Chinese historical and cultural themes make it a more interesting read than its western equivalents. It won't be for everyone, and it's annoying that the book just ends in media res, but I will probably pick up its sequels to see what happens next.

July 2023
Grave Suspicions – Alice James – Solaris, 2023
[Note: This book is written by a friend, so this is more an introduction than a review.]

The final volume in the Toni Windsor series (for now), this novel rings the changes by introducing a locked room murder mystery and an element of witchcraft. Our disaster-prone protagonist is called upon by her policeman brother Will to raise the corpse of Derowen Polkerris, an unpleasant cheese magnate found dead in his study after sacking his housemaid and arguing with his wife. All of his staff hated him so there is no shortage of suspects, but the man himself is annoyingly unhelpful about his demise, being more interested in the flavour of the crisps that Toni has brought with her. But she has no time for that, as she is immediately plunged back into vampire games, with a demand from Benedict the local leader to help a protégé of his, a young vampire called Nicky whose coterie has disappeared.

No prizes for guessing who Toni's next unsuitable love interest is. As with the other two books, there is almost too much plot, meaning that some established characters get short-changed (Bredon the presentable zombie especially - we may never find out why he is so different from the other zombies that Toni raises). It's also a pity that the inspired worldbuilding idea of vampire blood as an acknowledged cure-all has not been further developed. There are so many interesting possibilities - criminal gangs "farming" captured vampires, or vampiric super-soldiers, to name just two off the top of my head - but the constraints of the mystery-with-romance formula mean that none of them has been explored.

That said, the resolutions to the mysteries are particularly satisfying and help to develop the increasingly complex magical background. With the threatened return of an old enemy and the opening up of Toni's back story, there are clearly more adventures for her to have. Let’s hope that we get to read them one day.

Jun 2023
Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes – Rob Wilkins – Doubleday, 2022
* * * *
This is a somewhat unusual biography in that it is partly written by the man himself. The first half, encompassing Pratchett's early years and career up to his decision to become a full-time author after the success of the first four Discworld books, is based on notes for an autobiography that he would occasionally dictate between bouts of writing. For reasons of stylistic consistency Wilkins has expressed them in third person, but it means that the text has moments of uniquely Pratchettian phrasing that read slightly oddly. It's not that Wilkins is in any way a bad writer, but, as he himself would be the first to admit, he is no Pratchett.
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Jun 2023
Grave Danger – Alice James – Solaris, 2023
[Note: This book is written by a friend, so this is more an introduction than a review.]

Hurrah, a new story featuring estate agent-cum-necromancer-cum-reluctant vampire groupie Toni Windsor. It satisfyingly develops some of the good ideas from the previous book.

Set in a well-described wintry Staffordshire, the plot centres around the murder of a girl in the upstairs classroom of a school. There are two main suspects, the janitor Spiky Mikey, who had the means, and local teenage drug dealer Paul Mycroft, who had sneaked into the school at the time of the murder. But why would either of them have done it?

As in Grave Secrets, the mystery is sidelined while developments happen in Toni's love life, which inevitably leads to her becoming increasingly involved in vampiric politics. Without wanting to spoil anything, it is safe to say that readers who were dubious about the wisdom of some of Toni's choices in the previous book will feel well justified by developments in this one. Toni shows rather more self-awareness which makes her much more relatable. And the witty dialogue is as great as ever, with Toni giving no quarter to her arrogant vampiric companions when they try to do her down (should the collective noun for vampires be a "smugness"? I think it should.)

A couple of small criticisms: Some additional suspects would have given the murder mystery more substance. It's a shame that there wasn't much room for development of the necromancer aspects of Toni's character (though there are some interesting revelations). And it's noticeable that all the social power structures that Toni encounters are headed up by men - it would be nice to have a few more agentful female characters. But these are very minor. This book moves things along nicely and I look forward to seeing which unsuitable person Toni falls for next.

