Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Time	Event
12:40p	Two months later, and a big pile of books... Some Wodehouse... The first two covers above aren't the actual editions I read, but there you go. I'd read those ones before, but as always I enjoy revisiting Wodehouse books. The third book, Big Money, was a new one for me - there are still some out there, thank god - and was rather a good one. Some comics... Diamond gave me the second volume of these fancy Invincible collections a while back, and I never got around to reading it because - well, because it was volume two. But I was bored one day, and decided to give it a go. Slightly confusing, because of not knowing anything about the first twelve issues, but it sucked me in really quite quickly, and I was impressed enough to order the next volume soon after (Volume One was out of stock). Anyway, these are fun comics, and the presentation is fantastic - I do like expensive books, mind you, and I realise that most people prefer things they can leave in the bath or whatever. They're wrong. I'll pick up the first one as and when I can... Yeah yeah, I know I'm about a year beyond popular culture at this point, but I finally got around to these. Good stuff, of course. I can sort of see why DC didn't really want to be involved with these - most people reading this won't be bothered about sex and swearing and stuff, but I suppose some of their target audience might be - but they've obviously let a good thing go. I might even try and catch up with the monthly, rather than wait for the collections... A rather boring Judge Dredd this time around, I felt - no major stories really, just lots of bitty ones. Alright - and some of them are great - but nothing to shout about. The last two Strontium Dog books were fantastic, though - I think volume 4 pipped it for me, but I can see why a lot of people rate The Final Solution as well. The cover for that book is much better than the one shown here, more in the style of the other collections. Looking forward to the next tranche of these - Ro-busters! Ace Trucking Co.! Hooray! (Comment on this)
1:20p	Man In The Dark, by Paul Auster I'd never really rated Auster to any great extent, but Brooklyn Follies (http://marcusgipps.livejournal.com/20411.html) and Travels in the Scriptorium (http://marcusgipps.livejournal.com/35948.html) went quite a long way to convincing me, so I snapped up this proof when it arrived. It shares a certain recognisable feel with Travels in the Scriptorium - merging alternate realities, Auster's favoured 'who is the real author' meta-fiction - but manages to avoid that book's feel of ever-decreasing circles and little point. For me, this is the work I've enjoyed most, although of course that isn't to say that it's his best. But for an author who normally leaves me cold, I felt more invested in this novel than I have done before. It probably helps - for me, at least - that there is a definite SF tinge to the novel (well, actually I think you'd probably call it a novella, technically - this is not an extended piece of writing). The 'core' and beginning of the tale is supremely grounded in 'the real world' - an ageing and ailing writer named August Brill reflects on his failures in life and the indignities of old age, and tries to cope with his depressed granddaughter and daughter. But at night he sits awake, spinning a story in his head, with all the re-editing and commentary that a daydream allows us. In his tale 9/11 never happened, and the USA has degenerated into a Bush/Gore-tinged civil war. A man - Owen Brick - wakes up in a hole in the ground, and discovers that he has been selected to kill the author of all the world's mis-fortunes - a man who may or not be Brill, our frail narrator and ergo the creator of all the horrors of the war that is raging in his head. That last sentence may seem a little circular in itself, and there is no doubt that the book is not 'traditionally' structured, but this time (as opposed to Travels in the Scriptorium) it feels as though Auster manages to bring things to a more satisfying conclusion. Not everybody will agree with that analysis - there are still some very elliptical passages in the book, and it could be argued there is no real 'closure' - but there is a sense of movement and progression. That could well be because Auster shifts away from the 'story within a story' rather early. It provides the backbone of the book, and sheds light on the thoughts and motivations of the narrator, but after Brill has decided to end the story we get another 50 or so pages of his thoughts and dilemmas, not those of his creation. The sub-tales of Nazi-occupied Europe and America-controlled Iraq, the discovery of what happened to his granddaughter's boyfriend, the history of Brill's infidelities - all of these passages and incidents reflect back on, and gain a secondary meaning from, what we have learned in the other dimension. It's a difficult trick to pull off, but I ended the novel with a real feeling of satisfaction, despite the fact that nothing has really changed for Brill or his family. The point is, he has managed to change his own mindset through a complex and highly personal act of creation, along with a review of his memories, and he has accepted the world around him, with all the flaws and problems that it contains. The last line of the book is no coincidence: "...the weird world rolls on". I read a proof back in July, but the Hardback is available now, ISBN: 9780571240760. (Comment on this)
