mtvessel | Recent Entries

Oct 2020
A Buzz in the Meadow - Dave Goulson – Vintage, 2014
* * * *
I really enjoyed Goulson's previous book A Sting in the Tail, but with its focus on the highly charismatic bumblebee it was, entomologically speaking, an easy sell. This book expands the canvas to other members of the insect world, using as its focus Chez Nauche, a derelict French farm that Goulson has turned into a haven for wildlife (much to the bemusement of the locals). Can he make the sex lives of deathwatch beetles and the disgusting regurgitatory habits of bluebottles as compelling a read as the lives and times of more attractive insects? Yes he can, though it's only fair to warn you that the final few chapters may leave you feeling angry and depressed.
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Oct 2020
Grave Secrets - Alice James – Solaris, 2020
[Disclosure: This book was written by a friend, so this is more an introduction than a review.]

In S.A. Wakefield's wonderful children's book Bottersnikes and Gumbles, there is a character called Tinkingumble who has Tinks, bright ideas that sound like a spoon tapping a glass. At one point in the story, Tinkingumble's faculty gets stuck until an accident causes it to unstick, causing him to tink wildly like a cash register, and he has to sit under a bush to sort out all the good ideas. This book feels a bit like that.

Welcome to the world of Lavington Windsor, Staffordshire estate agent by day, zombie-raising necromancer by night (she has never found a way of making her hobby pay). Toni, as she is known to her friends, is a scatty redhead with a nice line in witty banter and an unfortunate love life. Balancing her compulsion to raise the dead with her day job is hard enough, but when she is introduced to Oscar, an eligible vampire who is looking for a place to live with his coterie, things get a whole lot more complicated.
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Sep 2020
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter - Alexis Hall – Ace, 2019
* * *
There is something about the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that seems to attract fan fiction writers like bees to buddleia. This is a bit strange if you think about it. On the one hand you have Holmes, whom many would argue is more a logic machine than a fully rounded human being, and on the other you have Watson, who, apart from his bizarre and not entirely honourable habit of chronicling his friend's activities for commercial gain, is as boringly conventional a character as any in fiction. I guess this explains why so many writers feel the urge to come up with spicier variants on the Holmes/Watson relationship (for example, The Oxford Despoiler). How successful you regard these takes to be probably depends on how much you are invested in the original pairing. This one, which envisages Holmes as a powerful sorceress called Shaharazad Haas and Watson as an uptight trans man called John Wyndham, will certainly not please if you care deeply about the originals because it largely abandons any pretence of mirroring its inspiration within the few first pages. The fantasy novel that is built around them, however, is quite entertaining.
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Jul-Sep 2020
The Wretched - Victor Hugo, tr. Christine Donougher – Penguin Classics, 2013
* *
This book is more commonly known by its French title of Les Misérables, and even more commonly through the musical which is based on it. I chose it because I wanted to read its famous depiction of the 1832 June Rebellion. What I hadn't spotted was that it is enormously long - just over 1300 pages in this edition, which makes it shorter than War and Peace, but not by much - and that the reason for this is the lengthy opinion pieces in which the author engages. Some critics love Hugo's discursive approach to novel writing, but I found it infuriating, for much the same reasons as I dislike post-modern writers like Milan Kundera.
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Jun 2020
Dark Eden - Chris Beckett – Corvus, 2012 (kindle edition)
* * *
I always think of Beckett as the social worker science fiction writer. All his previous stories have had an earth-based setting, albeit transformed by alien invasion, religious conflict or whatever, which allowed him to embed his characters' actions in a recognisable social matrix, giving them emotional weight. The pure science fictional location of this one, a planet alone in space without a neighbouring sun, perhaps explains why this lost colony story felt relatively thin to me, despite the interesting embedded critique of heroic saviour narratives. Though the similarities to a book that I really disliked didn't help.
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May 2020
The Unspoken Name - A.K. Larkwood – Tor, 2020
* * *
The map for this book is like no other fantasy cartography that I have seen. It consists of a set of scraps of paper with murder investigation-style pins and threads linking the very sparse names and icons. On the one hand, it is a strikingly original presentation that is particularly appropriate for the many-worlds-joined-by-gates setting. On the other, it is somewhat rough-hewn and lacking in detail, elegance and craft. It is a good metaphor for the book as a whole.
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Apr 2020
Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennett - Jo Fletcher Books, 2018 (ebook edition)
* * * *
Maybe it's just my particular sampling, but an awful lot of recent fantasy works seem to have had female thieves, rogues or assassins as lead characters. Some examples: Brandon Sanderson's Vin in the Mistborn novels, S.A. Chakraborty's Nahri, P. Djeli Clark's Creeper, V.E. Schwab's Lila in A Darker Shade of Magic, A.K. Larkwood's Csorwe (review forthcoming!) and Lila Bellaqua from His Dark Materials. I find this a bit depressing. I get that in a traditionally male-dominated mediaeval fantasy environment, making a female protagonist a small-time crook is one of the few ways to give her both freedom and agency whilst allowing for the inevitable "special destiny" plot development, but shouldn't we be starting to tell different stories by now? It says something for the small numbers of roles that women are permitted in big commercial fantasies that the only female equivalents of Gandalf that I can think of in terms of power and accorded respect are Galadriel, Granny Weatherwax and David Eddings' Polgara, for goodness' sake. And stories with female knightly or amazonian protagonists aren't exactly two-a-penny either. Making your female protagonist small and weak might be a way of encouraging reader sympathy, but it's a subtle form of misogyny.