Apr 2023
A Brief History of Black Holes - Dr Becky Smethurst – Macmillan, 2022
* * * *
The author is an Oxford University Junior Research Fellow in astrophysics who, in the way of modern academics, is also a YouTuber with over 700,000 subscribers (including me). Her channel covers all of space news, but her research focuses on the super-massive black holes that are now thought to exist at the centres of most galaxies. This is a subject I know little about - supermassive black holes not being a thing during my formative years - so I was interested to see if her breezy and enthusiastic presenting style, which is excellent for explaining the minutiae of scientific papers, would translate well to the page. On the whole, it does, though there were a few annoyances.
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I'm way behind again, so here's a roundup of the lighter books from last year.

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Mar 2023
Black Water Sister – Zen Cho – Macmillan, 2021
* * * *
In a previous book of this author's that I reviewed, I complained that the Malay elements of the story were short-changed by being yoked to a British setting that didn't quite fit. No such problem with this one, which is a modern-day fantasy set in Penang and featuring deities, temples, vengeful ghosts and some deeply traditional family attitudes.
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Feb 2023
Ocean's Echo – Everina Maxwell – Orbit, 2022
* * * *
This novel is set in the same universe as Maxwell's previous book Winter's Orbit, though apart from the cultural convention of gender identification (wood for male, flint for female) and the presence of the space-lane-controlling Resolution, there is very little connection. Well, other than the two main characters, who personality-wise are cookie-cutter copies of the protagonists of the earlier novel. Fortunately, the new situation that Maxwell puts them in is interesting and well worked out, and the story is pleasingly unexpected.
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Jan 2023
Midwinter of the Spirit – Phil Rickman – Corvus, 2011
* * *
This is the second volume in the sequence starring Merrily Watkins, a Church of England vicar with a talent for the uncanny. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first – the plot, which involves possible satanic worship, took a while to get going, and keeping Merrily and her potential love interest Lol on parallel tracks for so long was perhaps not the wisest decision – but the cathedral town setting is well done and the depiction of the ecclesiastical sexism that Merrily has to deal with is, I suspect, still somewhat true to life.

Nov 2022 – Jan 2023
Regency Buck / A Civil Contract / The Grand Sophy – Georgette Heyer – Arrow, 2004/2004/2005
* * * / * * * */ * * * * *
So here are three more Georgette Heyer novels recommended by my friends. They are all good fun and all subvert the romance formula in interesting ways. But for me there was a definite order of enjoyment, and that order was linked to the agency of the female protagonists.
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Nov 2022
The Galaxy and the Ground Within – Becky Chambers – Hodder & Stoughton, 2021
* * * *
Having set her previous book in a location almost entirely populated by humans, Chambers has now gone to the other extreme and has written a novel in which none of the characters are Homo sapiens. Not that you could tell from their emotions and relationships, which include a mother and her adolescent son, an artist returning from exile to see his children, and someone secretly visiting her lover. Adding shells, beaks, and long ape-like arms to the characters doesn’t really make them alien, but nonetheless this is not a bad book.
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Nov 2022
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles – Random House, 2017
* * * *
In the eyes of the western world, Russia has always had an interesting and troubling double nature. On the one hand, there are the incomparable contributions of Russian artists and scientists to world culture – Mendeleev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich to name but a few – but on the other, there is its brutal and inhumane politics, from the oppressive reigns of the Tsars to the horrors of Stalinism. This book has that dichotomy at its heart. The friend who recommended this to me really liked it, describing it as "joyous" despite its portrayal of a Russian aristocrat who, at the height of the 1917 revolution, is sentenced to life-long incarceration in a swanky hotel in Moscow, on pain of being shot if he ventures outside it. And it is – Nicolai Rostov's response to his situation is full of wit and grace despite the unending humiliations that are heaped upon him. But I read it some months after the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which meant that for me it landed rather differently.