3:37p	Memoirs of a Master Forger, by 'William Heaney' Well, if you haven't heard of Heaney don't be surprised - it's the pseudonym of an author who I think is fantastic, but who doesn't always seem to get the level of recognition (or sales) that he deserves. I've reviewed at least two of his other books on this blog at some point, but I won't announce who he is for fear of upsetting the wonderful Gollancz crowd. If you really want to know (if there's anybody out there still reading this!), ask me. Anyway, I can understand why this book is being published in the way it is - partly to give the author a 'fresh start', I suppose, and partly because the central conceit of the novel lends itself very well to a more mysterious presentation than could be achieved if it had just been published as 'any other novel'. These really are presented as the memoirs of Heaney, and are as unreliable and untrustworthy as one would hope of the work of a 'master forger'. The packaging of the proof - and what I've seen of the finished copy - is a little misleading as well, to be honest. It suggests quite heavily that this is a supernatural/horror-esque book, what with the references to demons all over the front cover - and don't get me wrong, those elements are vital to the book - but in reality this isn't really a 'genre' book at all. To be honest, purely in terms of the writing and plot, I think it would sit rather better on the Fiction A-Z shelves, perhaps near someone like Glen Duncan. But then, that's been tried with this author, so perhaps this is the best way to do it - trick the people who like horror books into reading this instead. To be fair, there were moments during the book that did make me think of, especially, the Mike Carey series of horror/detective books (which are very good), but that was more to do with the feel of the London setting and the character of the protagonist than anything else. I don't want to spoil too much of the plot, because it is such an odd and enjoyable one, but it takes in high-level book forgery, drinking lots of nice wine, demons, homeless shelters, Gulf veterans, love, sex, death and much more. The prose style is well done, if not fantastic, and the author manages to maintain 'Heaney's' voice throughout. He's a great character - grumpy, funny, intelligent, bloody-minded and possibly mentally ill, but impossible to dislike. The plot propels itself in a pretty pacey way, and there are enough oddities and uncertainties to make you want to keep reading, to get to the bottom of the demons that Heaney sees and to find out if he gets the ending he deserves. It's a very solid book, and I am a bit saddened that the publishers have to rely to a bit of trickery to get it into people's hands - books this good should stand on their own, but sadly they so rarely do. Still, that's better than it being missed again, I suppose... Heaney also has a livejournal here: http://butforthegrape.livejournal.com/, so go and have a look at that as well, but I don't feel that it's a very good representation of the novel. fun if you've read the book, though... I read a proof in early July, and the book is published in October, ISBN: 9780575082977. (Comment on this)
5:29p	The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman I like Neil Gaiman. Like him, like his books. I've been looking forward to this one for a while, to be honest, as the last offering was a short story collection - fine, but not what I want. I wanted a novel, and this pretty much fits the bill. Actually, it's a collection of short stories that all fit together into a bigger whole, much like David Mitchell's Black Swan Green or, more pertinently, The Jungle Book. Each chapter tells an incident in the life of the young Bod, short for 'Nobody', from the brutal murder of his family and his subsequent adoption by the local ghosts, through to his final revenge and freedom. Along the way he goes to school, meets a girl, goes to a dance, ends up captured by ghouls and so on. As you can probably guess, there's a lot more to each chapter than that - this is Neil Gaiman, after all - but in essence this is a chronicle of a childhood, and of growing up (maybe not the ghouls bit). The fact that Bod is raised by ghosts and surrounded by magic and murder is almost unimportant to the core of the story, in the same way that Anansi Boys wasn't about being the son of a God, and Stardust isn't about finding a fallen star. Creating fantastic frameworks and plots to hang his writing on is one of Gaiman's real strengths, because he generally manages to make the impossible so convincing and natural that it doesn't detract from the personal. I realise a lot of people like him for the fantasy and imagery, and there's no denying that