tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6649584369315289002024-03-13T10:54:16.315+00:00Simon's Book BlogBook reviews - a continuation of my Geocities site.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.comBlogger1509125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-52351127844480522792020-05-21T07:43:00.000+00:002020-05-22T08:14:46.183+00:00фANTASTIKA: Almanac for Bulgarian Speculative Fiction<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NDc-SRDHDEQ/XseJfxykQbI/AAAAAAAAASE/_38YtgRFMjIag3rs8ccv9bcYsc7Rc2WRACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Screenshot_2020-05-22_09-11-36.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="625" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NDc-SRDHDEQ/XseJfxykQbI/AAAAAAAAASE/_38YtgRFMjIag3rs8ccv9bcYsc7Rc2WRACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screenshot_2020-05-22_09-11-36.png" width="225" /></a><b>Edition: Terra Fantasia (Association of Bulgarian SF & F Writers and Artists), 2020</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1520</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
This is an extensive collection, a showcase of Bulgarian science fiction and fantasy, including both writing (translated into English) and art. I have never read any Bulgarian speculative fiction (at least, not knowingly), and so I'm approaching this with interest and am hoping to be impressed. I've written a mini-review of each story, and at the end I've added some general thoughts about the anthology as a whole.<br />
<br />
The first section in the anthology contains stories which are considered to be straightforwardly science fiction.<br />
<br />
<i>The Last Interview of Adam Sousbe</i>, by Lyuben Dilov (short story)<br />
This story positions itself as a journalistic interview of a proponent of male rights in 2980, which has been proclaimed the "Year of Man" - the final interview before Adam Sousbe is murdered. The idea that gender inequality might be reversed in the future is not unique, of course, and it can be hard to tell whether a story on this theme is intended to highlight continued unequal treatment of women or to suggest that feminism has gone too far already. It is very much a John W. Campbell story, complete with the feeling of slight discomfort at the politics (though here I am less sure of the intention than I would be with Campbell's). I couldn't see a date for this piece, but the "about the author" paragraph places him in the 1970s, and it is certainly a story which wouldn't be at all out of place in any collection of short science fiction from that decade.<br />
<br />
<i>Beating the Air</i>, by Velko Miloev (short story)<br />
What would happen if people could choose to become a wind? This brilliant story takes this strange question and runs with it. The point of view character is a "wind inspector", checking up on someone who has taken that option, who is conversing with a wind that is tired of paid work producing picturesque effects for a poet. Reading this whimsical story is one of my fiction highlights of my 2020 science fiction reading, and it deserves to be widely known.<br />
<br />
<i>It's Only Fair, Botkin</i>, by Khristo Poshtakov (short story)<br />
There is still something of a tendency in science fiction to depict space exploration as a glorious adventure. In this story, it is a tedious job, and one which doesn't reflect well on the explorers. The story is a thinly veiled attack on the attitudes of Earthly colonialists on the native peoples they encountered; fairly predictable, and less interesting to me than the depiction of what it's like to be doing a dull job in space at the start of the story. Worth reading, but less good than the stories which precede it.<br />
<br />
<i>In the Beginning Was the Subway</i>, by Lyubomir P. Nikolov (short story)<br />
The beginning of this story is a bit incoherent, but by the second page it resolves into a tale of a ghost arranging for a young man to receive a mysterious device, though which esoteric scientific information is imparted to him over a period of weeks. It's a weirdly utopian tale, which in tone reminded me of Olaf Stapledon, with an old fashioned, didactic tone. Interesting, but not a story which appealed to me.<br />
<br />
<i>Three Tales of a Very Windy Town</i>, by Lyubomir P. Nikolov (short story)<br />
"Up on the cliffs by a rough sea, there falteringly existed a town" is a great start to a story. It sets the whimsical tone of an amusing tale, which is essentially three tall stories about the wind. Together with <i>Beating the Air</i>, it suggests that Bulgarian writers may have something of an obsession with the wind! It is very unusual in an anthology with several authors to have two stories in a row from the same author (especially as they are not among the shortest stories); if I had to pick, I would choose this one to keep - it is both more inventive and more enjoyable to read.<br />
<br />
<i>Virgil and the Water</i>, by Svetoslav Nikolov (short story)<br />
Another strange story, of the Roman poet Virgil, who in this version oversees the whole of the history of the Roman Empire, and is obsessed with plumbing. From the note following the story, it appears that this is likely to be the most well known story from this collection to Western readers. It's engagingly written, but to me suffers (in a slightly bizarre way) from one of the major problems facing science fiction authors: finding a good way to give the reader all the information s/he needs in order to be able to understand the story. Because of the way this story works, the infodumps here are not about interplanetary trade relations, or the foibles of faster than light travel, but concern Roman history. In some ways, this is brought to life by the insertion of Virgil as narrator into the centre of events, but I suspect that there will be many readers whose interests don't extend to a summary the events of six centuries in a few pages.<br />
<br />
<i>How I Saved the World, Or, The Best Job</i> by Valentin D. Ivanov (short story)<br />
Training to be a hero is not fun in a (minimally described) post-apocalyptic world. Obsolete equipment and vehicles do not have the expected glamour. But just wait until you find out what the job actually entails.... Humorous story with some neat physics in the twist. A short, but excellent story.<br />
<br />
<i>Deflation</i>, by Valentin D. Ivanov (short story)<br />
Illegal astronomy?! This very short story is about an undercover investigation into illegal astronomy, and right from the beginning I was hooked: why is the use of telescopes banned? Unusual for these stories, <i>Deflation</i> is set into the USA, in may ways still the spiritual home of modern science fiction (and, indeed, a lot of modern astronomy). Not quite as good as <i>How I Saved the World</i>, but <i>Deflation </i>also has a good reveal of the physics involved at the end.<br />
<br />
<i>Dragonflies and Planets</i>, by Aleksandar Karapanchev (short story)<br />
Even shorter, this two page story is a beautiful lyrical prose poem about the exploration of distant worlds. <i>Dragonflies and Planets </i>is a distillation of the sense of wonder which lies at the heart of science fiction.<br />
<br />
<i>The Empty Room</i>, by Aleksandar Karapanchev (short story)<br />
Karapanchev's second story is also short and poetic, about the seasons and death and renewal, but is less successful than <i>Dragonflies and Planets</i>. However, the intention is to chill rather than enchant, and it certainly does that.<br />
<br />
<i>The Most Terrible Beast</i>, by Khristo Poshtakov<br />
This amusing story is the space exploration equivalent of tall fishing stories in a bar - swapping tales of the most hair-raising beasts encountered on newly discovered planets, each one topping the last with larger, more fearsome and dangerous creatures. Here, it's accompanied by some fun but seemingly unrelated cartoons, perhaps the most unusual of all the art in the book.<br />
<br />
<i>Father</i>, by Ivaylo G. Ivanov (short story)<br />
A son has a lot of questions when the police question him because his father, dead for many years, appears to have left his fingerprints at a robbery scene. This is a story which has an emotional punch, though the twist at the end is unlikely to take any reader by surprise.<br />
<br />
<i>10<sup>-9</sup></i>, by Nikolay Tellalov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
As the title suggests, the topic is purportedly nanotechnology (a nanometer is 10<sup>-9</sup> metres), though in the extract itself, there is not a great deal of nanotechnology to be seen. I found this tale confusing, especially the time shifts within the extract (which starts, "Thirty-two years earlier") - the synopsis doesn't give sufficient temporal anchors to make it possible to work out where the different times fit within the synopsis. The writing itself is good, but I don't think the presentation of this story is helpful to it.<br />
<br />
<i>To Wake a Dragon Girl</i>, by Nikolay Tellalov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
Tellalov's talents as a writer are much better served by this story. It's a love story, and also, in a sense, a tale of an alien encounter. One of my favourites from the anthology.<br />
<br />
<i>Sun Untouchable</i>, by Nikolay Tellalov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
A third excerpt from a longer Tellalov story; even though it is just a part of the whole, it is one of the longest contributions included in the anthology. This tale has illustrations by the author (where elsewhere the art included in the collection is just that, with no connection to the literary content). Of all the art in the book, I least liked these illustrations. And this story failed to grab me; <i>To Wake a Dragon Girl</i> is easily the best of the three Tellalov tales.<br />
<br />
<i>Love in the Time of Con Crud</i>, by Elena Pavlova (short story)<br />
Finally, a story by a female author - I was beginning to wonder if science fiction in Bulgaria is a completely masculine phenomenon! A story where the epigraph is one of my favourite silly physics jokes is sure to be good... It's a time travel story set in 2017 and the 2030s, and one of especial relevance now, as it's about attempting to derail and epidemic which leads to a permanent drop in the quality of life around the globe: "Helsinki 2017 takes pride in its pure water. Helsinki 2030 doesn't have that luxury." It's unintentionally chilling to read that line, published in 2019, in May 2020 - if we don't get things right, now, then what will life be like in 13, 15 years time?<br />
<br />
<i>The Assassination</i>, by Johan Vladimir (short story)<br />
This story begins the second section, classifying its stories as fantasy and magic realism. The title is simply a description of the subject of this lengthy story, about the planning for an assassination. The science fiction elements are provided by the central character, the assassin, who has visions of long-past events, other deaths and executions, and by the zmeys, the mysterious guardians of a utopian world order. This is hugely ambitious and complex for a short story, and is mostly successful, provided that the required level of concentration is granted by the reader. The "about the author" note reveals that Johan Vladimir is the second woman author here, writing under a pseudonym.<br />
<br />
<i>The Coin (Part One of Aurelion: Eternal Balance)</i>, by "Lights amidst Shadows" (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
Any story by a large collaborative group of young authors is an unusual beast, and this is in fact a synopsis of and an extract from a novel, first of a trilogy for young readers. It is a story about a clash between science and magic, the coin of the title proving to be the key to preserving the latter. The extract consists of the prologue and the first two chapters from the novel - starting as one of the main characters has just had his pocket picked, losing the coin. The extract makes me want to read the whole trilogy despite being considerably older than the target audience - and I would not have guessed either that the tale was written by a group, nor that they were "children and young people" (as the note at the end puts it). It stands alongside the rest of the anthology with ease.<br />
<br />
<i>They Don't Believe in Fairy Tales</i>, by Martin Petkov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
