Gareth L Powell is a British writer I’d not come across before. But the usual rule applies: Stars and Bones was a 99p special, so I bought it.
This struck me as a space opera out of the Scalzi school, which means there’s a universe of FTL travel, a certain amount of fighting and peril, all leavened by snark and wit from down-to-earth characters. Earth was on the brink of nuclear destruction but humanity was saved from itself by a god-like race who can manipulate matter and time. Exiled from Earth, humanity now lives in a vast fleet of ark ships, forbidden from interfering with planetary life ever again.
A scout ship encounters a different kind of alien and things start going badly wrong. It’s left to a second scout ship and its AI and chief navigator to try to rescue the situation.
I found this enjoyable enough. It rocks along, easy to read, not quite at Scalzi levels of entertainment, but all right if you like this sort of thing.
I tried not to dwell too much on pernickety plot details. A Kim Stanley Robinson version of this would go into great detail on the ships’ systems and internal ecologies (as in Aurora); an Adrian Tchaikovsky version would spend hundreds more pages on the alien intelligence. But that would be to detract from the page-turning space adventure this wants to be, with action from the first page to the last. As to why a human civilisation banned from settling on planets would bother with scout ships; or why there would be a security apparatus with authority to threaten dire consequences against a non-cooperative captain is never explained. Some of the characters here are just sketches and some of the viewpoint narrators do a chapter or two and then disappear, which was slightly unsatisfying.
While this tells a story which comes to a conclusion, there is at least one other book in the series (Descendant Machine), though the author’s home page says you can read the books in any order.
First published in 1984, this is something of a classic, the kind of fantasy novel that has transcended its genre and garnered academic attention. It’s the kind of fantasy novel that you think people who don’t read genre fiction should probably read.
Needless to say, I’d never heard of it.
But it popped up as a 99p deal, so into the Kindle it went, and here we are. As older readers will know, I have read a lot of fantasy over the years, but I have mixed feelings about it. I prefer science fiction, but recent trends in SF have left me cold and casting about.
Mythago Wood was not what I was expecting. Completely unexpected, but once you start reading, somehow obvious. I don’t mean obvious as in predictable, but in the sense of, why didn’t anybody think of this before?
A mythago is a myth-image, an entity created out of the human psyche, the collective unconscious of memory and myth. Jungian archetypes, dream creatures, race memory. Mythagos can appear human, or can be animal, vegetable or mineral. They can be buildings, landscapes, characters.
The setting is Ryhope Wood, a small area of primeval woodland in Herefordshire. I remember years ago being told that Highgate Wood in North London is an area of ancient woodland that has somehow survived since the days of the Domesday Book. The idea that something so ancient could still exist in the modern metropolis is amazing to me. The Woodland Trust’s web page about ancient woodland has the following pre-amble:
Home to myth and legend, where folk tales began. It fuelled our ancestors and still houses thousands of species. Ancient woodland has grown and adapted with native wildlife, yet what remains only covers 2.5% of the UK.
The fictional Ryhope Wood is just such a place. It’s in a fairly isolated spot, and can be walked around in less than a day; walking into it is another matter, however. It resists incursion. Follow a path and you find yourself walking in circles, ending up at your starting point. A child’s model boat, floated in on the small stream that meanders through the wood, emerges from it six weeks later.
People disappear.
The protagonist here is war veteran Stephen Huxley, who returns reluctantly from France a year or so after after the 1939–1945 war, in order to help his older brother Christian, who is living alone in Oak Lodge, the family home, with a woman called Guiwenneth. The brothers’ father has died, leaving behind a study full of papers concerning his obsession with the nearby woodland and the people – and animals – who live there. Now it seems that Christian is similarly obsessed with the woods: and Guiwenneth is nowhere to be seen – gone.
The two brothers had themselves encountered mythagos from the woods when they were children, incidents their father had explained away: gypsies, he said. But now the two men have access to his private papers and Christian is convinced something else is going on. The people in the woods are characters from myth and legend: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Guinevere, and others from deeper, older myths.
When Christian disappears into the wood, Stephen begins his own investigation.