it is well done, but for me it just provides a framework for the characters he wants to show off. I think that's why Anansi Boys worked so well for me, and why with this book I wasn't left with the witches and other worlds and so on, but the moments between Bod and his Guardian, or the asides from the (wonderfully depicted) many generations of ghosts. I can understand why a lot of people don't go for that sort of thing, though - the frameworks and trappings of fantasy and horror do put people off - no matter how good the book is, they simply won't be able to enjoy it, or at least convince themselves of that fact. Equally, some people don't like Gaiman's writing, or his style, or his use of mythology and folklore, or whatever. And, to be fair, if you fall into one of those camps (especially the latter), you're probably not going to like this book (you probably wouldn't pick it up in the first place, to be honest, but you know what I mean). There isn't anything here that isn't pure Gaiman, and while that's no problem for me, or many other people, it won't be enough for some. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this isn't a good book - I think it is constantly well written, often surprising, and more touching than I expected - but I don't feel it represents a great leap for Gaiman. There's no reason why he should make one, mind you, although I'd love to see him write a novel with no fantastic elements at all, but that's just me, and I also love to see him write things like this. So I'm probably being unfair - I can't have it both ways, really, can I? And none of that is the point. Putting the fact that Bloomsbury are going to publish this in both adult and child editions aside, and despite the fact that a large proportion of the readership will be grown-up, this is, at heart a book for children. Not young children, maybe - the opening murder scene is distressingly dark, and there are many points in the book which might go over the head of younger readers - but still, this isn't really aimed at adults. If I was coming to this at the age of twelve, or if I'd read Coraline and loved it, there really wouldn't be any criticism I could make. Spooky graveyards, evil societies of killers, bullies, tombs, werewolves, school anxieties, the process of growing up - what more could you want? It also helps that Bod is a great character to read about, albeit one who does sometime react like a classic hero of children's literature - will he learn from his stubbornness? Should he trust the mysterious teacher? Yes... - and getting to watch him grow from a baby into a fifteen year old boy is a fun process. You don't often to get to see the various stages of our hero's development portrayed in a single book, and the result feels surprisingly novel. The various chapters all have a strong enough sense of identity for them to work as stand-alone stories, but they do add up to more than a series of stories. The Jungle Book reference in the title is explicit, and this does work as a modern version of the Mowgli elements of that book - abandoned child, raised by people who aren't his own kind and aren't really people, gets into some scrapes that teach him about the world (and life), and slowly has to decide where his home is. This isn't as morally instructive as that book, I suspect, but that's probably a good thing. Will it still be read in a hundred years time (or turned into a shonky Disney film?)? Who knows, but while it may not be Gaiman's best, there's no doubt that it works exceedingly well, and is a very strong piece of writing. He never really seems to do sequels to his books, despite leaving the door open in most of them, and although I suspect we won't see any more of Bod, I'm really rather pleased with what we do have. I read a proof in a day or two at the beginning of August, and three (three!) different editions are published in the UK on Halloween. The Dave McKean-illustrated edition has the ISBN: 9780747596837, and the Chris Riddell one: 9780747569015. (Comment on this)
6:30p	Anathem, by Neal Stephenson Bloody hell. What kind of idiot takes a 900 page book on holiday with him? Well, me. To be fair, I had thought that I would finish it before I went away, but got distracted by the Gaiman proof, and I really wanted to complete this before starting something else. Still, a chunky thing, and I suspect the size alone will put off some people. Alright, I know the Baroque Cycle was three pretty hefty books, and this is a done-in-one deal, but still. Anyway, I like Stephenson (although I've never read the Baroque books, which is pretty poor of me), and when I got properly going on this one - which did take me a while - I found that I couldn't imagine leaving it behind, I was enjoying it so much. The size and subject may well put people off, but once the book gets going it really is very very good. There is an argument that it could do with a bit of an edit, and there is certainly some stuff that could be taken away without distressing the structure too overtly, but that doesn't really feel like the point. Immersing oneself in the world that Stephenson has built - and by God, has he built this world - requires a willingness to accept the seemingly irrelevant details along with the vital, and I believe that trimming would have led to the novel losing some of it's raison d'etre. However, I also believe - and I'm going to get upset about this - that the pre-story frippery in this book (the acknowledgements, note to reader and so on) are dreadful, and hugely off-putting. The first line in the former, for example, is "Anathem is best read in somewhat of the same spirit as John L. Casti's 'The Cambridge Quintet'". Is it? Is it really? Well now I feel like an idiot, and I'm pretty well read. I've never heard of Casti. Alright, that's entirely my problem, but still... A bit later on, we get "recipients of this Advanced Readers' Edition might like to know, if it's not already obvious to them, that the ideas..." and so on. Of course it isn't obvious to me yet, this is the first page of proper text in the whole book! Yeah, OK, maybe the acknowledgements will go in the back in the finished copy, but that whole piece really made me wonder if I wanted to read the book ahead. It wasn't helped by the 'Note to the Reader', which basically says 'if you don't read SF, here's some useful information - how to pronounce words, and a utterly incomprehensible timeline for the planet we're on'. Hooray, that'll convince the non-SF reader to carry on... I'm being a bit unfair, but really, I think the whole opening section of the book-as-physical-object - basically, before the novel itself actually starts - is incredibly off-putting. Which is a shame, because the first two or three hundred pages of the book itself don't do much better. They're interesting, certainly, and well-written, and there are flashes of plot, but they do meander a lot. I never felt that it wasn't worth reading - it was quite clear that a lot of this stuff was important background to the world of Arbre, our setting - but I did begin to wonder when anything was actually going to happen. I wouldn't have really minded a few hundred pages of messing around with a bunch of sort-of-monks, discussing philosophical problems and learning about the almost-Earth they live on, but it was quite clear that there was something going on in the background, and the wait for the main plot to kick in became, at times, a little exasperating. And just when it seemed as if this was it, this was the moment of beginning, back we'd go... Once we do get started, though - and get out of the Concent, the pseudo-monastery - the book doesn't leave behind the philosophical and scientific musings and sidesteps that Stephenson so obviously enjoys. To be honest, it does at times feel as if he's come up with his overarching plot purely so that he can cover all of the theories and methods that he wants to. That doesn't mean that it isn't a strong plot, though - as we slowly begin to get an idea of the bigger picture, and as our focus pulls out from one Concent and a handful of young avout, it becomes clear that the sequence of events is going to end up with some planet-wide (and further) events end effects. Part of the fun is in trying to predict what is actually going on, and the fact that our main protagonist, Ras, is as uncertain as ourselves allows Stephenson to play with the reader. Multiple possible solutions are offered, and there is little indication as to which one may be correct. And as soon as one 'problem' is solved, another one looms up behind it, and we're left with an enjoyable but often confusing whirl of facts, half-recognisable versions of Earth people and beliefs, and a frequently exciting through-plot. That may sound a little like faint praise, but I did enjoy the book and the fact is, Stephenson is a very good writer. He can juggle complex explanations and debates with the odd action sequence, some very funny slapstick 'business' and an explanation for everything that is going on that still makes my head hurt a little, although it made sense within the confines of the book. Our main character is a very enjoyable person to spend nine hundred pages with, although occasionally I did want to give him a good shake, and some of the cameo and bit-part characters are deeply memorable. Equally, there can be no doubt that huge amounts of effort have gone into the creation of this world. The initial feeling of disorientation does persist for a while, as many things are very like the earth equivalents, but there is no doubt that by the end, my picture of Arbre (or at least the bits we've seen) was coherent and surprisingly detailed. I'm very very sure that this book won't be for everyone - it is a hard read at times, and the better bits (for me at least) came about five hundred pages in, by which time some might have given up - but if you're prepared to put the effort in, if you're prepared to think about what you're reading, and if you're not put off by SF, this is probably well worth a go. If you'll take my advice, though - don't take it to the beach. I read a proof, and the Hardback is published next week, ISBN: 9781843549154. (Comment on this)

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