In this case, the "synopsis" is a summary of a discussion of the nature of law and the breaking of laws, and a link between this and children no longer believing in fairy tales. I'm quite glad to have this discussion in a shortened version - what there is appears to be just enough to provide the setting for the story, while letting the reader get to the action in only a page and a half. In the end, though, the extract doesn't really work, not being long enough to do more than give a vague idea of what the novella might be like - the ideas are clearly interesting, but not how they are worked through.<br />
<br />
<i>I, Sinner Ivan </i>by Nikolay Svetlev (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
Another extract, a story based on the life of Ivan Rilski, a tenth century hermit who became the patron saint of Bulgaria. It is a fantasy weaved around the basic biography of the saint, portraying him in this extract as a strange child, half in the mundane world, half in a spiritual one where the Christian God and pagan deities are close by and where he can command strange powers. Without the rest of the story, I found it quite hard to follow what was going on - it's clearly an unusual story told an a strange way, but it was not immediately comprehensible.<br />
<br />
<i>Mina, the Spells, and the White Vial</i>, by Vesela Flambulari (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
This story is for children, and to me seems unlikely to appeal to older readers; this is perhaps to do with the tone, which is very much in the face of the reader. It's a novel about a school for gifted children, gifted in the artistic sense, though this is a world with magic in it too. The extract didn't to me give much feeling for whether the novel would be more rewarding; it is taken from early parts of the book, before the main part of the plot starts up, it seems.<br />
<br />
<i>Orpheus Descends Into Hell</i>, by Georgi Malinov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
An alternative universe, in which the Bulgarians conquered Constantinople and rule the known world, at the end of the fifteenth century when this story is set. Strange things are happening across the empire, though. Again, the extract is rather unsatisfying; I think I would much rather have read one of Malinov's short stories, a complete work.<br />
<br />
<i>The Dragon and the Orange Juice</i>, by Genoveva Detelinova (short story)<br />
A humorous short story about wizards trying to control a dragon. Vlad is different to the other wizards, as can be seen from the results of his trying to explain mobile phones to his raven familiar. He is convinced he's going to die soon, so his major preoccupation is to amend his bucket list so he can get it done and to hone his "famous last words"; the last thing he wants is the dragon, the national icon, to be misbehaving. This is very silly and quite funny, even in translation, which often flattens humour.<br />
<br />
<i>Journey to Akkad</i>, by Val Todorov (extract)<br />
This story marks the beginning of the third section of this compilation, which is made up of avant garde science fiction. <i>Journey to Akkad </i>is (as might be expected from the avant garde label) a strange story, poetic stream of consciousness, describing a journey through the land of the dead. It has good illustrations by Plamen Atanasov. Interesting and enjoyable to read, though remaining baffling.<br />
<br />
<i>The Book</i>, by Val Todorov (extract)<br />
<i>The Book </i>is a second extract from the same source as <i>Journey to Akkad</i>. It's a lot shorter than <i>Journey to Akkad</i>, and is much the same in style, tone, and quality.<br />
<br />
<i>The Thing Gone with The Birds</i>, by Val Todorov (short story)<br />
This is like a more surreal version of the Kafka's famous story <i>Metamorphosis</i>. Rather than a cockroach, Mr S. turns into a balloon... Another interesting but weird story, a lot more fun than the other two.<br />
<br />
<i>The Film-thin Bound</i>, by Kalin M. Nemov (short story)<br />
Shades of Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on, I must go on" immediately sprang to my mind reading the first paragraphs of this story, which almost literally repeats this, at least in the English translation. In two pages, it moves from death, mourning and despair, to a new love, and a heroic salvation. It doesn't to my mind quite work; it would take a top class literary master to manage such a change in that short a space, and the initial desperate sadness is much better portrayed than the ending, which as a result approaches glibness. Interesting, and a gallant attempt to be great.<br />
<br />
<i>Asked the Soldier, "Who Called Me?"</i>, by Yancho Cholakov (short story)<br />
This story starts with affecting emotion, as did <i>The Film-thin Bound</i> (is there something about Bulgarian avant garde fiction which makes it easy to convey emotion), and goes on to deal with a topic which perhaps now seems difficult to discuss in a way which it might not have done a few months ago: the way that travellers can bring disease which may be fatal to those who have no immunity. Perhaps the most interesting story in the anthology, though in places the translation doesn't seem quite as good as many of the other stories here.<br />
<br />
<i>The Story of the Lonely Ranger</i>, by Yancho Cholakov (synopsis and extract from a novel)<br />
The synopsis of this work is almost more a description of the methods used in it rather than the plot - it's more a multimedia dossier than a novel, containing "pseudo-documentary" photos, drawings, and musical notes". The plot sounds rather Moorcockian, as "the huge figure of the Lonely Ranger is set against the dying mankind" - and hopefully the work offers an interesting depiction of the nature of heroism/villainy and the end of civilisation for the current era. Unfortunately, the excerpt - a half page of thirteen rather sentences reading like a scene from a gory pulp monster movie - is far too short to make a sensible assessment.<br />
<br />
<i>A Small Step</i>, by Màri (short story)<br />
Three actors are hired to pretend to be astronauts as NASA fakes the first moon landing. A fun story with twists even though short - I'm not sure why it's considered to be avant garde.<br />
<br />
<i>Impossibly Blue</i>, by Zdravka Evtimova (short story)<br />
A story about writing stories, a story about life, writer's block, and the neurotic thoughts that pass through most people's minds - maybe especially writers - from time to time. And it is fantastic.<br />
<br />
<i>Wrong</i>, by Zdravka Evtimova (short story)<br />
Another story about writing from Evtimova, this time about translating a work that is disliked, until a meeting with a mysterious stranger. Also good, it is pretty similar to <i>Impossibly Blue</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>The Matrix: Resolutions</i>, by Atanas P. Slavov (short story)<br />
This is <i>Matrix</i> fan fiction - it's basically an imagined conversation with the films' central character Neo. Possibly reactions to the story will depend on what the reader thinks of the films, personally I can take or leave them, and the same is very much true for the story.<br />
<br />
<i>The Keresztury TVirs</i>, by Ivan Popox (fictionalised book review)<br />
This article starts the final section, entitled "Futurum", a section title which is very unclear (and perhaps deliberately so). <i>The Keresztury TVirs </i>purports to be a review of a banned book describing computer viruses which affect cable TV transmissions, allowing editing of the picture and audio. It discusses their use by radical political factions as well as pranks and commercial advertising. Interesting and thought provoking - as science fiction should be!<br />
<br />
<i>Mindster</i>, by Valentin D. Ivanov (short story)<br />
Valentin D. Ivanov already has two stories earlier on in this anthology. This is rather more straightforwardly science fiction than <i>The Keresztury TVirs</i>, suggesting that the meaning of Futurum is simply near future science fiction. That is, assuming that the central concept is in fact a possibility: the story is about moving beyond file sharing online to mind sharing. Interesting, and a fitting conclusion to the anthology.<br />
<br />
<b>Overall thoughts</b><br />
<br />
I was sent this anthology as an ebook with a request to let the compilers know if there was anything which was significantly less good than the rest, something which should be dropped. It's a big anthology, and the stories do not all appeal equally - but this is true of every anthology, and there is nothing which stands out as much poorer than the other stories. On the other hand, there were several stories which I enjoyed a great deal, including one I would pick as among the best things I've read this year in any genre.<br />
<br />
On the negative side, I was not entirely convinced by the structure of the anthology. In a multi-author compilation, it is unusual to feature authors multiple times. This is done repeatedly here, and is more obvious because most of the multiple contributions are clustered together. This has the unfortunate consequence that it makes it seem as though there are not enough good science fiction and fantasy writers to fill the anthology with unique contributions: I hope this is not the case, and that there are plenty of other writers who could have been included. The biggest problem with the content of the anthology is the number of excerpts from longer works. They are clearly meant to give a flavour of the novel they come from, but in some cases, the extract is too short, or the accompanying synopsis doesn't quite give enough context to make for satisfying reading, which is a pity.<br />
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Like any other local science fiction community around the world, Bulgaria's is still influenced by the US, but this collection shows that there is local flavour there too, and a good deal of talent. I hope that the release of this ebook raises the profile of Bulgarian writers around the world - there are several I will seek out, given the chance (and, I'm afraid, the translations, as I speak no Bulgarian).<br />
<br />
My overall rating: 8/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-27338541893275880792019-05-07T18:28:00.000+00:002019-05-07T18:28:03.018+00:00Leslie Charteris: Salvage for the Saint (1983)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Salvage-Saint-Leslie-Charteris/dp/1477843094/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=9781477843093&qid=1556003612&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=0e8389704cdf78d9c939e97bbffb5a64&language=en_GB" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1477843094&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=1477843094" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Thomas & Mercer, 2014</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1519</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
After almost forty years, this is the final Saint book which I am reading for the first time, as well as being the last one published (aside from the Burl Barer contributions, neither of which I've been able to like enough to read right through). <i>Salvage for the Saint </i>was adapted by Peter Bloxsom from a double episode of <i>The Return of the Saint </i>TV series written by John Kruse, the two of them being frequent choices by Leslie Charteris to work with turning TV scripts into books.<br />
<br />
The story starts at a motorboat race on the Isle of Wight, in which Simon Templar is unable to save fellow competitor Charles Tatenor from a fatal accident - or possibly from murder. He also meets the dead man's beautiful widow Arabella. The action moves to the south of France (one of the favourite European locations of Saint stories), Simon to investigate the murder and Arabella to sell a yacht, as her husband unexpectedly left nothing but it and debts.<br />
<br />
In places, <i>Salvage for the Saint </i>has a wistful atmosphere which is appropriate to the last novel in such a series, and includes a number of melancholy references to older Saint stories. This is far more subtle than in the Burl Barer-penned <i>Capture the Saint</i>, which is full of contrived attempts to introduce names of older stories into the narrative - a piece of silliness which becomes infuriating after a few pages. It was Leslie Charteris' decision to stop at this point, and these touches are perhaps pointers to this being the final Saint story.<br />
<br />