All of which is fascinating in itself, but what really sets this book apart is Holdstock’s prose style. He writes with a clarity and elegance that make this a deceptively easy read. Deceptive because the ideas are complex and sophisticated, while the prose is beautiful and clear. And then there are breathtaking passages like this:
‘I am the fish that struggles in the water, swimming towards the great grey rock that marks the deep pool. I am the daughter of the fisher who spears the fish. I am the shadow of the tall white stone where my father lies, the shadow that moves with the day towards the river where the fish swims, towards the forests where the glade of the woodcocks is blue with flowers. I am the rain that makes the hare run, sends the doe to the thicket, stops the fire in the middle of the round house. My enemies are thunder and the beasts of the earth who crawl by night, but I am not afraid. I am the heart of my father, and his father. Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land.’
Such a good book, one that puts you in touch with the ancients, and makes you consider woodland walks in a new light.
I downloaded this as an audiobook on Libby, which is the app that allows you to borrow ebooks and audiobooks using your library membership.
The problem with Libby and audiobooks is that the availability is patchy. Some titles by quite prominent authors are just not available, and those that are have artificial limitations placed on them as to how many people can borrow at once.
Which is how I ended up downloading The Dry, which I’d seen reviews of, but wasn’t sure I’d enjoy. Turns out, it was pretty good, if a little bit formulaic. There’s nothing inherently wrong with genre formulae of course (that’s why we like genres), but sometimes the tropes just make you tired if you aren’t in the mood for them.
Item: cop returns to his home town after decades away and gets a hostile reception. Item: said hostile reception is because of an unresolved Something That Happened A Long Time Ago. Item: current visit is because an old friend (Or Was He?) has died in Mysterious Circumstances.
So that’s the kind of thing, which combined with the Australian setting, just makes you kind of roll your eyes.
But as with all genre pieces, it’s all in the execution, and the execution is good. Aaron Falk, a federal agent specialising in financial crime, returns to his home town for his former best friend’s funeral. The friend has apparently killed his wife and son and then turned the gun on himself in the midst of a catastrophic drought. The whole town is on edge, and then Falk turns up: a man suspected of involvement in the death of a 16-year-old girl 20 years earlier.
Falk stays in a local pub, and endures the hostility of the locals for the sake of his friend’s family, who want him to look into the apparently open and shut case of the murder-suicide. And so he stays a little longer than he intended, encountering old friends and enemies, but also forming a kind of partnership with the local cop, an outsider with no axe to grind.
There is the usual array of stock characters here: the attractive woman who-might-have-been; the embittered family of the dead girl; the hostile neighbours of the murder family; and the town itself – almost dried up and blown away, a spark away from catastrophe.
Ronnie executes operation Fish in Desk. This definitely won’t cause any problems down the line. Toffo calls another staff meeting. On their train to London that evening, Mel confidentially reveals to Ronnie a side to her character that blindsides him.
When I worked in an office I never hated anyone so much that I wanted to exercise petty revenge against them. But it was close. I remember there was this one time that a higher grade officer thought I was after this girlfriend. The looks! Of course, I was entirely innocent. She was definitely flirting avec moi, but she wasn’t my type. Of course, she as an individual was free to flirt with whoever she wanted to, and the problem was the HG officer’s sense of possession and entitlement. Office romances are never a good idea. There were an awful lot of office romances though. I personally started at least three relationships in my time there, and I wasn’t even the worst offender. There was a guy in the office, let’s call him Mike (his name actually was Mike), who would routinely ask out every new girl who started in the office within a week of her first day. This is No Exaggeration.
It was a tragic situation. The idea of this ageing Lothario, slowly losing his hair, asking younger and younger girls out. Luckily he did get one of them to stick, and they entered a long-term relationship and he dodged the bullet.
This is the episode in which Ronnie realises that he and Mel both have some kind of involvement with Melody and her father’s movement, both meeting in the middle from different directions.
Operation Able Archer/Autumn Forge is over, Mel seems to have dealt with the boyfriend problem, and things are looking up. On the train to London to see a film at the NFT, she reveals (among other things) what she knows about where Paul works. It was on such trips to London with my girlfriends that I conceived of the idea of a secret place behind blank walls and innocuous doors. Of course, if it had been 2013 and not 1983, I might have done some actual research, but I didn’t even know, then, about the disused Underground stations, many of which come straight out of T S Eliot: King William Street (closed 1900); City Road (1922); Down Street (1932); and the British Museum (1934), which was between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road. The most recent station to close was Aldwych (1994), though part of Charing Cross was also closed in 1999.
