Review: Life After Life - Kate Atikinson

This is a great book.

(Fred, that isn't a review.)

Fine. So:

 Life After Life is a book I wouldn't have encountered without my book club, and - going to be honest - hadn't really heard of Kate Atkinson before it was added to the list. But that's the joy of a book club, and yeah, maybe it throws up more duds than gems, but every now and then?

I mean, it is really, really good. Intricate, complex, intelligent, the characters glow through the premise in a way that kind of reminds me of A.S Byatt. If I had to sum it up in a word, that would be "nourishing" - Life After Life a book that feeds your story sense, that builds a world, a family, a life (we'll come to that later) in a way that is just so satisfying. I'm not often a big fan of realist fiction (again, we'll come to that in a minute), but when it delivers, it triumphs - and this book is a triumph. It's just so well written. Yeah, I will quibble with the faint conservatism that pervades it, with the handling of some of the characters, or the tropes that are leaned upon - but my gods, it's well written and just good to read.

So, the premise is simply this: when the Ursula Todd dies, her life begins again from the start. While she cannot strictly remember her earlier lives, trace memories linger, allowing her to guide this 'replay'. This is the only fantastical aspect of the novel, and Ursula is not the only active agent: her fate is affected to some extent by chance, and the decisions of others. This premise offers quite some commentary in what it means to live our best lives, and how even the smallest decisions can send us on wildly differing courses, making us vastly different people.

But the real strength of Life After Life is not in exploring such questions - rather it is offering us a powerful vision of the various lives one could live in the first half of the twentieth century (limited, of course, by gender, class, sexuality and skin colour.)
[Mild spoilers below] 

Review: In Exile by Alexandra Turney

When I was a child, I wanted to be a Maenad. At about nine years old, Anglican and living in rural England, I read the myth of Orpheus - how he was torn apart and eaten by the followers of Dionysus and thought, "Yep. Reasonable life goal."

Just putting that out there, really.

Anyway, Turney's debut novel, In Exile is fucking gorgeous.

Capturing the stultifying disaffection of fifteen in a city that doesn't fit you, it tells of Dionysus reborn in modern Rome and weaves a captivating story of worship, obsession, and sacred transgression in a world with no space for gods, that spoke to the deep buried, teenage part of me. It's really hard to describe the power of this book, occupying as it does that uncomfortable space between metaphor and fully committed fantastical fiction. It engaged deeply with the implications of godhood and worship with a deity wildly removed from omnibenevolent, monotheistic connotations, while also portraying the deeply familiar experiences of fear and trauma around blackout drunkenness around and boys whom you know are Bad News.

The aftermath, for example, of the first Bacchanal as Grace, Caroline, and Sarah go for coffee is a wonder of the sordid, dirtiness of the morning after: "All she had was a headache, a stomach ache, and the worrying sense that she was not merely forgetting, but was actually repressing what had happened. She couldn't shake the feeling that some part of her mind was trying to protect her."

Turney's young female characters are wonderfully realised in their stunted, problematic reality. Although at times it felts as though Grace - the protagonist - was made a little too heavily in the 'plain and execeptional' mould, I can see why those decisions were made, and her relationship with Caroline brought back plenty of memories of the uneasy, competitive and repressed nature of that time in life. Likewise, while (as a Pagan) I'd want to explore the conception of Dionysus more deeply, within the scope of the narrative, both his malice and his tragedy are brilliantly written. 

This is a book that I finished, and just knew I was going to reread, that it might even find itself of that special pile of books that never really find their way back to my shelf. Honestly, it feels as though that first, breathless read only got to scratch the surface, and to a certain extent I resent writing the review now rather than when I've had a couple of years to think on it properly.  There is so much there to talk about, and 2-300 words can't really cover it.

But, in the interests of brevity, if you're here because you like the way I think, then you need to read this book. It's brutal and powerful and glorious. Alexandra Turney is a writer I am going to watch.