Diving is an crucial part of <i>Salvage for the Saint</i>, as it was to the early novel <i><a href="https://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/2000/08/leslie-charteris-saint-overboard-1936.html">Saint Overboard</a></i>, published almost fifty years earlier. In both novels, the diving technology is important to the plot, and it is hugely different - heavy suits with air hoses to the surface are now replaced by compact scuba tanks; to read both is to have a glimpse of how much had changed during the time that Leslie Charteris was writing.<br />
<br />
All in all, this is a worthy conclusion to the Saint saga, though it doesn't match up to the quality of the early stories. My rating: 7/10.<br />
<br />
<br />Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-16242232485344270002019-04-14T10:05:00.000+01:002019-04-16T06:26:15.167+01:00Leslie Charteris: Count on the Saint (1980)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Count-Saint-Coronet-Leslie-Charteris/dp/0340271051/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=0340271051&qid=1555057681&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=5295142c09ffe97ed6f42ecb9dfc3ab2&language=en_GB" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0340271051&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" /></a></div>
<b>Edition: Coronet, 1980</b><br />
<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=0340271051" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Review number: 1518</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
According to the <a href="http://www.saint.org/">saint.org website</a>, this is by uncredited (as far as I can see) writers Graham Weaver and Donne Avenell - the same as the previous Saint book, <a href="https://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/leslie-charteris-saint-and-templar.html">The Saint and the Templar Treasure</a>. Like many of the books which originated from the TV Saint adventures, <i>Count on the Saint </i>contains two independent stories, <i>The Pastor's Problem </i>and <i>The Unsaintly Santa</i>.<br />
<br />
As soon as I started reading the first story, it felt as though I was back in the heyday of the Saint. This is a big contrast to <i>The Saint and the Templar Treasure</i>, which is a competent thriller but which is not convincing as part of the series. The setup is very Saintly indeed, as Simon Templar steals a chalice belonging to a church in order sell it to help the pastor raise money for the parish; the chalice can't be sold legitimately to raise money directly. (The chalice is meant to be real; the very obviously fake chalice shown on the cover of this edition does the story no favours.)<br />
<br />
In his long history, Simon Templar points out several times that he is not a detective, usually before solving a mystery. <i>The Unsaintly Santa </i>is definitely a mystery, and Simon is definitely detecting. Set in Cambridge just before Christmas, the puzzle is to work out the identity of a killer dressed as Santa. Unlike some of the earlier attempts at detecting (where Simon's method is basically to accuse each person until the right one is exposed), this works quite well as a puzzle - but there very little need for it to be a Saint story.<br />
<br />
For the reader, this is one of the best of the late Saint books. My rating: 8/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-21797654753776870632019-03-29T18:33:00.000+01:002019-03-29T18:33:04.231+01:00Leslie Charteris: The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saint-Templar-Treasure-Coronet-Books/dp/0340239344/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1553409073&sr=8-1&keywords=0340239344&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=32ee6b88894438a9841c34a14ecdc5ae&language=en_GB" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0340239344&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=0340239344" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Coronet, 1978</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1517</b><br />
<br />
Another late Saint novel, written by Donne Avenell and Graham Weaver in the days when Leslie Charteris was editing new entries in the series rather than writing them himself.<br />
<br />
It feels like a somewhat trite idea that Simon Templar should become involved with the Knights Templar, but in fact the way it is handled is competent, if a little clichéd for a thriller setup - Simon gives a lift to a couple of young men heading for a French vineyard to work in the summer, and gets there to discover that someone has set the barn on fire. The vineyard is at a house which was originally one of the last Templar castles to remain in the hands of the knights after the suppression of the order by the French king in 1307, and suspected by some to hold the hidden Templar "missing" treasure (while more sober individuals suspect that the treasure never existed in the first place, and that the riches of the order were exaggerated).<br />
<br />
While the book is satisfying as a thriller, it doesn't really read like a Saint book. It could almost be any late 1970s British thriller writer. The early Saint stories were unique, standing out from the crowd (even if they had obvious debts to Dornford Yates and Sapper), and Leslie Charteris was an expert at maintaining this specialness. It was partly that he made Simon Templar a genuinely charming character, rather than the direct man of action favoured by many other writers. That is really what is missing here; Simon Templar just isn't Simon Templar by 1978.<br />
<br />
My rating: 6/10.<br />
<b></b>Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-76088823178152461632019-03-19T08:09:00.000+01:002019-03-19T08:09:44.708+01:00Leslie Charteris: The Saint in Trouble (1978)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saint-Trouble-Coronet-Leslie-Charteris/dp/0340232501/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=0340232501&qid=1552634326&s=books&sr=1-1&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=cc4fbeaff84880c02a98a4d4f03355bc&language=en_GB" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0340232501&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=0340232501" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Coronet Books, 1978</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1516</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Another compilation of stories which originally were TV episodes of <i>Return of the Saint</i>, <i>The Saint in Trouble </i>comprises The Imprudent Professor (by Terence Feely) and The Red Sabbath (by John Kruse), both adapted from the TV scripts by Graham Weaver.<br />
<br />
In the first story, Simon Templar is asked to look out for the safety of Professor Maclett by his daughter, in the glamorous setting of Cannes. Maclett is the centre of a lot of attention, being of interest to both British and Russian spies, and the story is a hectic series of encounters between the various parties involved and the Saint. Even if only ranked against the other TV adaptations, The Imprudent Professor is not a high quality story. It seems to be Saint-by-numbers - a location which would have been exotic in 1978, beautiful women, Saintly tricks, and Simon sorting everything out in the end.<br />
<br />
The Red Sabbath is better. It follows on directly from The Imprudent Professor, as Simon disembarks in London from the plane he took in Cannes at the end of the first story, and is accosted by men who take him to talk to an Israeli intelligence officer. This leads to Simon hunting an Arab terrorist through London, a task he invests in personally. It is perhaps more typical of other thrillers of the second half of the seventies than of the Saint oeuvre, though the nature of the story reminds the reader that Arab terrorists are not new in fiction post 9/11.<br />
<br />
Averaging out my ratings for the two stories, I would give <i>The Saint in Trouble</i> a solid 5/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-80496973688471919482018-12-27T07:20:00.001+01:002018-12-27T07:20:26.502+01:00Leslie Charteris: The Saint and the People Importers (1971)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Importers-author-Charteris-published/dp/B01BODUQ64/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1544779248&sr=8-3&keywords=charteris+people+importers&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=5334335edd6b2fc9b0ad20371ceb9d93&language=en_GB" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B01BODUQ64&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" width="266" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=B01BODUQ64" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Thomas & Mercer, 2014</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1515</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
In recent years, the news has been full of refugees; immigration, legal and illegal, is seen as a problem by many. But people have been concerned about it for decades, and even centuries, and this is a novel about illegal immigration from the early seventies (the TV episodes that the novel was based on were aired in 1969 and the book came out in 1970).<br />
<br />
This is not the first Saint novel to take on social and political issues, including pre-war attacks on the Nazis in <i><a href="https://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/2000/09/leslie-charteris-prelude-for-war-1938.html">Prelude for War</a> </i>(aka <i>The Saint Plays With Fire</i>). Many Saint stories have a moral content, as Simon Templar is almost always taking on the bad guys in order to help an innocent victim. Here, his activity is prompted by a newspaper report of the killing of one of the immigrants as a warning by the traffickers. However, there is no serious attempt to integrate any of the issues surrounding immigration into the story, the abuse of would-be immigrants by traffickers being only the motivation for a TV thriller. The eventual "solution" to the problem of the existence of a group of rescued immigrants seems crass and insensitive today. To be fair, the TV episode and this novel were not intended as any kind of serious exploration of the issue; the adventures of the Saint are about entertainment pure and simple. The nature of the MacGuffin in <i>The People Importers</i> is not really suitable for this treatment, and it shows.<br />
<br />
Like many of the TV based stories, this is a much more straightforward thriller than the earlier Charteris stories. Although his introduction says that he added his own signature touches to each one, that is little in evidence here. One for Saint collectors only, really.<br />
<br />
My rating: 6/10.<br />
<br />
<br />Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-65666692066988333512018-12-01T08:51:00.000+01:002018-12-01T08:51:46.867+01:00Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice (2013)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0356502406/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=1d3f289cead25476269a9f66e7eb90aa&language=en_GB" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0356502406&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" width="254" /></a><b>Edition: </b><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=0356502406" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Orbit, 2013</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1514</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Back in 2013/4, <i>Ancillary Justice</i> won just about every award going in the science fiction genre: Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA. It's the only novel to have done this (no others have won even all the first three), though the more limited scope of some of the awards makes this slightly less impressive than it otherwise would be. It also led to suggestions that Leckie was a natural successor to <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Iain%20Banks">Iain M. Banks</a> (as reprinted on the back cover of this edition).<br />
<br />
<i>Ancillary Justice</i> tells the story of Breq, a Radsch ancillary. The Radsch are the rulers of a space empire, colonialists dedicated to the expansion of their civilisation, and ancillaries, known colloquially as "corpse warriors", are their soldiers, basically zombies with added artificial intelligence, sharing a gestalt mind with several others of their kind. Breq is part of the mind of a warship, and she is at a colony planet when the human officers of the ship are ordered to carry out a mass murder. The ship's reaction to this leads Breq to discover that the gestalt human mind which makes up the leader of the Radsch is divided against itself, and to a journey to kill this group individual. Rather unusually for a part of a trilogy, <i>Ancillary Justice</i> has its own satisfying ending, which leaves enough openings for a promising second and third volume (which I have already read, as this is my second reading of the series).<br />