I couldn’t pass one of those mysterious doors, even now, without thinking of The Obald. But back then I thought of a space where an organisation existed, so secret that barely anybody knew of its existence. Walls from behind which the millions of faceless commuters were being watched, measured, judged. Well, you think yourself faceless, but now they have facial recognition.
Back then, we were naive enough that we still believed in the mythological TV detector vans. I’ll never forget the “…And they’re watching Columbo” public information film. You could quite believe they were watching you, just like in George Orwell, that they even knew your shoe size.
Nowadays I’d tend to think that, yes, they are watching, but they’ve got you mixed up with someone else, and they think they know your shoe size, but it’s actually your neighbour’s shirt collar size. Just as dangerous, but more because of stupidity; like the Met arresting people “by mistake”.
I have to say, I hovered over the Goodreads star rating on this, and I’m still torn between giving it three stars (okay if you like this sort of thing) and four stars (quite good). The problem? I am always squeamish and this book in particular (and its various substances) was always going to give me the icks or the squicks. I had been forewarned: so why read it in the first place?
Well, apart from the icky stuff, it’s a fairly straightforward adventure in bookselling (and buying), which is not a bad world to lose yourself in. It’s not exactly “cozy crime” (which is having a bit of a moment) but it is an interesting world of book fairs and first editions. I’m reminded that one of my favourite John Le Carré’s is The Russia House, which starts in such a world. So it’s a kind of fantasy-mystery-adventure story, which on the surface is quite appealing. It’s a decent story and it rocks along, and at least one podcaster I respect recommended it, so.
On the other hand, the particular book being pursued here is a sex magic book, and that’s where it gets icky. I believe I had a character in my novel The Wake Knot respond to the thought of sex magick (with a k) with a simple, ew. But I went in knowing this, and the truth is that those scenes that are likely to prompt squeamishness are few and far between. There is quite a bit of sex in here, but it isn’t sexy, I don’t think. In fact, I don’t think sex in novels is ever sexy.
But ignoring all that stuff there are some structural problems. There is a lot of travelling around, and bumping up against different characters in pursuit of the book. Well, this means it tends towards the Menippean satire, as our protagonist-narrator encounters these characters and their philosophies. But (unlike in a thriller/mystery) there is no doubling back, in the sense that we get what we need (or learn what we need) and then move onto the next. There’s no going back to someone and saying, you lied!
Which is a problem because (slight spoiler ahead) there’s a revelation towards the end that one of these characters murdered somebody. But I completely blanked on the name of the victim, not remembering who they were in the story until a couple of pages later. And then I was like, oh. Well, that should have had more impact, but it didn’t, because I’d completely forgotten about them. Because this is a novel about the pursuit of a book rather than the solving of a murder mystery, it’s hard to care. But at the end, I think you’re supposed to care?
Here’s the set up: one-time novelist Lily Albrecht has been forced to abandon her promising literary career and sell books for a living in order to care for her husband, who has some form of early onset dementia and is completely locked in, requiring round-the-clock care. She’s involved somewhat reluctantly in the world of rare and collectible books. I actually would have liked a bit more of this scene, as I quite like it. But the ruthless plot moves us on. Through another bookseller she learns of a collector who is after an exceedingly rare book of magic(k-k-k), and gets involved because the money at stake will help her in her dire financial situation. But then the other bookseller is killed and Lily finds herself front and centre in an international pursuit of power and sex. The first job is to find out just who it was wanted to buy the book.
Well, you may have spotted in that brief summary that the other bookseller was killed (in a mugging). And yes, I did completely forget about that by the time I reached the end. So a little frown creased my brow and it took me a couple of pages to remember that particular precipitating incident.
So: three stars, or four? I think, in the end, that it was readable without being particularly gripping. There was a fair amount of squick, so I think perhaps three stars. Which, again, means: if you think you might enjoy this, you probably will.