This was particularly acute in the discussions concerning the destructive urges of the Russian state. Rostov's poet friend Mishka remarks that "we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created", which the official Osip subsequently argues is the necessary cost for achieving progressive goals such as universal literacy and industrial development. Which is at least arguable when it is elements of your own culture that you are destroying. When it's someone else's, that's very different.

Oct 2022
The Left Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix – Gollancz, 2020
* * *
Not a lot to say about this one as it hasn’t lingered in my mind. It's a young adult fantasy set in an alternative 80s London, where Susan Arkshaw, daughter of a loving but vague and useless mother, is looking for the father whom she has never met. She visits her uncle Frank Thringley, a minor crime lord, only to discover that he has just been killed by a flamboyant young man called Merlin because he was a sipper, a type of vampire, who had gone bad. This is the introduction to the Susan Cooper-ish dark forces that are trying to break through into the modern world, who are opposed by an organisation of not-quite-human warriors (left-handed) and scholars (right-handed) that has decided to run a set of bookshops as a cover. It’s a nice conceit but, like so many young adult novels, substitutes pacy plotting for plausible characterisation.

Sep 2022
Troubled Blood – Robert Galbraith – Sphere Books, 2020
* * *
This novel sees Strike and Robin take on a standard rite of passage in detective fiction, the cold case. While visiting his sick aunt in Cornwall, Strike is approached by Anna, a woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her mother Margot, a London GP, forty years previously. The police think that she was abducted by a now-incarcerated serial killer, Dennis Creed, as she walked from work to see a friend, but he is refusing to say. And there are other suspects and witnesses; the staff at Margot's GP surgery, her husband Roy, who married Anna's nanny suspiciously soon after Margot was declared dead, and an obsessive patient called Steve.

The case itself is fine and has a satisfying resolution, but as in Lethal White, its progress is sandwiched between big dollops of the soap opera of Strike's and Robin's personal lives and their increasingly tedious romantic tension, fatally weakening the pacing. This means that the books are becoming ever more unwieldy – this one is over 900 pages. As, I note, is the next. At least with the Potter series there was a fixed ending. I think it may be time to get off this particular train.

Sep 2022
Alliance Rising – C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher – Daw Books, 2019
* * *
Here's a mildly depressing fact: the Alliance-Union universe, one of my favourite SF settings, is now over 40 years old. I first came to it through the Chanur quartet, a first contact story told from the perspective of cat-like aliens. It was fun but I enjoyed the grittier SF psychodramas that followed - Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and particularly Rimrunners and Hellburner - rather more. These books dotted around the history of the rise of the Merchanter Alliance and its conflicts with the technically advanced but quasi-Nazi Union without ever resolving it one way or the other; this unfinished quality is clearly intended by the author as being closer to the messiness of true history than the neat narratives of epic fantasy or space opera, but is a little frustrating for the reader, who just wants to know what happens next. Sadly, this book, the first Merchanter-Alliance novel for many years, will not tell you.
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Aug 2022
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel – 4th Estate, 2019
* * * *
Historians and soap opera writers share an obsession with storytelling, which is why history as soap opera is a fertile ground for novelists and playwrights. Nowhere is this more evident than in the life and times of Henry VIII and his court. Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons depicts one episode of this history – the downfall of Thomas More – in crude but dramatic terms as a saintly man brought down by his calculating evil nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. But of course real history is much more complicated, knotty and ambiguous than that. Hilary Mantel clearly understood this and it is to her credit that her portrayal of Cromwell and the circles he moved in is consistent with the historical facts while retaining a compelling soap operatic drive.
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Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Recent Entries

Maximum Melodrama

Deradicalisation through Space Magic

The Thing in Itself

Just Tell It Straight

SF with Chinese Characteristics

Ringing the Changes

A Bit of an Oddity

Unsuitable Love Interests

Stellar Trashpiles?

Catchup 2023

Malay Ghosts

Reading and Writing

Sexist Ecclesiasticals

The Importance of Agency

Blandification

Landing Differently

The Origin of Foyles?

Too Much Will They, Won't They

An Old Star

A Tudor Soap Opera