<br />
The first thing that strikes me about <i>Ancillary Justice </i>(and its sequels) is the originality of the universe that Leckie has invented. Yes, it has echoes of other pan-galactic civilisations in science fiction, especially Banks' Culture, but it contains many different elements which make it unique, and also fascinating as expert world building. Many details contribute to this, especially the otherness of Breq. Leckie very cleverly takes ideas used in much science fiction (artificial intelligence, space travel, interstellar wars and colonial empires, telepathic communication, and so on) and gives them a novel twist, guaranteeing the interest of the long term science fiction fan.<br />
<br />
Engagement with issues is also very clearly part of what Leckie wished to achieve, from nearly the beginning of <i>Ancillary Justice</i>: there are few novels which deal with why people follow orders to commit an atrocity, and what effect this has on otherwise normal, decent human beings when they have done so. And it is unusual for science fiction to deal with this kind of issue. The fictional discussion of colonialism is more commonplace, but adds another aspect to an already multiply faceted background.<br />
<br />
Leckie manages to describe the feelings of Breq-as-part-of-a-gestalt in a convincing way to those of us who have never experienced being a mind split between several bodies. This experience is used to make Breq seem alien to the reader: successful portrayal of the alien is rare in science fiction, when it is so much easier to make an "alien" just like a human being inside a costume. Another aspect of this is provided by making Breq unable to identify the gender of the humans she meets, assigning (as she says at one point) masculinity or femininity to people based on whether she thinks their actions are masculine or feminine, which results in a fluid concept of gender, one very different to the still common binary expectations of many of today's humans. This also ties into Leckie's use of the novel to engage with issues, with its clear ties to discussions of what gender means in the twenty first century.<br />
<br />
Science fiction, it is said, is always about the era in which it was written. And <i>Ancillary Justice </i>definitely has contemporary relevance. It is also a fascinating portrayal of an alien world, and an exciting story about characters the reader cares for. It is perhaps in this way that Leckie can be described as a successor to Iain M. Banks, and she joins him in my list of favourite science fiction authors. My rating: an unsurprising 10/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-23971110464851130672018-10-07T07:26:00.000+01:002019-05-07T09:31:40.136+00:00Matt Ridley: The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge (2015)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Everything-How-Ideas-Emerge/dp/0007542488/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1538893341&sr=8-1&keywords=9780007542482&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=cc820592d1297b1f4bce8a223595f7bd&language=en_GB" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0007542488&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&language=en_GB&l=li3&o=2&a=0007542488" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Harper Collins, 2015</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1513</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">While there are many interesting ideas, points and quotes in this book, I found it frustrating and unconvincing. While it is apparently about how evolution works in a number of settings, essentially those of complex emergent systems, much of it uses that as the basis for an attack on any form of control or management of these systems - it's a libertarian manifesto in all but name.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">I have a fair number of issues with the book. First, and fundamentally, I don't think it makes a case for the word "evolution" being applied consistently to all the subjects. It starts, naturally enough, with one of the best known and best understood subjects, the evolution of life. Here, there is a sound mathematical foundation, a set of statistical rules which can predict many things (such as, for instance, the ways in which altruism can bestow an evolutionary advantage despite the immediate appearance that it shouldn't). While there are mathematical models for some of the other concepts, such as the economy, there isn't the same broad agreement on the most acceptable model. In some cases (education, for instance) it is hard to even see what a model would be like, and here it feels more as though something is evolutionary because it is complex and changes over time.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">Second, the shortness of the treatments of the different topics makes it appear that Ridley makes his points through selective quotation. Some of the discussions do talk about other ideas in the field, but I think they are not given even the appearance of a fair hearing. Some authors are quoted repeatedly, which makes selective quoting seem more obvious. I don't think that this appearance was Ridley's intention, but it does reduce the impact of the book.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">Thirdly, the book seems to me to avoid talking about some of the ethical issues involved in taking the libertarian approach. While he talks approvingly of unregulated private enterprise, and even makes it seem that this will improve the lot of everyone, the problem is that even in today's heavily regulated world, unethical individuals abuse positions of power over others: there have always been companies run as sweat shops, and we still see prosecutions for slavery and exploitation on a regular basis (especially, it seems, in those underground industries which are less regulated because of their essentially criminal nature, such as prostitution). It often seems that those who put forward libertarianism do so because they expect that they would be among the winners, and they don't really think about what this means for the losers. This isn't to say that live isn't going to be grim for the losers in the world as it is today, or hasn't been miserable in the past, and Ridley does cite several examples, including some from the worst moments of British colonialism.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">Overall, there is much said which is interesting, but I found the book more frustrating than convincing. My rating: 5/10.</span></span>Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-20645095497514730902018-07-08T08:57:00.000+01:002018-07-08T08:57:02.779+01:00Ernest Cline: Armada (2015)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1780893043/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=c28fe1292da932c42f1a752cca006286" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1780893043&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Century, 2015</b><br />
<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=1780893043" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Review number: 1512</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Ernest Cline's first novel, <i>Ready Player One</i>, was one of my top reads of 2018, when I finally read it. Even though I am not a gamer, I was introduced to computers in the 1980s and played many games in that decade, and Cline's nostalgia for that decade combined with the excitement of the story resonated with me. After that, it wasn't long before I sought out Cline's second novel.<br />
<br />
In <i>Armada</i>, narrator Zack Lightman is an obsessive teenage player of the game Armada, a first person shooter where the aim is to prevent an alien invasion. When it becomes clear that Armada and other games are secretly training drone operators to fight an expected (and now happening) alien invasion of Earth, Zack is enlisted and flown to a secret base on the far side of the moon. But he becomes uneasy, as he starts to think that there is something wrong with the story he and the world have been told about the aliens.<br />
<br />
In many ways, <i>Armada </i>is very similar to <i>Ready Player One</i>. The games and their integration into the story, the young, nerdy hero, the eighties nostalgia are all basically identical. The characters generally could be interchangeably in either novel. This makes <i>Armada</i> less than ideal to read soon after <i>Ready Player One</i>, but is not necessarily a bad thing - many genre writers essentially continue writing what they know and what made them successful in the first place, and a large number of readers enjoy each slightly different version of the same story.<br />
<br />
As in Cline's first novel, the writing is good, drawing the reader in and providing an exciting read. I often find that lengthy descriptions of combat in science fiction become tedious, but this is not a problem here. (This tedium is really why I have never been greatly interested in first person shooter games.) Further interest is provided by an underlying critique of the clichés of game scenario design - in fact, these are the clues which suggest to Zack that there is something going on behind what is on the surface. While this is interesting, it is damaging to <i>Armada </i>if regarded as a thriller, because of the way it undercuts so many scenes - visceral excitement is hard to generate if the protagonist is constantly wondering whether his role is too easy, if the enemy being fought is holding back for some reason, so that every battle is just within the capability of the player.<br />
<br />
I would rate <i>Armada</i> at 6/10 - and I suspect it would get a higher rating if I'd waited for longer before reading it.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-71935355147500366722017-12-18T19:24:00.000+00:002017-12-18T19:24:00.285+00:00Jonathan Sumption: Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV (2015)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Years-War-Vol-Cursed/dp/0571274560/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1511960994&sr=8-1&keywords=9780571274567&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=bc8fbb3bc7c842a54ebc953839acf390" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0571274560&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=0571274560" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Faber & Faber, 2016</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1511</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The fourth volume of Sumption's brilliant history of the Hundred Years' War is up to the standard he set in the earlier books, and very similar in many ways to them. <i>Cursed Kings</i> covers the early years of the fifteenth century (up to 1422). Until 1413, both countries were ruled by kings whose rule was compromised: Henry IV of England, who faced difficulties establishing the legitimacy of his rule after deposing Richard II; and Charles VI of France, who spent long periods mentally incapable of governing while the many other royal princes squabbled and diverted national resources to their personal gain. Neither reign was a period for a country to take pride in, and it often seems as though the governments of the two countries seem to be competing to make the poorest showing. Both crowns suffered from a chronic lack of financial resources, along with political disruption which was at times close to civil war. This means that the period was mostly one where the war was characterised by uneasy truces rather than open combat, at least until the accession of Henry V in 1413. The most interesting question about the early years of the fifteenth century covered is what happened to make the immediate recovery of England so fast and so successful.<br />
<br />
The second half of <i>Cursed Kings</i> is dominated by the effect of Henry V on the war. As Sumption says, "as with other successful warriors, his personality has been almost entirely masked by the uncritical adulation of contemporaries and the nostalgia of a later generation which lived to see his achievements undone". Being the subject of one of Shakespeare's best known and least ambiguous plays does not help, of course. I did occasionally feel that Sumption fell into the same trap that he warned about. Whatever he was like as a person, Henry's effect on the war was dramatic, and at one point, it looked as though France was about to be entirely extinguished as a nation. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that his personality, drive and ambition were the main reasons why the position changed so dramatically.<br />
