The Road
Sat Apr 17 08:55:48 BST 2010
For a reader coming to a book after it has been made into a widely acclaimed film, it is difficult to prevent the hype and dazzle of the film's release from clouding the perception of the book as a work in its own right. This is certainly the case for Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which has seemingly been a constant media presence since its 2006 release, increasingly so since its movie adaptation early this year.
With all the media attention given to The Road, I started reading the novel with a good idea of the plot, and even a reasonable idea of the ending (as Mark Lawson noted on Radio 4's Front Row, such tales have two possible conclusions: redemption or damnation). From the start I knew this book was a stark depiction of a post-apocalyptic world peopled by nomadic cannibals, and in some respects I was mentally prepared for such a story, having hardened my heart against such horrors.
It is to the credit of The Road, therefore, that despite my forewarned approach to the book it nonetheless had the power to move me. McCarthy has used his post-apocalyptic landscape to strip the distractions of the world as we know it away his central theme of parental responsibility, concentrating the narrative on the relationship between father and son to great effect. Despite the bleak and fantastic setting of The Road, it is easy to identify with the complex and shifting tensions that exist between The Man and The Boy as they make their journey along the interminable road, precisely because the same tensions exist in our own lives, albeit in a muted form.
Beyond the personal identification the reader finds with the bond between the central characters, The Road uses its extreme world to pose wider moral questions about our actions and their repercussions. The Man's fear of the roaming cannibals that seem to lurk in the silent gaps between the paragraphs and the pages is a proxy for any creeping dread, and his desperate reactions in the face of his fear force us to question our own apprehensive responses to sources of anxiety, be they the hooded man behind us in the queue for the ATM or the orange-suited terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay. The final paragraph of the book, in leaping back in time from the cold, ash-strewn and dead world to a green and sunlit forest, provides a shocking contrast laden with implicit criticism of our disregard for the fragility of our environment.
The Road's sparse writing style leaves much unsaid. Yet within the economic lines McCarthy has hidden a sinuous, visceral truth about what it is to be human. As the Man warns the Boy early on, there are some things, once in the mind, that are difficult or impossible to remove. The Road is full of them.
The Elements of Style
Tue Feb 9 21:25:44 GMT 2010
William Strunk's book on style is almost the epitome of its own central thesis: communicate clearly, aim to be exact, and use only as many words as necessary. In the latter he certainly succeeds -- even with subsequent overhaul and expansion by E.B. White, and the addition of two forewords, this little book is slim enough to lose down the back of the sofa.
Yet its diminutive stature belies the value of the advice contained within. Strunk's original canon of a set rules for composition coupled with a list of misused words and phrases is valuable on its own; when combined with White's short essay on the wider topic of writing style it is not only instructive but also inspiring. If you're interested in writing, and in writing well, this book is well worth your time and money.
Consider Phlebas
Thu Feb 4 17:03:49 GMT 2010
Consider Phlebas is the first in the Culture sci-fi series which now spans some eleven books and has enjoyed wide critical acclaim. As the book that started the series, Consider Phlebas is notably lacking in many of the motifs of the later novels: there are no amusingly-named Culture ships, there is a distinct lack of Banks' trademark dark humour, and the focus of the novel feels curiously narrow, confining itself entirely to the exploits of a single protagonist, Horza, caught up in an intergalactic war between two ideologies. And although Horza's exploits take him across several worlds and various space battles the novel somehow fails to feel like the space opera that the Culture series is usually billed as: if anything it reads more like an anti-war novel as the narrative stumbles from skirmish to skirmish, each more squalid and meaningless than the last. As the core characters die, one by one, we're drawn inevitably to reflect on their lack of legacy, the complete indifference with which their passing is marked. Their lives disappear instantly and anonymously, their compadres move into their bunks and quarters and sequester their belongings. Each death becomes a metaphor for the losses and waste of the larger war, of all wars, and the reader's rapid desensitisation to the destruction on the page becomes a comment on the callousness of conflict.