Review: The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Yes. Yesssssssssssss.

Oh, my blog was having its hiatus when the last one of these came out. The one where I bought half a dozen copies, gave them to all of my friends for Christmas and went, "Look, look! IT'S US!"

So: Did you go to a single sex school? Did you fucking hate it? Or, did you love it, but find yourself the 'red headed stepchild' all the same? Are you still mates with some of the weirdos you met there?
 
Okay. You need to read Drearcliff Grange. 

How to describe this? Superpowers and eldritch abominations at St Trinians? Rip-roaring adventures, jolly hockeysticks, defeating facism, and overcooked swede? These books are nuts and it's fucking marvellous. Newman is the King of Pastiche and he owns this totally.

I need to calm down.

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the second in the Drearcliff series, and expands both the world and the themes that Newman developed in the first novel. It suffers a little from being a transitional piece between the self-contained first book, and the wider series - but it is still an immensely satisfying read. Moreover, Newman addresses that aspect of it thematically, taking Amy, Frecks, Kali, and Emma from the plucky girlhood and simple moralities of The Mysteries... to a adolescence, and a reappraisal of what it is to be a hero.

Certainties are challenged, characters change, and we explore the awkward ground between the broken and the malevolent, balance law agaisnt lawlessness, explore the dangers of privilege, the worth of trust, and the harm that can be done by the simplest of actions. At the heart of the novel is Amy, whose role as the benevolent Kentish Glory is reconsidered as she wonders if she might not do better as the more terrible Death's Head Hawkmoth.

Of course, its all terribly referential, both to adjacent literary worlds and Newman's other works, but that's all part of the fun. If that isn't your sort of thing then... honestly, you might want to find another book review blog.

More seriously, Newman's great strength as a writer is that he manages to drop every name under the sun without ever detracting from the story he is telling at that moment, and this book carries off that trick admirably. An absolute joy.

I loved it so much, I did cosplay.

Review: Spoiled Children by Philip Hemplow

Yikes. I'm well behind on these...

Continuing on my horror bender, next up was Spoiled Children, three eldritch novellas - also available independently as Sarcophagus, The Innsmouth Syndrome and Ashes.

So, I never actually found Lovecraft's own work scary - well, apart from 'The Rats in the Walls', and that was less "cringing in terror" than "dry-heaving for an hour". Other than that, it was all just a bit meh. I mean, they're great stories, but I'm not going to wigged out by some massive monster just because its name doesn't have a quite enough vowels and it's so godawfully terrifying that, to solace yourself, you decided to abuse a thesaurus.

As studies of loneliness and paranoia they are glorious, as twisty tales of atmosphere and pleasant frisson, I really enjoy them, but they aren't enough to get me starting at shadows, or send my mind pulling itself apart in genuine disturbance. Yeah, the universe is big and scary and uncaring, but there's only so many times you can read about a genteely destitute, neurasthenic young white man stumbling upon unspeakable horrors and realising this before you stop really caring. If I were to imagine the kind of person most likely to be driven mad by the horrors of the abyss, it would be precisely the sort of people Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be. The rest of us have more pressing worries.
 
In that way, Lovecraft's fiction lacks a human element. With no point of empathy between us and the person experiencing the described horrors, there is no fear.

With this in mind, Spoiled Children is fucking terrifying.

Hemplow writes well, at times strikingly so - acid rain leaving brickwork "as pockmarked and powdery as a Renaissance syphilitic" - and his stories are relentelessly modern, embracing 21st century strangeness and conflict. We go to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, deal with the corruption of post-Communist Russia. We see a Centre for Disease Control and Prevention rep sent to a recession struck Innsmouth, or big money transforming the rural English landscape. These settings, jobs and proceedures are fantastically realised, giving a sense of rigorous research without ever info-dumping. The world is not a vague, Gothic backdrop - it is our world, with all its safety nets and preoccupations.But this is not the Spoiled Children's real strength.