Ronnie covers his tracks in the office. Cooper enumerates the many steps taken towards armageddon. Mel reveals her deep anxiety about the other boyfriend. When Ronnie gets home, he realises someone has been in his flat…
The Italian coffee place in the indoor market. The one I’m thinking about is actually in Nottingham, but transferred in this chapter to the Arndale Centre in Luton, where it is much more convenient for Ronnie to reach in a lunch break. The problem with all indoor markets, of course, is the smell. Some places sensibly keep the fish and meat stalls separate from the rest, in a separate hall or building, but inevitably there’s an aroma that lingers. Still, it was exciting to get a cappuccino, even if it wasn’t at breakfast time.
Places like this are reminders of the days before coffee chains. These days, you could trip over as you leave a Starbucks and land face forward in a Costa, or a Nero, or another Starbucks. Back in the 80s, if you wanted a cappuccino, you had to find something like the little stall in the indoor market, or a corner café on a side street. Reaching back further into the dim and distant past, there was a place on High Street North in Dunstable called The Milk Bar. I have a faint memory of having a milk shake in there, must have been in the 60s, before it closed. Did the milk bar also offer a species of cappuccino? I think it must have done, because there was also a Milk Bar in Bute Street, Luton, where I would go with my older brother on the way to (or from?) football matches.
Meanwhile, in the pub, Cooper has news about Operation Able Archer, and informs Ronnie about the Korean 747 jet that the Soviets shot down in September 1983. Crashed submarines, downed Jumbos, four minute warnings… 1983 was da bomb. And amidst all this Cold War tension, Cruise missiles arrive on UK soil. Picture Ronnie, hearing this news: pint paused on its way to his mouth.
Then there’s talk of office revenge plots. So many of these seem to involve fish, which takes us back to the indoor market. The legend of the fish dangling outside a tax inspector’s window while he interviewed a tax defaulter made me laugh so much at the time that I almost gave myself a hernia. Fish in the workplace: always unacceptable. I wish more of my colleagues appreciated this.
Finally, Ronnie’s love life is melting his head. His newfound tenderness towards Mel is complicated when he arrives home to find a bean casserole in his oven. This scene was a little holdover from the original (lost) version of The Obald, written contemporaneously. I just thought of packaging all that cold war paranoia and giving it a twist. What if someone did break into your house, but instead of stealing your stuff, or planting bugs, or searching through your papers, they just left you a nice casserole?
On the day his band is to start recording their album, Ronnie is called upstairs to speak to Surveillance. How much trouble is he in? Melody contacts Ronnie and they agree a signal. Here’s the feed.
The inter-office rivalries: I remember the Inspector who interviewed me for my tax office job telling me (while standing next to me at the urinal, which is an absolute red flag) that he was beginning to be embarrassed to have recruited me, finding it hard to justify to his fellow inspectors. This, by the way, was for a filing job that was so far beneath my true abilities that I could hardly be blamed for being a bit… bored? But really it was something about me they didn’t like: the way I walked, for example, came under scrutiny. The way I dressed, obviously. And the way I looked for files. You take a pile of files on a table, and you need to flick through them quickly to determine whether the name you’re after is in the pile. There’s a right way, and a wrong way. The wrong way was however I was doing it.
After this, I was called upstairs by a rival inspector, a member of the Old School, who read me the riot act about my style of dress and general demeanour as a person. There were people around, in the early 80s, who were old enough to have been in the War, and they were just like the guy on the train in A Hard Day’s Night. “I fought the War for your sort.” “I bet you’re sorry you won!”
But then there was that other guy, the one who arrived and was clearly a grade or two above all the others, and he seemed to like me and to be relatively relaxed about all the things they’d been picking on – all of which were simply pretexts, clearly, for a deeper dislike of me. Anyway, all of this was enough to drive me into the arms of the union, obviously, and I directed the brain cells I wasn’t using on the job to my union activism. And the pub. There were plenty of two-hour lunch sessions in the pub, and there were also plenty of wondrous occasions when I would be meeting a girl for lunch.
For Ronnie, the interview about his demeanour and personal style takes place on one of the upper floors, with a sinister person who has been alerted to a suspicion of non-cooperation. Ronnie uses all of the dark arts of work avoidance to avoid this meeting as long as possible. These go way beyond the traditional “carrying a piece of paper around so people think you’re busy” method.