Well, tough luck, because here's yet another one - Robert Jackson Bennett's Sancia in his new "Founders" trilogy. Fortunately, Bennett's talent for hitting on good fantasy ideas has struck again, and makes this book an enjoyable and compelling read.
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Apr 2020
Aberystwyth Mon Amour - Malcolm Pryce – Bloomsbury, 2001
* *
This is a book that should have worked for me but didn't. Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's premier private eye, is hired by local beauty Myfanwy Montez to investigate the death of her cousin, Evans the Boot. He is the latest in a series of schoolboys to disappear. Could their teacher, Mr Lovespoon, have something to do with it?

As you can probably tell, this book falls firmly into the sub-genre that I call cutesy noir, in which seedy investigations by a world-weary detective take place in a humorous or fantastical setting. Other examples include Terry Pratchett's Guards novels and Colin Cotterill's Killed at the Whim of a Hat. Unfortunately, for me this is a genre-meld that just doesn't work. The re-purposing of Welsh kitsch to darker purposes is an entertaining concept that would make for a good light comic fantasy (imagine what Diana Wynne Jones could have done with it), but when your plot is an investigation into the grimmer aspects of human character, the jokes are bound to fall flat. Conversely, a good noir tale relies on having compelling characters with strong reasons for what they do, but that is not really possible when any motivational plausibility or depth is undermined by whimsical world-building. The end result is a book that is too dark to be funny and too superficial to be interesting.

Mar 2020
Exhalation - Ted Chiang – Picador, 2019
* * * *
It's been - urk - almost fourteen years since I last reviewed a book by Ted Chiang. At the time I expressed the hope that his next one would be a novel. No such luck, alas - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a story in this new collection rather than a stand-alone. It seems that Chiang decided that his metier was the short story and that was where he was going to stay. That said, several of the stories are considerably longer than the ones in Stories of your Life and Others, with a couple approaching novella length. Sadly, those are the least effective ones in the collection, so his choice to avoid the longer literary forms is probably the right one.
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Feb 2020
Anaximander - Carlo Rovelli, tr. Marion Lignana Rosenberg – Westholme Publishing, 2011
* * * *
The first thing to say is that this is not really a biography because almost nothing is known about Anaximander's life and his writings have been lost. Instead, Rovelli uses his ideas - in particular, his vision of the earth as a cylinder hanging in a void "because of its indifference" - as a starting point for an investigation of what makes scientific thought different from other forms of knowledge. The conclusions he comes to will be familiar to anyone versed in the Western liberal tradition of academic discourse and probably won't do much to persuade those who have already rejected them. But they are worth stating nonetheless.
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Feb 2020
Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik – Pan, 2019
* * *
This is another Slavic-influenced fairy tale that starts off as a clever spin on Rumplestiltskin. Miryam is the daughter of a uselessly kind-hearted moneylender who takes on his debt collection duties to buy medicine for her ill mother and proves to have a talent for it. Her ability to strike profitable deals attracts the attention of the Prince of the Staryk, an ice elf with a gold obsession. Meanwhile, in another part of the kingdom, a nobleman schemes to marry his daughter Irina to Mirnatius, the handsome young Tsar. But Mirnatius has a dark secret, as Irina soon discovers.

While I enjoyed the story, it didn't appeal to me as much the author's previous work, Uprooted. The story structure seemed less clean, with the Rumplestiltskin elements supplanted by a different tale that didn't dovetail entirely elegantly. And the somewhat male-hostile gaze evident in Uprooted is more forcefully expressed here. Of course I have absolutely no problem with the main viewpoint characters being strong young women who are doing it for themselves - indeed, hurrah! - but the absence of a single likeable or competent man in the cast, while an understandable reaction to the othering mysogyny of most traditional fairy tales, seemed a step too far in the other direction.

Jan 2020
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday - Saad Z. Houssain – Tor.com, 2019
* * * *
I enjoyed my previous encounter with this author but found the book tonally uneven. This one is rather better, successfully fusing Arabian Nights-style djinni magic with a well-developed science fiction thought experiment set in a future Kathmandu. It's quite funny, too.
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Jan 2020
Lethal White - Robert Galbraith – Sphere, 2018
* * *
If there had been any doubt about the true identity of Robert Galbraith, it will have have been dispelled by this book, which has the same level of bloat as the later Harry Potter novels. It is getting on for six hundred pages long and it takes fifty pages before we have even a sniff of the plot. Once it gets going there is an enjoyable if over-complicated plot involving insufferable MPs, home counties horsey types and hypocritical left-wing agitators. But Strike's and Robin's unresolved romantic tension, and the consequences it has on their relationships, takes up far too much of the narrative.