At the same time that Consider Phlebas is an anti-war novel, it is also a political commentary on the nature of ideology. The central struggle is not one of good versus evil, but rather one between two competing views. One one side, the Idirans pursue an aggressive expansionist policy driven by a religious doctrine justifying their supremacy; on the other, the Culture is driven by a what it sees as a moral obligation to protect less advanced civilisations from the ravages of the Idiran advance. Yet the conflict goes deeper than that: the Idirans are committed to the strength of the individual, whilst being religious fanatics; the Culture are committed to twin virtues of free will and permissiveness, whilst depending heavily on the symbiotic relationship they share with the hyper-intelligent AIs that control their ships and cater to their needs. In considering the ground between the Idirans and the Culture, two entirely fictional races, the reader's prejudices are challenged: neither side is demonstrably right or wrong, and the little motifs of the central theme that appear throughout the novel serve to inform and progress the argument by degrees.
Although Consider Phlebas is the seminal work of the Culture series it is not emblematic of the later works, and it is almost far enough removed from the others as to be best considered as a lone novel. Taken in that context, it is an interesting, if not hugely enjoyable read. If the central premise of the book is that war is bad and that no ideology is perfect, it delivers those messages succinctly, and yet the result is a grindingly bleak slog of a novel: the characters are largely unlikable, the endless fighting becomes increasingly wearing, the set-pieces at times almost unreadably grisly. As a start to the Culture series, Consider Phlebas is worth reading if only to catch the later references and for the satisfaction of completing the set. For everyone else, there are other sci-fi novels, and other anti-war novels for that matter, which will better reward your attention.
Anansi Boys
Sun Jan 31 20:12:09 GMT 2010
To some extent, my dedication to the works of Neil Gaiman started with the terrific Good Omens, which I read more times than I care to remember whilst growing up. The partnership of Pratchett's dry humour with Gaiman's characteristic dark flourishes made for a heady mix. The real infatuation set in somewhat later, when having been hooked on the TV serialisation of Neverwhere I proceeded to read the subsequent reworking of the series as a novel, and the book sealed the deal. I became a die-hard Gaiman fan, revelling in the masterly way he can transform an entirely fantastic story into something completely believable, the genuinely chilling monsters he devises, and the dark wit he uses to sometimes devastating effect.
With this background it is something of a disappointment to consider Anansi Boys, a novel which, despite my best efforts, I cannot love. Inevitably, and entirely unfairly, I have ended up comparing it to American Gods, since the subject matter is somewhat the same, and the character of Anansi himself is taken from the cast of American Gods. The similarities end there, however, for the subjects that so beguile in the dark, gritty environs of American Gods fail to take hold in the much lighter, comedy-driven narrative of Anansi Boys. The little snippets of mythology that wrap and weave into the fabric of American Gods tend to sit alone and isolated on the smooth plane of Anansi Boys. Where the text of American Gods flows like a river, Anansi Boys' prose clunks and crunches, too-clever puns littered around like so much sugar on top of a bowl of bland strawberries.
As I've already noted, this comparison is unfair. Anansi Boys isn't a sequel to American Gods, and it deserves to be considered on its own merits. The central coming-of-age story, and the examination of the relationship between a father and a son, are both well crafted and effective; and the novel is not without its genuine comedy moments; but these things on their own don't save it. Even some of the central characters are poorly sketched, the aforementioned puns are little more than a distraction, and the attempt to meld a general comedic tone with a very dark antagonist serves to mar the comedy at the same time as making the adversary mildly ridiculous.
On the whole, Anansi Boys feels to me like a novel that is half-baked, incompletely realised. I would be loath to call it downright bad, and certainly I have read many worse, but it doesn't live up to the expectations that the rest of Gaiman's canon encourages.
How To Be A Writer: Secrets From The Inside
Tue Jan 26 09:34:12 GMT 2010
How To Be A Writer was a gift to me from my wife: whilst I had enjoyed leafing through the book in the shop it seemed rather too slim a volume to merit the list price. I was perhaps wrong to take this view: wisdom isn't measured word for word, after all, and on balance How To Be A Writer is a guide and inspiration for the budding author.