And then there’s the recording session. The 80s were an exciting time for home recording tech. Springsteen had released Nebraska, recorded on a TEAC 4-track, and my first band multitrack recordings were made on a Fostex 4-track, which simply felt incredible at the time. So you’ve got your standard compact cassette (invented 1966) which can play music in stereo. That’s two tracks: left and right channels. But! You can also flip a cassette over and play the other side, which is another two tracks. But what if you used all four tracks together to record a song demo? And doubled the speed of the tape to improve the quality of the recordings? Now you’re talking. You could basically make Revolver this way. Record on three tracks, bounce down to the fourth, Now you’ve still got three free tracks. And when we decided to record a single (not an album, as Ronnie’s band does), we hired a reel-to-reel 8-track and used the living room of one of the band members as the studio. I insisted we mix it as mono, of course.
Later on, when I was living alone in Milton Keynes, that same band member (Pete) wanted to store some equipment in my house, and I had the dream home demo setup: a big mixing desk, an 8-track recorder, a selection of microphones. I made a few recordings with that set-up, just me and Pete. And then stopped making music for years, until I started using my Mac as a recording studio in the early 2000s.
I wrote a while ago about my enjoyment of The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, which I described as “a properly entertaining, very clever, puzzle box of a book”. So Hallett’s other two books were on my list, and given that I was about to embark on a long drive over easter, I downloaded The Appeal to listen to on my way to France.
Like The Twyford Code, The Appeal is constructed from fragments in epistolary style. Texts, Whatsapp messages, emails, and so on. The blurb says, “One murder. Fifteen suspects” so you have certain expectations. But, unlike a classic detective novel, the novel doesn’t begin with a murder. Two legal interns are tasked with ploughing through a lot of material looking for clues and seeking to exonerate somebody – only we don’t know who. We neither know who the victim is nor who the possibly wrongly convicted murderer is. So that’s the first kind of appeal, or the first meaning of the title.
The background is amateur dramatics: you can already imagine the petty jealousies, frustrations and mind games that go on in such groups. Again, this feeds your expectations. The narrative proper begins with the announcement of the next production, and the series of messages about auditions and rehearsals. As a reader/listener you start trying to work out who is going to get killed, and why. But then there’s a twist, as the other “Appeal” of the title is introduced. It’s a fundraiser… but again, while you might have expectations of what this will be about, Janice Hallett is quite prepared to keep pulling threads. She also has a tendency to cheat a bit, by withholding certain documents until much later in the book. So you’re kept guessing: even if you suspect what’s actually going on with one appeal, you’re never quite sure about what’s happening with the other. Who gets killed, who gets blamed, who really did it — and why?
The audiobook version is especially engaging because the publishers have employed multiple voiceover artists to read the parts. What you’re getting, then, feels more like a 12-hour radio drama than a conventional audiobook.
I enjoyed The Appeal so much that for the journey home, I downloaded The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, a third Janice Hallett audiobook. As with The Appeal and The Twyford Code, the narrative has an epistolary structure. This time, a true crime writer is commissioned to write about an old case in which two teenagers and their baby survive a cult mass suicide. Eighteen years later, the baby is about to come of age, and the author wants to uncover the redacted identities of the survivors, and investigate what really happened. But, there’s a problem: another author is working on a similar book, and there’s a history between them. A rivalry, some anger and bitterness about an event in the past, and therefore an extra urgency to get to “the baby” first.
As with The Appeal, the publishers effectively employ a range of voice actors, and this brings the text to life more dramatically than a single voice would. It also gets around the issue with The Twyford Code, which is that email headers etc can be a bit of a drag to listen to when all read in the same flat voice.
I really loved both of these audiobooks, which makes Janice Hallett three for three as far as I’m concerned. A great way to pass a journey.
Fantasy is an inherently conservative genre. While the best of it might offer a critique of monarchy and feudalism, most of the core texts are set in worlds with Kings, Queens, knights, court intrigue, hapless soldiers and peasants, operating in a rigidly hierarchical society with stultifying formality. Of course, the joy of the genre is in taking us behind that curtain of formality and showing us the cold clockwork underneath. Those who challenge the hierarchy are often portrayed as evil, and the peasants, on the whole, are mere background characters, dragon victims, refugees, burned out of their houses and generally disregarded by the heroes—whoever they are.