<br />
The book ends with the deaths of Henry V and Charles VI, paving the way for the final act of the long drawn out conflict to be covered in the final volume.<br />
<br />
The book does include a fairly obvious copy editing error, not something I've seen in the earlier volumes. It is fairly minor (the town of Ham is described as "unwalled" on page 285, and then on page 286, its inhabitants "shout defiance" from these non-existent walls).Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-28276205989555497752017-11-03T19:47:00.000+00:002017-11-03T19:47:17.494+00:00Paul Beatty: The Sell Out (2015)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sellout-WINNER-BOOKER-PRIZE-2016/dp/1786071479/ref=as_li_ss_il?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508847400&sr=8-1&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=747e4c7c0d43bcb94e881dbd209e8563" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1786071479&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)</b><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=1786071479" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><br />
<b>Review number: 1510</b><br />
<b><br /></b><i>The Sell Out</i> is a novel which divides opinion. If you look at online reviews, ones which give it very high ratings are common, but so are ones which give it very low ratings. The style and the content of Beatty's novel are responsible for both these extreme reactions, and I can really understand why people think of it in both ways.<br />
<br />
I started out as a fan. The first part of the book is a tour de force of satirical humour: this is I think the only Booker Prize winner I have ever laughed out loud when reading. Basically the book starts with the ending. The narrator ends up before the US Supreme Court, basically for actions which call the comfortable assumption of white people that there is no longer any racial divide in the United States, which is the first chapter, with the rest of the book leading up to this appearance. The early parts of the book are an extended, vitriolic, riff on what it means to be black in twenty-first century America, full of references both literary and otherwise, and also full of language which may well shock. It's kind of like the illegitimate child of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. Strong stuff, and although I was enjoying it, I didn't want to read more than a few pages at a time.<br />
<br />
As the book goes on, the tone settles down somewhat, and this is actually a problem. The actually story is less interesting than the set pieces and jokes - things like a parody of <i>The Charge of the Light Brigade</i>, or a stand-up comedian making jokes in the format of academic reports on psychological experiments. Without the energy present at the start, <i>The Sell Out </i>reading experience becomes an impatient wait for the next extended joke.<br />
<br />
If you don't get many of the references (and I'm sure I missed some, not being into gangsta rap), the jokes won't be as funny. If the language offends, you will find <i>The Sell Out </i>unreadable. It made a difference to me that the book was written by a black writer; I think I would have been offended if it had been written by anyone else. The first part is really love or hate; the second half is so much less successful that it was just mainly average. Overall, my rating for the book is 7/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-22787668772798139792017-10-14T09:02:00.001+01:002017-10-14T09:02:13.457+01:00G.K. Holloway: 1066 (2014)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/1066-Impose-G-K-Holloway/dp/1783062207/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1507129530&sr=8-1&keywords=9781783062201&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=e7bd7d02917a9fb7f2e256be7e3ba36d" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1783062207&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Troubadour, 2014</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1509</b><br />
<b><br /></b>What book could be more appropriate to review on 14th October, the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings!<br />
<br />
1066 is clearly the defining date in British history, the one year everyone knows. It is probably the most important single date in English history. And it is also the end of a long series of complex events in English history, with roots in the renewed Viking attacks on England almost a century earlier. On top of this, the surviving contemporary documentation of what happened is scanty by modern standards, and some of the events as well as the details of characterisation are either disputed or recorded by biased sources. All of this makes the events of the year a challenging subject for a historical novel.<br />
<br />
How as G.K. Holloway approached it? Well, for a start, neither the main title or what looks like a subtitle are entirely accurate. Holloway's narrative begins many years earlier than 1066, and doesn't reach that year until about two thirds of the way through the book. I would also have said that what happened during the year year is perhaps more driven by personalities than many historical events (particularly those of Edward the Confessor, Harold and William of Normandy). Despite the choice of quotation, Holloway's writing does suggest that these played a huge part - fates imposed remarkably little. (The source, by the way, is the moment in Shakespeare's <i>Henry VI</i> when Edward IV is offered the crown of the deposed Henry; another king overthrown by force, four hundred years or so later than Harold). Making the novel not quite as expected from the cover is not a big problem, though.<br />
<br />
<i>1066</i> is told from an apparently neutral third party perspective, as though it were a documentary - far more detailed, of course, than a historian could be with the available sources. Where sources disagree, or where they are biased or disputed by modern scholars, this means that Holloway has had to make a decision. So, for instance, the fictional version of Harold is killed by the arrow in the eye, though some historians would argue that the depiction in the Bayeux tapestry is at least ambiguous. More seriously, I find the character of Edward the Confessor not entirely convincing - the sources for this are works aimed at promoting the campaign to make him a saint, which are not going to present a rounded picture of an individual and which definitely use ambiguous word choices to do this (he is described a chaste using a Latin word which could either mean virginal - an important qualification for sainthood - or faithful within marriage, for instance). Holloway has clearly done a lot of work on researching the background, but it seems to me to be more trusting in the original sources than modern scholars think they deserve. Given the need to make choices, this is not entirely problematic, but a reader who has come across some of the debates will find it a little frustrating. I feel that the third party neutral narrative was a wrong choice; a first person account from an incidental figure (or multiple figures) might well have worked better.<br />
<br />
The most important negative aspect for me in <i>1066</i> was the unleavened unpleasantness of the characters. The men are mostly thugs or devious troublemakers, or worse; the women are sex toys or helpless political pawns (with two exceptions, Harold's common law wife Eadgyth, and William's wife Matilda). There are some very unpleasant passages involving rape, torture and murder. To a large extent, this reflects the realities of life in eleventh century Europe, but it does become somewhat unrelenting. This was the main problem I had with the book, it was at times a chore to read.<br />
<br />
However, there are many positive aspects to <i>1066</i>. One difficulty with writing this novel is the large number of events which need to be described and put into context; here, Holloway succeeds admirably. It is easy to follow what's going on and who is who. The clear writing style helps with this, too. Of course, the astonishing events of the year make for a memorable tale. While this review may have spent more time on the negative aspects of the novel, they are outweighed in my opinion by the positive. My rating: 6/10.<br />
<br />
<br />Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-37530694660820578722017-09-29T18:09:00.000+01:002017-09-29T18:09:09.942+01:00Iain Pears: Arcadia (2015)<b>Edition: Faber & Faber, 2016</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arcadia-Iain-Pears/dp/0571301576/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1503644655&sr=8-1&keywords=9780571301577&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=aaa007cb6de3127a61105ceec2095e10" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0571301576&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=0571301576" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Review number: 1508</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Iain Pears' 2015 novel may seem to be something of a departure from his earlier work - if I'd been asked to read it blind and guess the author, I think I'd have picked <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/David%20Mitchell">David Mitchell</a>. As both are among my favourite authors, this boded well for enjoying the book.<br />
<br />
<i>Arcadia</i> is a complex narrative, with multiple strands and connections which involve time travel. The order of the chapters is (at least to begin with) not actually hugely important; indeed, it is sufficiently random that there is an app available to allow readers to restructure the book (which I haven't had the opportunity to try out). The complexity comes partly from the shortness of the chapters, but is mainly because they don't follow a chronological order as experienced by an individual character. <br />
<br />
The structure is closely entwined with the form of time travel which Pears uses as the basis of the novel. Many time travel novels are built round an exploration of the grandfather paradox - how a time traveler in the past can influence the future to make it different from the one they came from - and this is no exception. It is, however, unusually fully thought through. In <i>Arcadia</i>, time travel is about manipulating probabilities. Only one universe can exist, but if that universe is no longer the most probable, then it disappears and a new sole universe not only come into being, but has always existed (except in the mind of the traveler). Pears is not absolutely consistent about this position, and there is debate among the characters about whether this is a true description of the universe. So far as I can remember, this is the only time travel novel I have read which is so ruthless about multiple timelines without making change impossible, though it perhaps has a predecessor in <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Clifford%20D.%20Simak">Clifford Simak</a>'s <i>Time Quarry</i>, which I was coincidentally reading at the same time.<br />
<br />
There are three main universes in <i>Arcadia</i>. The central one is a version of Oxford in 1960, where a minor writer, one of the Inklings alongside <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/J.R.R.%20Tolkien">Tolkien</a> and <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/C.S.%20Lewis">Lewis</a>, has written about his own fantasy world. This world itself is also a universe, deliberately brought into being in Professor Lytten's basement by Angela Meerson. She is a fugitive character from the third universe, a dystopian England where research into time travel is being carried out on a Hebridean island. A third major character is Rosie Wilson, a fifteen year old girl who becomes a friend of Professor Lytten and discovers Anterworld in the basement. A major theme, which I suspect may have been the original motivation for writing the book, is the relationship between Lytten and the world he imagined.<br />
<br />