The focus of Ferris' text is the value of revision: he states that this is the sole differentiator between the unpublished and the bestseller, and whilst this is perhaps somewhat oversold it is an interesting insight into the world of commercial writing from someone who not only runs a publishing house but is also a published author in his own right.
American Gods
Sat Jan 23 10:15:31 GMT 2010
The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead
As fantasy goes, American Gods is of the absolute best, mixing dark magic with jittery action, chilling tales with off-kilter philosophy. It's one of those books that I keep coming back to, time and again, and by now I hold it in such high (indeed, nigh-on irrational) regard that it's difficult to describe with any degree of objectivity. If you get a chance, read it. That's all.
Stone's Fall
Sat Jan 9 18:42:24 GMT 2010
In some respects, the title of Iain Pears' Stone's Fall is a metaphor for the book as a whole: say it out loud and it could be a literal statement of fact, the description of a rock's descent, or a shorthand for the downfall of a man called Stone. Of course, the final sense is the true one, but the title's ambiguity is nonetheless descriptive of the wider story, which describes a tale from three separate perspectives, slowly building up layers of nuance and subtlety until the final, genuinely unexpected denouement.
Much like An Instance of the Fingerpost, the only other Pears novel I've read to date, Stone's Fall is constructed to exploit the different views and truths that each narrator's perspective affords. Over the course of the book Stone's character shimmers and changes, moving from a shadowy figure in the background to become solid and real, developing and morphing with each passing page. Interestingly, as the tale of his downfall is told, the core theme of the book moves from being Stone's death to the life of his wife; another parallel with An Instance of the Fingerpost. Yet despite these similarities, Stone's Fall isn't merely a rewrite of An Instance of the Fingerpost in a different time period, it is a vibrant work in its own right.
In this novel, Pears explores some weighty themes: determinism, the ethics of foreign policy, the logical conclusions of a capitalist society; and he does so with a deft hand, maintaining pace and tension throughout 600-odd pages and three narrators, spread over three locations. It's an impressive feat, but it comes with some cost to the reader: characters must be remembered and catalogued, momentum must be maintained between narrators, and the ambiguities and contradictions that develop as each narrator adds his voice to the mix must be navigated. For the motivated reader, however, it is a worthwhile price to pay.
Anathem
Tue Dec 22 22:12:52 GMT 2009
I've long been a fan of Stephenson's work, and, having exhausted the canon of his previous work, I looked forward to Anathem's publication with some anticipation. When the book finally arrived, snapped up in hard-back format from an online retailer, my first thought was of how very big this book is: some 800 pages of fairly dense text make not only for a lengthy yarn, but also for a novel which practically demands special consideration before even sitting down to read it. It's not a book for the morning commute, or for reading in the bath.
The special consideration this novel requires does not end with the physical, however. The reader should also be prepared for some heavy mental lifting, as the twists and turns of Anathem take in a range of weighty themes, including discussions on mathematics, physics and philosophy. Stephenson even goes so far as to include three appendices which expand on specific discussions presented in the main text of the book, elevating his typically discursive style to the realms of fine art.
However, for all that it is weighty and discursive, Anathem does have rich rewards for the dedicated reader in the form of a driving plot, engaging characters, and underlying concepts which are stimulating as they are intellectually challenging. Beyond that, it even manages a rather clever twist that turns the reader's own scepticism of an increasingly fantastic storyline on itself; a meta-plot-twist, if you will. Stephenson is arguably one of the foremost alt-fiction writers of his generation, and this is entirely apparent in Anathem.
This said, the book is not without flaws. In particular, the way the narrative frequently bends in order to accommodate a particular thematic discussion can serve to distract as much as illuminate; with characters following what at times can read like a conversation-by-numbers, serving only to ram home some philosophical point. On top of that, for an 800-page novel Anathem would appear to contain much that could safely have been cut: whilst the sheer volume of the book does help to present an immersive world to the reader one is left wondering whether a manuscript half that size would have served just as well.