Sure, sometimes the protagonist is an outsider (or several outsiders), making their way into the upper reaches of the hierarchy with imposter syndrome and trepidation, but we are rarely questioning the need for a King, Monty Python style.
That single bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the “watery bint” bit, is the best genre critique of monarchy and the whole basis of the world building that exists: played for laughs.
I just finished all 848 pages of The Priory of the Orange Tree and I kind of enjoyed it. And really, that’s how I’ve been talking about it. I just finished a really long book. It was extensive. It took me ages. Really, really long. At least partly, I had read it on the promise (from a podcast) that it was complete in itself and not part of a series. Now I discover that like one of the characters in the story, I have been deceived. It is part of a series (The Roots of Chaos), notwithstanding its Lord of the Rings style extreme length, and now I don’t know what to think.
The best-selling The Citrus Convent is enjoyable enough, entertaining and well-plotted, and I did persevere to the end, but it did feel a bit of a slog, and the word is persevere. I don’t think we can claim greatness for any novel where your overwhelming impression is that it was really lengthy.
One of the things I did enjoy about The Lemon Abbey was the way in which the author didn’t shilly shally. After moving her pieces around, she did not then create scenes that overstay their welcome or unnecessarily delay outcomes. Things go wrong, in the way of this type of novel, but the Final Battle with the Big Bad is not overly extended. In fact [spoiler alert], when it comes, the Final Battle is over and done with in short order, no nonsense. And though there are Long Journeys for many of the characters, these are generally handled briskly, with elision, and there’s only one of them that seems to be extended: the first one, just to let the reader know that there are distances involved.
[More spoilers ahead] There are five viewpoint characters (not untypical of the genre). There are dragons, two kinds. There are the products of dragons fucking other creatures. There’s a bit of magic, rival religions. There are clearly also people of colour and ethnicities other than white, and no great fuss is made about this. There is of course at least one character from a lowly background who turns out to be descended from Royalty; another who is low on a particular hierarchy and ends up at its top; a Queen who learns to loosen up and love who she wants… and so forth. Funny, really, that a book like this is perfectly able to question representations of race, gender, sexuality, but only slightly hint at the idea that perhaps we don’t need Kings and Queens and, well, the whole management class. Perhaps in the sequel?
But it was all right. I’m not saying don’t read this. It was readable, engaging, and – a ringing endorsement they might want to quote on the cover – “not too much of a slog.”
Cooper has news about NATO exercises in Europe, and events in Afghanistan. Ronnie contemplates sabotage. Over tea at Debenhams, Mel reveals her conundrum regarding her other boyfriend.
This chapter focuses on Ronnie, with a newfound paranoia about his work in the office. How do you hide something within the filing system so you can put your hand on it easily, but nobody is likely to stumble across it by accident? When I worked in the civil service, I was trained in the correct way to file things—the human way, as opposed to the dumb computer way. Take my own name: McMinn. A computer will file Mc names after names like Matthews, because Mc comes after Ma in a strict alphabetical system. But, a name like McMinn could easily be spelled MacMinn, in which case the relevant file would be with the other Mac names, and before Matthews etc. It’s an important idea, a kind of fuzzy human logic. Because McDonald, spoken over the phone might be MacDonald, you file all the Mc and Mac names together, as if they were all spelled Mac. It’s one of the great disappointments of the infotech era that no alphabetical ordering will take that into account.
Ronnie is learning to distrust everything: the filing system, the photocopier, the telephone system, his colleagues. You leave your desk for lunch, someone might search through it while you’re gone. A state of hyper-alertness takes over: a parallel to the cold war manoeuvrings concerning Operation Able Archer. Ronnie, like NATO, is approaching Defcon 1.
Meanwhile, Mel reveals something about her other boyfriend that hints at the precariousness of her position, but also at the true nature of The Obald.
Another moment in this chapter: the inspiration for the title: that sewing machine shop with its neon sign, and the warm girl who kept letting bus after bus pull away so she could stay for ten minutes longer.
McMinn & Cheese 