No, its real strength is in his characters. Hemplow's protagonists are vivid, alive. These are not ciphers who are so obviously going to fall prey to entities from beyond the abyss that you don't bother to get attached. They involve you, from the first page, with their struggles, ambitions and goals. These are people with relationships, jobs, priorities and failing relationships. They have friends and money worries and interests. Their survival is important to you, the threats to them upsetting.

More than that, by bringing in this human dimension Hemplow brings the horror of Lovecraft's heartless universe right in to your own life. It all seems horribly plausible, raising the possibility that - outside your own, warm bubble - there are dreadful things, resting in uneasy sleep.

My favourite story in the collection, for several reasons, is Ashes, a grand culmination of both character work and creation of terror. With a main character who is both pathetic and unlikable it would be a compelling study of desperation and betrayal, even without the supernatural elements. But it's all the better for having a cracking weird fiction plot. For a further kick of vicarious dread, it had a scene which horrified the medievalist in me, just as the more conventional horror aspects delivered their kick. (Put the fish slice down, woman. Put the fish slice down.)

Brilliant as the book is, I cannot say that it's flawless - some of the 'action' scenes feel a little rushed, and the endings, although earned and convincing, feel rather abrupt. However, these are minor complaints against what is an altogether fresh and immensely satisfying collection of stories.  

Spoiled Children engages your heart and your brain, not merely your pessimism. In all honestly, it's one of the best things I've read in the genre. Give it a go.

Thunder in her Veins - the sacredness of geekdom

Some bits of childhood never do make sense.

Look: I grew up in a village with an unreliable bus service and two shops - that became one shop, and then none, and that's where it's settled. It was the sort of place where there were enough people who wore petticoats for the expression "Charlie's dead" to be part of my childhood lexicon. My elder sister was the first - the only - girl on the school's football team. It was a place where 'comic' meant the Dandy and the Beano, or - if you were really lucky - an old copy of Bunty*.

So how I ever came to read Marvel's Thor line is something of a mystery to me. I think I had a Spiderman annual once, and there was the X Men and the Fantastic Four on telly on a Saturday morning, but… Thor? Seriously? I might have been able to get it at the comic book store in the nearest town (seven miles and, apparently, a twenty year timeslip away) but, well, I always knew places like that weren't made for people like me**.

All the same, Thor I did read. A fair few, actually. Mostly the early ones, with Donald Blake in them. I remember being caught by something about them - the disabled man whose vocation was easing others' pain, his walking stick actually the hammer Mjolnir. I still can't really express why, but something about them felt very beautiful, very true.  Maybe it was the overtones of the Fisher King? Maybe it was just the myth connection.

Because I was a myth junkie, devouring folklore and fairytale. If a story was old and epic and glorious, then it was my kind of story. I grinned at the pranks of tricksters, railed at monsters, wept for Prometheus chained to his rock. Raised as both an Anglican and a Baptist (don't ask) I was used to God being male, ineffably right and absorbingly loving. My contact with the grim, problematic stories of the Bible was one sanitised by a Sunday school framing which repackaged them into a reassuring scholasticism where faith (read:goodness) was rewarded, and the wicked (read: unbelievers) were punished.

Noble failure...

Myths weren't like that. In myths, all bets were off. And that made for grandeur and for tragedy. It made for fatal flaws and noble failure. It made for Gods who were tricksy, passionate, even petty. They could be deceived, could deceive. They could be wrong. 

And yet despite all that, they were honourable, powerful, righteous.

It's probably fair to say that I found myself through reading Norse legends. Yes, I was too young, too uncertain, to call it 'faith', yet all the same something in me ran to those myths with a more intuitive open-heartedness than my parents' religion could ever call from me. More, they seemed to understand me. I craved them, the way you crave salt when dehydrated: dread, beautiful Freyja; bright, lost Baldur; Loki - quick, cunning, dangerous; and Thor.

Of course, Thor.