Clearly, <i>Arcadia</i> is extremely ambitious, more so than any of Pears' earlier novels. I found it challenging, partly because my reading of it wasn't helped by having to put it aside for days at a time on a number of occasions. In the end, I would have enjoyed it more if the narrative had been more traditional and linear; it felt as though the content was not quite interesting enough in itself to reward the effort of comprehending the structure. I think I'd have enjoyed it more at a time when I wasn't so distracted by other things. My rating: 6/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-66511380102301176182017-08-16T18:53:00.000+01:002017-08-16T18:53:00.182+01:00Marc Bloch: Feudal Society (1940)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Feudal-Society-Routledge-Classics-Bloch/dp/0415738687/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1500795636&sr=8-1&keywords=marc+bloch+feudal+society+routledge&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=080b9ee21eb9a20a8e0f81f6b9f8b247" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0415738687&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=0415738687" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Translation: L.A. Manyon, 1962</b><br />
<b>Edition: Routledge Kegan Paul, 2014</b><br />
<b>Review number: 1507</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The foreword to this Routledge Classics edition, by Geoffrey Kozol, starts by asking, "Why read a work of history written over seventy years ago?" Clearly, after such a long time, a scholarly work of this kind no longer represents current knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, any more than earlier historical classics like Gibbons' <i>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i> or Carlyle's history of <i>The French Revolution</i> do.<br />
<br />
Each of the books mentioned, including this one, has good reasons why you might want to read them. Three in particular are common to all of them: they have all been influential in one way or another; they are all quite general overviews of topics often treated on a smaller scale by specialists; and they are all of high literary quality.<br />
<br />
In <i>Feudal Society</i> Bloch attempts a study of several centuries of Western European social history, analysing the genesis, flowering and eventual modification into something else of the culture known as "feudal" - that is, based around vassal/overlord relationships, tied to land grants (fees, the origin of the word feudal). Given the fragmentary state of the documentary record, especially in the early years going beyond the major chronicles to understand the society is hard work, but in this book Bloch uses a huge array of small scale records (mainly legal documents) to produce as full a picture as possible.<br />
<br />
To research this way is now far more common, but the scale of the project in this case means that it is still an impressive synthesis - indeed, it would be fair to say that Bloch is phenomenally successful. Naive historical accounts, in any era, tend to paint a picture of society as though it remains the same over long periods of time, so that Roman customs and fashion appear to be constant from the late Republic to the end of the Empire, for instance, or (more relevantly) as though feudalism as an organising principle sprang into being in the tenth century and then was replaced during the fifteenth, and was the same in France, Germany, Italy and even England after the cataclysm of 1066. It is clear that these pictures are nonsensical, and Bloch of course gives a far more nuanced and subtle description of a culture which was never uniform, and which developed significantly over time. Bloch identifies the economic downturn of the late Carolingian era and the disruptions to social order and centralised power at the time of the Magyar and Viking raids as causes of the adoption of personal vassalage and serf labour in the manorial system, as a development of Germanic and Roman customs. The argument is convincing, but I would like to read a modern equivalent of this book to see how today's scholarship has modified this viewpoint. That is, of course, if there is a modern historian with such detailed and widespread knowledge and understanding.<br />
<br />
At the end of <i>Feudal Society</i>, Bloch suggests that one area which could the focus of further study is how European feudalism is related to other historical cultures which have been described using the word. He discusses in particular the Japan of the samurai, and describes a number of significant differences from medieval western Europe. Although I don't think it's all that clear from the text, I'm sure that Bloch was perfectly well aware that the use of the "feudal" label for Japan is based on superficial likenesses: the real interest is to look at how and why the similarities and differences on opposite sides of the globe.<br />
<br />
Overall, <i>Feudal Society</i> is an inspiring classic from "the father of scientific history", and, like Carlyle and Gibbon, deserves to be read and remembered. My rating: 10/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-22842516032502318972017-07-22T09:28:00.000+01:002017-07-22T09:28:15.234+01:00Michael Spivak: Calculus (1967)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Calculus-Addison-Wesley-student-Michael-Spivak/dp/0805390235/ref=as_li_ss_il?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500707556&sr=1-1&keywords=spivak+calculus+addison=wesley&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=095c1623cd0a3ec339c946d8d749cb88" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0805390235&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=0805390235" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Addison-Wesley (World Student Series)</b><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li2&o=2&a=0805390235" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><br />
<b>Review number: 1506</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<i>Calculus</i> was the very first textbook I read for my university degree. As well as being a fine description of the basics of analysis (mostly real, with a toe in the deep water of complex functions), it is an excelent book to ease the transition from mathematics as taught at school level to the rigours of university mathematics.<br />
<br />
Unlike many writers of textbooks in mathematics, Spivak makes a big effort to give more than a dry exposition: theorem - proof - next theorem etc. Considerable attention is paid to motivating the discussion, showing why each result is important (though mainly in the pure mathematics context, applications of calculus being mainly found in the problems at the end of each chapter). Of especial use to the budding mathematician are the points where Spivak discusses potential proof strategies for the theorems, often explaining the pitfalls that student taking a naive approach could fall into. There are even occasional jokes, both in the text and the index.<br />
<br />
For students with an interest in how analysis can be used in apparently unrelated parts of mateematics, a number of advanced sections give proofs of such topics as the transcendence of the number <i>e</i>, and a construction of the real numbers from set theoretic principles.<br />
<br />
<i>Calculus</i> was not just the first university textbook I read, but one of the best.<br />
<br />
My rating: 10/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-64358571077322054002017-01-30T18:31:00.000+00:002017-02-04T10:54:13.403+00:00Alexander Broadie: Introduction to Medieval Logic (1993)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Medieval-Logic-Alexander-Broadie/dp/0198240260/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1485773885&sr=8-1&keywords=introduction+to+medieval+logic&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=5bdf593bc01574a2cefdcc080afbf0c9" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0198240260&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=0198240260" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Oxford University Press, 1993</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1505</b><br />
<br />
The title is perhaps somewhat misleading. I would expect that a book
introducing medieval logic should be fairly easy to follow for someone
like myself, with a doctorate in modern mathematical logic and an
interest in medieval philosophy. But the first few chapters assume a
fair amount of prior understanding of the form of logic used in the
middle ages, i.e. one based on natural language rather than symbolic
representation of carefully pre-defined and abstract ideas of such ideas
as truth, implication, proof and so on (this, the basis of modern
mathematical logic, being the legacy of Frege and others such as
Russell, Tarsky, and Gödel).<br />
<br />
In fact, what is eventually revealed
is a way to relate the arguments of medieval logicians, which can seem
weird and monumentally pedantic, to a process which moves from the
potential ambiguities of natural language towards more abstract
understanding of the processes of logic. No matter how interesting that
might be to me, though, the path travelled through mainly fourteenth
century logical arguments is one I found hard to follow. For me, the
best part of the book is the concluding chapter, in which Broadie
discusses the transition from scholastic logical thought to humanistic
ideas of proof, more based on rhetoric and Ciceronian legal arguments,
and the relation of scholasticism to the ideas of modern mathematics.<br />
<br />
I
would have welcomed a lot more historical context, and also some way to
connect the thematically organised discussion to that context<br />
<br />
My rating: 5/10. Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-29030102378771358942017-01-03T18:58:00.000+00:002017-01-03T18:58:11.807+00:00Patrick Dennis: Auntie Mame (1955)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Auntie-Mame-Dennis-Patrick/dp/B0016DAF3M/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&qid=1483255898&sr=8-1&keywords=patrick+dennis+auntie+mame+pan&linkCode=li3&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=f5f0c3441c780c8c0e6c83d23e20484e" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B0016DAF3M&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Pan, 1958</b><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li3&o=2&a=B0016DAF3M" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
<br />
<b>Review number: 1504</b><br />
<br />
I'm a big fan of Patrick Dennis, although the difficulty of finding his books nowadays means I haven't read all that many of them - three out of sixteen (all published under various pseudonyms, his real name being Edward Everett Tanner III). Even the normally reliable Fantastic Fiction only lists the two Auntie Mame books.<br />
<b><br /></b>
This is the third of his books, the first under this name, and was hugely successful in the fifties, made into a play and then an Oscar nominated film with Rosalind Russell as the title character. The trailer for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051383/?ref_=nv_sr_1">the film</a> describes it as "the one you've been waiting for", and expects the watcher to guess the name of the title character. So this was a huge phenomenon at the time, and yet it seems to be almost forgotten today. (It later became a stage musical and another film.)<br />
<br />
It is a parody of an autobiography, scenes from a bizarre Bohemian childhood. The narrator, named as Patrick Dennis, is sent as a nine year old to be brought up by his aunt after the death of his father. This catapults the boy into a completely different world - one which many today would still consider unsuitable for the raising of a child. In her company, he expands his vocabulary, meets a lot of strange people, and gets involved in many scrapes, as he becomes an integral part of his vivacious aunt's life. The last scene in the book depicts Patrick, now married and respectable, being persuaded by Mame to let his seven year old son join her on a trip to India: although the book's chronology would indicate that she was by this point in her seventies, she had not changed a bit. This also sets up Dennis' second novel, <i>Around the World with Auntie Mame</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Auntie Mame </i>and its sequel are lit up by the larger than life character of Mame. I can easily imagine that she would be tiresome in the long term in real life. Indeed, the portrayal by Rosalind Russell in the film is wearingly strident to me, even in the short dose of the trailer. The literary version of the character has a lot more charm, and her dominance of the book makes liking Mame crucial to enjoyment of the humour.<br />
<br />
It's easy to see why it was so popular. It's still immensely funny, and