As I have said before, I like the fact that e-readers make the short-form novel commercially viable, but having read a number of them this year, I can see that the format leads to a number of common problems. You can take as read the criticisms that all the books in this list were too short, with simplistic plots and characters that did not have the narrative space to become especially rich and memorable. However, I think it is important to acknowledge and encourage them, because they offer a mouthpiece for perspectives different from those of the white middle-class writers that have dominated SF and fantasy up to now.
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Sep 2019
The City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty – HarperVoyager, 2017
* *
This book was an airport read for a punishingly early flight which may explain why I forgot all about it until I saw it in my e-reader the other day. It's a perfectly serviceable Arabian fantasy featuring Nahri, an off-the-peg female thief in Cairo who accidentally summons a dodgy djinn called Dara and gets mixed up in some overly complex magical politics. The use of Islamic and Middle Eastern folklore is interesting, but the descriptions of fantastical locations are very bland and the relationship between Nahri and Dara, where she basically effaces herself to please him, left a bad taste in the mouth.

Dec 2019
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins – Joe Books inc, 2015 (kindle edition)
* * *
This book reminded me a lot of its near contemporary, Dracula, in the way that it promises to break apart the conventions of a Victorian novel and then spends an inordinate amount of time ensuring that it does not do so. This is not entirely fair - Collins is a much better writer than Bram Stoker - but it is frustrating to see the potential of its first half be utterly wasted in the second.
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Nov 2019
The Best of R.A. Lafferty - R.A. Lafferty ed. Jonathan Strahan – Gollancz, 2019
* * *
One of the great things about SF is its embrace of the short story. There have been some true geniuses in the field - Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Kelly Link and Ted Chiang come immediately to mind. But ask many SF writers, and they will mention a name that is not so well-known: R.A. Lafferty. His general lack of recognition suggests that, like dark chocolate or continental coffee, he might be something of an acquired taste. Having read this book of what are generally regarded as his best stories, I have to say that this would seem to be the case. I enjoyed his original ideas and the unique ways in which he approached them, but they didn't have the emotional oomf that I found in the writers mentioned above.
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Oct 2019
An American Story - Christopher Priest – Gollancz, 2018
* *
A big disappointment, this. I've read three or four previous books by the author and enjoyed his ongoing obsession with intersecting realities. Internet conspiracy theories and the whole concept of "alternative facts" would seem an excellent basis for a story using Priest's particular talents for keeping the reader guessing about what is going on. Sadly this turns out to be a conventional conspiracy thriller, but with very little action and consequently no thrills.
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Sep 2019
A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge – Gollancz, 2016
* * * *
This is a prequel to A Fire upon the Deep and is set in a smaller, more human corner of the universe. I have to say that I liked it a lot better, mainly because the fundamental premise - a first contact with a species living on a planet orbiting a very unusual star - felt much more plausible compared to the situational laws of physics of the zones of thought. Not entirely, mind, but enough that I could suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the story.
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Jul 2019
Less - Andrew Sean Greer – Abacus, 2017 (Kindle edition)
* *
So apparently this won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I have no idea why. It has some nice turns of phrase, but very little else to recommend it.

The basic premise is entertaining enough - an accident-prone writer about to turn fifty goes on a world tour to avoid attending the marriage of an ex-boyfriend for whom he still has feelings - but there isn't a lot more to it than that. You can get a feel for the situations he finds himself in from the first chapter, which is set at an SF convention in New York, where Less is waiting to meet a publicist who will escort him to a panel with a famous swords and sorcery writer in front of an audience of fans. However the clock he is looking at has stopped (a fact which, implausibly, he does not recognise for over fifteen minutes), and the publicist thinks that she is meeting a woman, for the (somewhat racist) reason that she is Japanese. Mild social embarrassment results, which is increased when it turns out that the famous writer a) has food poisoning, b) is not into cosplay as Less had been led to believe.

And so it continues, with Less moving to a new country with each chapter and becoming embroiled in similar incidents. He also has a number of affairs with men who are considerably younger than he is, which struck me as more likely to be authorial wish-fulfillment than a realistic depiction of gay relationships. The authorial voice, which I can only describe as ironic third person present, is typical of modern literary novels, though there is a sort of explanation for it at the end.

To be fair, there are probably some disappointed expectations here, though the lazy trope of the author protagonist should have been a warning sign. I got it because of a recommendation that it was "hilarious", which for me it most certainly was not. This is a relatively short book, but 250 pages of a basically comfortably-off writer feeling sorry for himself, getting into scrapes and having lots of sex was more than enough.

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Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Recent Entries

Following the Science?

Tinkingumble

The Sorceress and the Prude

The Poor and the Wicked

Show Your Working

People with Tusks

Writing that Alters Reality

Cutesy Noir

The Little Bit of Ivory

A Cylinder in a Void

Hot and Cold

Karma will get you in the End

Harry Potter Syndrome

Novella Round-up 2019

Forgettable Djinns

A Prototype Conspiracy Thriller

Mark Twain meets Isaac Asimov

Alternative Facts

Mid-American Aliens

Ironic Third Person Present