I always feel faintly ridiculous using the word 'sacrilege' in anything other than ironic hyperbole. All the same, there does need to be a word for that hurt that is located somewhere against your heart, behind your ribs, when the things you hold sacred are treated slightingly. As a Pagan who honours certain Norse deities, there is something wrong in seeing the stark, terrible beauty of your mythic landscape re-envisaged into slick, commercial print, complete with hulking villains and so. much. spandex.

Thus it was that, for years, I was embarrassed by the association. Marvel's Thor was not my Thor, their Odin not my AllFather. Drawing that distinction was important, remains important still. But scorning the former overlooks something vital, something powerful, something old. The memory of it came back to me with the release of the MCU film. A sense of struggle, of soaring glory, of a rightness at the very base of something. And, yes, it was more slickly packaged, and sexier than a fireside story about Sir Gawain, but it spoke of something grandiose and sweeping on that same, gut-deep level.

Something sweeping and grandiose

People tend to associate the numinous with a sense of peace, of silent wonder, but sometimes it is more a sense of your heart being pried apart with grinning exuberance. Sometimes, it is that twisting, cathartic need that comes with the raunchiest choruses of folksong, the catchiest reels of the Morris. Sometimes it was what we feel when we hear stories about heroes, about people in extremity, about villains we love to hate, and sometimes just love, despite ourselves.

And that feeling is sacred. Some narratives speak to something deep in us, something more real than anything we enounter in our daily lives.When they are slighted, undermined, mocked, we feel that little wince that cries out 'sacrilege!'. It is one of the reasons why feelings are running so high around this 'Hydra Cap' debacle. Some heroes should be held high, above baseness, above the taint of cynicism.

Yet, collectively, we disown these stories. Heroism, self-sacrifice, betrayal, need - the bright, bold colours of traditional stories - are things we insist upon shutting out as we become 'grown-up', 'critical', 'literary'. But these things are still nestled in us, occupying a space in what I can only call our soul.

My engagement with this comic was not adult. It was not smooth, questioning, probing. It was not the 'refined' tastes that I have spent years cultivating. No. It was the wild joy that got me into stories in the first place. It made me air punch, made me grin, made me arch my feet and press my eyes together. I cared from a place of total, unironic absorpsion. I felt this book, felt the way I once felt as I tore around the playground pretending to be the Human Torch.

(Flame on!)

But, as such, an actual review is beyond me. Is Mighty Thor: Volume 7 great art? Will it change the shape of Literature as we know it?

Is the story any good, even? Should you read it?

I have no fucking clue. Sorry.

Also: Malekith the Accursed - just too FABULOUS for your morality.

There are some books out there that make you realise the futility of reviewing books, that make you see there is no helpful, universal rubric to define whether something is worthwhile. Yes, you can analyse craft and effect and technique, but sometimes a story speaks to something that is too pronounced and personal, its power over you too great to allow you to reach for your wonted pose of critical objectivity.

I have to admit that, while I tend to enjoy what I read, I'm not especially immersed in Marvel 616 stuff. As an adult reader, it's rare they provide me with more than an entertaining stopping post for an insatiable bookworm. Mighty Thor: Thunder in Her Veins went so far beyond that faint praise that there is no comparison - but those feelings are so subjective that I cannot extend to any of you.

As such, I really can't recommend it. Do you like stories about honour and righteousness, about family and longing, about war and good and evil, and some things that you just can't categorise? Then maybe read it. You might get something from it.

But, while we're on the subject of recommenations, what I have to say is that  it isn't really this comic you need to read. No. Don't seek out a specific story or book, don't listen to anything else. Instead, shrug off your irony. Ignore the cheap, headline grabbing shots, the 'risky' takes appealing to the part of you that wants to tarnish and tear down.

No. Reach into your heart and find those embarrasing remnants of unmitigated joy - however commerical, low brow or melodramatic they may be. Find your heroes - your glorious and impossible heroes - and cling to them. Celebrate them.