bears comparison with the best comic fiction ever written. Why, then, is it so much less well known today? Dennis himself stopped writing and became a butler before his death in 1976, but already by then his books were out of print. It is possible that revelations about the author's lifestyle (he was bisexual and was involved in the Greenwich Village gay community) made publishers less keen to promote his work. Indeed, a number of publishers rejected <i>Auntie Mame</i>, presumably because of its endorsement of an unconventional lifestyle, tame though much of it seems today. Maybe it was the opposite: in the liberated 1970s, did people no longer feel shocked enough by Dennis' writing to want to read it? I don't know what happened, but whatever it was, Patrick Dennis was too good a writer to deserve it.<br />
<br />
My rating: 10/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-243117743666449982016-12-29T08:42:00.001+00:002016-12-29T08:51:19.857+00:00EXO Books: The Last Day of Captain Lincoln (2015)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Day-Captain-Lincoln-ebook/dp/B0182N1UYQ/ref=as_li_ss_il?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1478938834&sr=1-1&keywords=the+last+day+of+captain+lincoln&linkCode=li2&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=6cf6c38a7161c2eb947e76d113b10a19" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B0182N1UYQ&Format=_SL160_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=li2&o=2&a=B0182N1UYQ" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Kindle, 2015</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1503</b><br />
<br />
The title of this novel is a good summary of its content, if not its purpose. Captain Lincoln is a retired captain of a generation ship, on which a carefully designed and controlled society keeps the population exactly stable: each five years, a new generation is born, each older generation moves on to a new phase of their life, and those who are 80 die to make room for the new children. What the book is not about is the social and emotional ramifications of this idea, making me wonder how the society actually works - there are no rebels, no dissidents, no calls for changes to allow a greater population. Very little is explained or used to power a plot (readers don't even get to know the precise reason for the space flight, though its aim is to colonise another world).<br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
The sociological ramifications of the idea are not in any sense important to EXO Books (a pseudonym which I unfortunately find irritating, for no particular reason). <i>The Last Day of Captain Lincoln</i> is not really a novel at all; the scenario is a framing device for a series of short essays about society and death. These main part of this consists of transcripts of lectures given to younger inhabitants of the ship - a distinct oddity in a novel set in the future, to use a communication method which has been criticised as ineffective for years in universities.<br />
<br />
Because of this structure, the reader's response to <i>The Last Day of Captain Lincoln</i> will be determined by what they think of the ideas presented in the essay-like sections.I was actually surprised by the lack of profundity - the general message is that life is good, the afterlife is unknown, and the transition is difficult for the people facing it and those who care about them. Other than that, it seems to me that giving lectures (while convenient for the book) is an odd thing to do when you know it's your last day of life. Is this the best idea for helping with the transition that this carefully designed future society could come up with?<br />
<br />
It is possible that I'm not doing the book justice. If science fiction novels have a serious intent, their message is not usually about the future but about the present. <i>The Last Day of Captain Lincoln</i> may be intended as a commentary on the attitude to death in today's Western culture, and this possibility is made more likely by the use of the names of assassinated US presidents Kennedy and Lincoln for current and former captains of the ship.<br />
<br />
The most interesting parts of <i>The Last Day of Captain Lincoln</i>, for me, were the quotations heading each section; EXO Books has collected some profound thoughts about death from a wide range of authors. One of these in particular, the somewhat unexpected <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Isaac%20Asimov">Isaac Asimov</a>, provides a summary of the book in his aphorism about life and death, and I found myself looking forward to these thoughts far more than the content they frame.<br />
<br />
It is perhaps superfluous to add that I didn't like the illustrations - this is mainly a question of the style not appealing to me than anything else.<br />
<br />
This is a missed opportunity - the basic idea could have been used to say something more profound, more involving and more affecting. As one of the major aspects of death in any human culture is its effect on those continuing to live, not making the reader care about the characters is a major flaw. (Writing this at the end of 2016, with its litany of celebrity deaths and the reactions of fans constantly seen on social media, this side of death has been rammed home to me more forcefully than it might have been to EXO Books writing <i>The Last Day of Captain Lincoln</i> last year.) My rating: 4/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-83338787266467229992016-09-05T18:34:00.000+01:002016-09-07T09:49:30.156+01:00Jo Walton: Among Others (2011)<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51H3gJdaqsL._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51H3gJdaqsL._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" /></a><b>Edition: Tor (2011)</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1502</b><br />
<br />
Diary of a lonely teenager? Misfit at boarding school? Both form and setting of <i>Among Others</i> may seem to have been done until there is nothing new which could be extracted from the limp and tired ideas. Has Jo Walton managed it?<br />
<b><br /></b>
Morwenna (Mor) has run away from her mother's home in Wales, and sought her estranged father, who she has not seen since she was a baby. Her father's sisters promptly see her sent to Arlinghurst, a boarding school, one specialising in sports - not the most sympathetic environment for a teenage bookworm with a damaged foot. Mor has another thing which makes her different: all her life she has been able to see fairy spirits invisible to most, and believes her mother is a witch whose powers Mor has inherited (though she does not want to use these selfishly, as she feels that her mother does). It is interesting that the school is almost completely devoid of magic - she has to work
at it through acts like burning letters from her mother - unlike the
spirit filled world of the Welsh valleys she knew before.<br />
<br />
Much of the novel is about the science fiction she reads, exhaustively, perceptively, precociously, and perhaps unbelievably. Most of what she says will perhaps mean little to those who haven't read everything from <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Poul%20Anderson">Poul Anderson</a> to <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Roger%20Zelazny">Roger Zelazny</a>, or those who, like myself, don't share her likes and dislikes. I can really see this book being virtually unreadable if you don't at least know something about Samuel Delany and gender politics, <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Brunner">John Brunner</a> and dystopias, characterisation in <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Ursula%20K%20Le%20Guin">Ursula Le Guin</a>, world-building in <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/J.R.R.%20Tolkien">J.R.R. Tolkien</a> (just to mention a few of the recurring topics and authors). But at the same time this extended love letter to science fiction is surely one aspect of this novel which made it successful in both the Hugo and Nebula awards, joining the handful of genre classics which have won both.<br />
<br />
At the same time, it is possible to read the novel as a magic realist work, where the magic seen by Mor is her own way of dealing with her life - an imaginative piece of private world-building. It is perhaps important if this is Walton's intention (whether it is or not only really becomes clear at the end). In some ways, the imaginary world view of the novel is more interesting, and gives a completely different significance to the diary, as an act of therapy.<br />
<br />
How much you like <i>Among Others</i> will depend very much on how irritating you find Mor as central character, how much you understand and sympathise with her likes and dislikes in science fiction. I found her more annoying as I progressed through the book, and the dogmatic science fiction pronouncements seemed less interesting and more self indulgent on Walton's part. This is perhaps because Mor does not seem to change a great deal, which is surely a realistic portrayal of a teenager starting a new school, especially not one with a traumatic past. The dramatic events which led to her arrival at Arlinghurst are followed by...nothing much really. Making friends and enemies. Lots of reading science fiction. A bit of learning - her introduction to the works of <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/T.S.%20Eliot">T.S. Eliot</a> is one of the more memorable moments of the novel.<br />
<br />
While I can see why <i>Among Others</i> won awards, it feels to me that it did not really deserve to do so. The subject matter resonated with science fiction fandom, which explains why it won. But I would rate it lower because Mor was so annoying, and also because to me the ending was trite and unconvincing. My rating: 5/10. Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-41789492555810746512016-08-28T17:45:00.000+01:002016-08-29T06:59:47.727+01:00 Patricia A. McKillip: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1973)<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Throme-Erril-Sherill-Patricia-McKillip/dp/0441808395/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/517VT6vq96L._SX289_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" /></a><b>Edition: </b><b>Tempo, 1984</b><br />
<b>Review number:1501</b><br />
<br />
Unusual, poetic fantasy - the first Patricia A. McKillip which I have read, after many recommendations of her as a fantasy author.<br />
<br />
This edition also includes <i>The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath</i>, and is still extremely short as books go: it could fairly easily be read in a single sitting. Of that short length, the title story makes up about two thirds. It is the story of a quest undertaken to win the hand of a King's daughter - the very hackneyed theme of fairy stories. The story is intended for a young adult audience, and could quite easily be read to or by children, though I think it is likely that they would miss a lot of what is really going on. To an adult well read in fantasy, it reads like a cross between Jack Vance and William Morris, with a playfulness with language which may be influenced by <i>Jabberwocky</i> or possibly comes more from Vance.<br />
<br />
The language is perhaps the most obvious of <i>The Throme of the Erril of Sherill</i>'s unusual qualities. Apart from the title of the story itself, there are made up words (a monstrous "borobel" could be straight from Lewis Carroll), and words which look almost right - perhaps versions from an alternate world where modern English developed slightly differently ("cnite" for knight, "Damsen" for the name of the princess - a damsel, and so on). This could be irritating, but I found it atmospheric.<br />
<br />
But strange things also happen in the story itself. The cnite starts with the standard equipment of a knight - horse, sword, shield, armour - and as the quest goes on, he is forced to exchange these for magical items, the horse for a fire-breathing dog, and so on. The people he meets are rarely what you would expect on a quest - he does not slay monsters, rescue innocent maidens. At one point, there is an adventure which made me wonder if the whole story was not meant to be an allegory of aging and death.<br />
<br />
<i>The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath </i>is apparently much more straightforward. A strange young man visits a strange island, where winter lasts twice as long as on the mainland, twenty miles away. He claims that this is due to a dragon, which he wishes to remove. This is an action with unforeseen consequences. Though told in a normal narrative form, it still seems that there is more to the story than is visible on the surface; the reader wants to invest it with a hidden meaning. For instance, is it about the unwisdom of making unwanted "improvements" to communities - doing away with tradition in the name of progress?<br />