All in all, Anathem is a fine addition to Stephenson's already impressive bibliography. For fans of his other works, Anathem continues a grand tradition of lofty themes presented around characters your inner geek loves to champion. Erasmus, the cloistered philosopher protagonist of Anathem sits comfortably alongside Snow Crash's samurai-sword wielding hacker, Cryptonomicon's haiku-loving GI Bobby Shaftoe, or even Zodiac's motor-boat piloting enviro-hero Sangamon Taylor; and to be honest, for fans the main problem with Anathem is likely to be that it is over too soon, and that samurai swords don't make a more prominent appearance. For newcomers to Neal Stephenson, Anathem is still a worthwhile read, so long as you're prepared for the challenges it presents, and for it to be more of a intellectual investment that the typical novel.
Modern Baptists
Wed Dec 16 20:02:02 GMT 2009
Picked up in a charity shop on the basis that Penguin's Modern Classics range tends to be reliably good, along with my liking of picture of the dog on the front cover, I didn't have any preconceived notions about Modern Baptists, having never heard of the book or its author, James Wilcox.
As it turns out, my ignorance is unjustified: Modern Baptists is an elegant, understated comedy which combines gentle humour with a poignancy which extends its impact beyond the reach of the genre.
The Informers
Sat Dec 5 17:54:45 GMT 2009
Throughout The Informers I kept thinking that I knew where Ellis was going with the novel, that the jumble of characters and situations he assembles, chapter by chapter, would suddenly crystallise into a coherent structure.
I was mistaken. Although some characters do appear in more than one of the narratives there seems little pattern or meaning to their reappearance. Indeed at times Ellis seems almost to taunt the reader with these embryonic links, rousing false hope that some meaning, some relationship will emerge from the noise.
Frankly, it left me wondering what the point of the book was. This is not to say that it is without merit, since there is certainly a kind of poetry that emerges from the apparent meaninglessness of each passing chapter. Moreover, the very lack of emotion and reason in the situations of the estranged figures populating is itself strangely affecting as one struggles to empathise with the people hidden between the pages.
And yet, I cannot escape the feeling that there should be more to a novel than that. As an exercise in dehumanisation and apathy, the book works. As a collection of bleached desert snapshots, captured with a sparse lyricism reminiscent of Kerouac, the book works. But don't go looking for anything more.
Wheels Within Wheels
Sat Nov 21 20:02:20 GMT 2009
Having never previously read any of Dervla Murphy's works it might seem strange to start with a autobiographical book of her early life. Yet this strangeness is in part explained by how I first heard of Murphy, on a radio broadcast reviewing her book Through Siberia by Accident: A Small Slice of Autobiography, which details her wanderings in Siberia at the age of 73. A woman capable of such feats, I assumed, would almost certainly be worth learning more about.
I was not disappointed. Well written and engaging, Wheels Within Wheels is not only a chronicle of Murphy's upbringing in rural Ireland, but is genuinely thought provoking as an examination of the charged relationship between Murphy and her mother, crippled by arthritis at an early age and increasingly dependent on Murphy throughout the course of the book. If I was looking for the furnace that wrought a person willing to explore Siberia alone when most are settling down into retirement, then Wheels Within Wheels certainly contains that, and more besides.
Moondust
Sat Nov 7 19:18:17 GMT 2009
Part historical documentary, and part personal search for the greater meaning behind the Apollo space program, Andrew Smith's Moondust is a curious and fascinating beast.
In between moon-landing trivia, nostalgia for a childhood spent in the wake of the Space Race, and the genuinely gripping descriptions of the various touchdowns on Luna's surface, Smith covers a lot of ground; and yet the core of this book seems to be something else entirely. Piece by piece, another agenda emerges from the text, morphing Moondust from a well-written documentary into a broadly philosophical treatise on what humankind's first forays into space mean to us all.
It is perhaps these philosophical musings that are the most striking and important part of the book. For all that our culture has readily absorbed the Apollo landings into our movies, television screens and printed pages, the wider question of "why bother?" hasn't really been satisfactorily addressed. Moondust's exploration of this question, and the somewhat unexpected conclusion it comes to, is ultimately fascinating reading.
This said, even if philosophy isn't your bag, Moondust is still a worthwhile read, capturing not only the excitement and inspiration that Apollo engendered, but also some candid interviews with many of the fascinating individuals involved in making the programme happen. If you've any interest in the history of space exploration, or even of a formative event in popular culture, you should find something to engage with.