We are readers. We are better than that.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*What? The stories were better.
** Shout out to 'The Grinning Demon' and 'Whatever Comics' of Maidstone, which (when I finally plucked up the courage to slip inside) were absolutely lovely. But you know what I meant.

Review: Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? By Paul Cornell

YES!

I've raved a bit about the Shadow Police before, and have been waiting for this sequel for a good old while. The earlier books are bloody good. This is... It's… Well, it's more or less flawless, actually.

I try not to give too many flat out, positive reviews, try to pick out the problems in the book, the failings, because otherwise this blog just turns into a long episode of me going YAAAAY! BOOOOOKS! But sometimes, it's justified.

Cornell is a writer of rare talent and compassion, and in Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? the concept of The Shadow Police finally fulfils the promise of the first two books. Opening it, I was lost, captured entirely. The unevenness of the shock-brutality that could be seen to mar London Falling has been replaced by a creeping weight of horror, a sense of real struggle and danger. The possibly-too-fast pace of The Severed Streets has levelled out in to the gripping, but measured, almost painful intensity of the plot.

DI Quil and his team are still breakable, still wounded, and Gods, the stakes are as terrifyingly high as every they were, but in Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? there is a sense of movement that The Severed Streets did not have. There is a touch of playfulness. A sense of hope.

That does not mean terrible things do not happen - none of the Shadow Police books are for the faint hearted - but balancing the horror, there is as good an old-fashioned mystery as the title demands. Honestly, I could laud this book all day. From Cornell's creation of a magic beneath London - which feels less like invention, and more like channelling - to the pitch perfect emotional beats, it is a triumph and an utter delight to read.

If, however, you forced me to level one criticism, it would simply be that it is a little crowded. With five fully realised central characters and their relationships, one gnarly mystery and the overarching plot of the Smiling Man, there is an awful lot to fit in to 350 odd pages. It is intense to read, and the sheer quantity of information the reader is presented with is overwhelming. Cornell handles it admirably, and I honestly think that goes to make up some of the richness of the book, but it is somewhat full on.

So, clear your weekend before attempting it, because you won't be putting it down

Review: Lexicon, Max Barry

 Okay. About a week ago I had the thought that the government was monitoring us via the ubiquitous Playbuzz quizzes that I and everyone around me find addictive. They would use these endless list of questions, preferences and gameplaying to identify subversive elements, to mark us out, to control us.

Isn't is nice when fiction pays into your paranoia?

Actually, Lexicon is pretty fantastic. (Thanks Debs!)

 Rippingly well paced, it tells an engaging, intelligent story with some wonderfully threatening overtones. A thriller with a brain, a heart and a political conscience, it moves through real sweetness, visceral intensity and laugh out loud wit. It twists, turns, and confounds you. It's a full on, all boxes ticked wonder. It is genre fiction at its best.

 So, the premise: words create chemical signals in the brain. The right words spoken in the right order can create hormonal conditions which bypass our societal defences, leading to a state of euphoria and suggestibility. With the right words one can control a person, utterly.

The words used depend on a person's psychological profile, their 'segment', or 'type'. Even without these control words it is possible to manipulate someone by knowing their type - by knowing a more superficial set of buttons to press, by being able to guide their thoughts.

Hence all the questionnaires.

An organisation who call themselves 'Poets' study these words, teaching themselves defence against them, using them to shape the world that we know.They recruit Emily, a young woman from the streets with a natural ability for verbal manipulation, or 'attack'. Elsewhere in the narrative, Wil is 'the outlier', a man kidnapped by the Poets, a man who words cannot control. He is the only man to walk away from a disaster engineered by the sinister Woolf.  People want to know why, and how they can use his power of defence.

Any more information would constitute a spoiler. Go, read it, it's brilliant. Not perfect, and the ending... yeah, I had issues with the ending. But go read it, like right now.

Full out recommendation, no caveats.