And so to my conclusion: at first glance, Moondust is a fine retrospective look at a unique undertaking whose repercussions still ring clear some half a century later. Yet it is also much more than that: its' core of philosophical questing lends it a whole other dimension of interest and profundity. Either one alone would be a worthwhile read, the artful combination of the two makes for a most engaging and pleasurable book.
American Psycho
Tue Oct 27 14:42:11 GMT 2009
"Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here": the opening words of American Psycho are an explicit statement of intent, and indeed the novel that follows those words is more or less a descent into hell, not only for the characters that people Ellis' lurid depiction of 1980's Wall Street, but also for the reader. Bateman, the novel's psychotic protagonist, flips from obsessive detailing of the banality of his yuppie lifestyle to visceral descriptions of brutal murder in a matter of paragraphs: a disarming juxtaposition that occurs throughout the book, and yet manages consistently to surprise the reader. Bateman's insanity remains as shocking as his arrogance, vanity and tedious obsessions remain familiar, reflections and echoes of our own lives. We see ourselves in the blood-flecked face of the psychopath, and as such are forced to look for evidence of the psychopath within ourselves: by no means an easy examination to undertake, but one that makes for a novel that compels as it terrifies, titillates as it sickens. Certainly not a read for the faint of heart, but a brilliant, perspective-altering book nonetheless.
Matter
Thu Oct 15 22:32:54 BST 2009
I have had an unbalanced relationship, over the years, with Iain M Banks' Culture novels. On the one hand, Banks' writing is smooth and assured, the weird and wonderful characters populating his fantastic worlds are engaging, and the serious themes at the heart of many of the books elevate them beyond the status of space-opera escapism. On the other, the Culture is frequently smug to the point of being unbearable, Banks' villains have a somewhat predicable tendency toward sadistic violence, and the sheer vastness of the imagined Universe that the Culture books describe leaves much shrouded in a sketchy, unsatisfying ambiguity.
Matter, the most recent installation in a series which now spans some eight books, shares this unbalanced quality. For the majority of the book (and it is a big old book) the narrative is concerned with the journeys that the central characters undertake in coming together for the finale of the story. This quickly gets frustrating -- as a reader it is difficult not to feel the urge to skip ahead to the action, however it is an impulse worth fighting since there isn't any action to speak of until the very end of the book. And yet, when the action does come, it serves to turn much of what went before on its head. Themes emerge from the previous narrative that weren't obvious before, and whole sections of the storyline can be considered in a new light. It's a very clever trick, and makes for a complex -- if exceedingly bleak -- novel.
Little Brother
Thu Oct 1 21:52:54 BST 2009
As the title suggests, Cory Doctorow's most recent novel takes some of the themes of Orwell's 1984 and brings them into our near future, replacing Orwell's fascist dictatorship with a paranoid, security crazed US government. Similar to 1984, Little Brother roams the wilderness that exists between the realms of fiction and political polemic; and the transitions between the two are somewhat jagged, with the central the issues that Little Brother discusses - issues of personal privacy, security and trust - regularly subjugating the plot. To the extent that Little Brother is a call to arms for the teenagers that are its intended audience, that doesn't matter: the pages of description of things like public key cryptography are a good starting point for the interested reader to base further research on; but it does make for a somewhat unbalanced read. In the same vein, some of the characters in the novel are little more than one-dimensional placeholders whose sole purpose seems to be to espouse a particular ideology for Doctorow to discuss (the central protagonist's father, for example, seems especially prone to this effect when he is wheeled out to support the heavy-handed security efforts of the state with phrases like "they were just doing their jobs").
However, for all its faults, Little Brother does a fine job of forcing the reader to think critically about the motivations and limitations state security, and the plot, when it's not being sidelined for a technological discussion, provides enough pace and interest to keep the pages turning. Although it's not an especially great work of fiction, Little Brother is a very enjoyable read, and well worth seeking out, whether directly from Doctrow's website (the novel's text is freely available under a Creative Commons license), or as a hard copy from your local bookshop.