<br />
Altogether, two fascinating pieces of fantasy, well worth reading at any age. My rating: 9/10. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-63600131476421602992015-12-28T08:32:00.001+00:002015-12-28T08:32:13.482+00:00Michael Moorcock: The Whispering Swarm (2015)<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1473213320/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1473213320&linkCode=as2&tag=sisbobl-21" rel="nofollow" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1473213320&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Gollancz, 2015</b> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=as2&o=2&a=1473213320" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
<br />
<b>Review number:1500</b><br />
<br />
Are there any literary devices which have not been attempted in novels, by 2015? <i>The Whispering Swarm</i> certainly attempts one which I have never seen before.<b> </b>Many novels include autobiographical elements, but here Michael Moorcock mingles straight autobiographical material with historical fantasy. The autobiographical elements match my knowledge of Moorcock's life picked up as a fan of many years' standing; the fantasy elements centre round the mysterious Alsacia, a part of central London which acts as a refuge (this part is accurate, there was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatia">such an area</a> which for historical reasons had the rules of sanctuary applied to it), and which can take those who find it to a semi-mythical London from the past.<br />
<br />
Does the idea work? Basically, I don't think it does. There is clearly a desire on Moorcock's part to contrast the mundane real world and the glimpse beyond that in to fantasy, but this means that <i>The Whispering Swarm</i> feels like it is made up of distinct parts which could be pasted together sections from two different stories. It even feels as is though the prose style used changes, more matter of fact for the real world, more poetical and descriptive for the fantasy.<br />
<br />
For most of Part One (the first third or so of the novel), Moorcock-as-character has either not yet discovered Alsatia, or is trying to ignore what he thinks might be a delusion. So the fantasy plays little part, and this left me as a reader wanting to skip forward to something more interesting. However, even when Alsatia plays a greater part, it too turns out to be fairly dull, and it is hard for the reader to invest in any of the characters, in either milieu.<br />
<br />
The title refers to the noise Moorcock and a few others can sense, the combined voices of the inhabitants of this fantasy London. This is in itself an interesting concept, and would relate well to the themes of his best literary novel, <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/2001/08/michael-moorcock-mother-london-1988.html"><i>Mother London</i></a>. That is also about the mythic significance of London, and is much more successful, partly because it is a fully synthesised novel. The best urban fantasy evocations of London (such as those written by <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Neil%20Gaiman">Neil Gaiman</a>, <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Ben%20Aaronovitch">Ben Aaronovitch</a>, or <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Kate%20Griffin">Kate Griffin</a>, among others) are also better at integrating the fantasy elements with a real world setting, and also possess a sense of humour which seems to have disappeared from Moorcock's recent work.<br />
<br />
I have long been a fan of Michael Moorcock, since my early teens, but have found much of what he has written in the last decade unpalatable for one reason or another. Despite an interesting and unusual idea, <i>The Whispering Storm</i> also fails to impress me. My rating - 5/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-88493402116300243052015-09-11T18:45:00.000+01:002015-09-11T18:45:00.064+01:00Toby Litt: Journey Into Space (2009)<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/014103971X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=014103971X&linkCode=as2&tag=sisbobl-21" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=014103971X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Penguin, 2009</b><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=as2&o=2&a=014103971X" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
<br />
<b>Review number: 1499</b><br />
<br />
Warning: this review is going to contain lots of spoilers, without which it would be hard to say what I want to say about it. Please don't read if you don't want to know the plot of the novel. <br />
<br />
Toby Litt is, incidentally, someone I used to vaguely know (I had rooms
on the floor below him for a year when we were students). Some of his novels I like a lot, and others not at all. <i>Journey Into Space</i> is the first of his books which I have read which comes between the two extremes. Or, rather, it moves from one to the other, as the story progresses.<br />
<br />
<i>Journey Into Space</i> is divided into five sections, each shorter than the previous one, which gives an overall impression spiralling into a central point because of the way the plot develops across them, as well as because of influence the decreasing length has on the reading experience. The whole thing is set on that standard science fiction location, the generation ship on its way to colonise another world, inhabited by a very small community. (In-breeding, something which concerns some of the other writers of this type of stories, is simply handled by gene technology.) The plot covers four generations of life on the ship, not starting at the launch but several generations into the journey.<br />
<br />
The first section is the most unusual in science fiction terms. It concerns the meetings between two teen-aged cousins, who share their ideas about Earth, a world they have never seen except in the records carried by the ship and messages received by it. The main way they do this is through "describing", where each tries to make the other feel what it would be like to experience something - rain, grass, the presence of animals - they have never known themselves. The theme here is nostalgia, and how we look at a past we can never actually see fully. This might feel like an extended creative writing exercise ("Produce 500 words describing grass from the point of view of someone who has never seen it in reality"), but it is effective at generating a mood which is shattered at the end of the section - Celeste gives birth a child (in a strange passage using a series of images derived from the describes, while the pair are shunned for their incestuous relationship.<br />
<br />
In the second section, the child, named Orphan, takes over as the centre of the narrative. He charms his way into becoming the captain of the ship, despite not being terribly bright, and becomes regarded as something of a king and god. He institutes a perpetual, hedonistic party, where everything is done on his slightest whim (though he is manipulated into making decisions by others who have more interest in running the ship). This section seems to be a commentary on a different aspect of today's world, where we are living in the moment without a care for the traditions of the past or for the effects our way of life will have on generations to come. The main problem with this section is that Orphan, as depicted, does not convince the reader hat he has the charm he is credited with<br />
<br />
The third section follows the life of Orphan's third child, imaginatively named Three, from spoilt child to ascetic obsessed with being able to write on paper in the old fashioned way, and centre of a new religion, proselytised by her nephew. It is in this section that news reaches the ship that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself. In the final two sections, the nephew takes over the ship after Orphan and Three die; the ship then returns to earth, receiving a signal to indicate that there have been some survivors, before being deliberately crashed into the earth to obliterate defective humanity (leaving just two survivors, in an escape pod, who know that there is no way they can properly survive). This nihilistic section is much less clearly linked to commentary on twenty first century humanity. It seems perfunctory, and poses a fairly common conundrum - how does the narrative survive and who adds the final words describing the death of the last two humans orbiting earth? It may be that this ending is meant to provide some positive message of hope: somehow, some remnant of human civilisation has continued - but it isn't effective in this way for me, being swamped by the nihilistic theme of the book, which seems to be that the human race is better destroyed than allowed to continue.<br />
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The message of <i>Journey Into Space</i> (assuming I haven't just completely misinterpreted the novel, and there is one) is made so much the centre of the novel that other aspects of fiction writing suffer, especially characterisation - Celeste and Three are the only individuals given much in the way development. Apart from the descriptions which form part of the game between Celeste and August, there isn't much filling in of the background; like a lot of modern science fiction, <i>Journey Into Space</i> assumes that the reader will be familiar with the basic idea of a generation ship, for instance.<br />
<br />
While there are some interesting ideas in <i>Journey Into Space</i>, parts of it simply don't work, and it generally feels under-developed. My rating: 5/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-67169177501530723152015-05-06T18:54:00.000+01:002015-05-06T18:54:00.684+01:00John le Carré: A Delicate Truth (2013)<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/067092279X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=067092279X&linkCode=as2&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=EBK77YNAZOASV465" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=067092279X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Viking, 2013</b><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=as2&o=2&a=067092279X" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
<br />
<b>Review number: 1498</b><br />
<br />
It's a while since I last read a John le Carré novel, and I picked this up in the local library a little reluctantly, because I felt that his world was often too downbeat for me to enjoy reading his work as much as I felt I should - very well written, provocative, but depressing.<br />
<br />
<i>A Delicate Truth</i> is the story of the aftermath of a secret and rather shady operation, a collaboration between British military and a US security firm, organised outside normal security services procedures by an ambitious government minister. The operation is described in the first section of the novel, and the fallout from it returns to haunt some of those involved through the rest of the book. The main character is Toby Bell, who was the minister's private secretary at the time of the mission and was excluded in a manner which made him suspicious. The focus is on Bell's attempt to understand what has happened and to act in accordance with his conscience, not in the way which sustains the cover up.<br />
<br />
The ideas of the novel are clearly inspired by the Wikileaks saga and the cases of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden. Several of le Carré's earlier novels, especially <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2002/10/john-le-carre-constant-gardener.html"><i>The Constant Gardener</i></a>, <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/john-le-carr-mission-song-2006.html"><i>The Mission Song</i></a>,<i> </i>and <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/john-le-carre-most-wanted-man-2008.html"><i>A Most Wanted Man</i></a> have done the same thing, but this is the first time where a UK setting has been used to give the novel more immediacy to what I would assume is the author's main audience, his compatriots.<br />
<br />
Although the operation is not an official one, and the background is post-Cold War, I found <i>A Delicate Truth</i> reminiscent of le Carré's Smiley novels as a reading experience, more than it is of the recent works already mentioned. This is not the only reason; le Carré's spy fiction has often had matters of conscience and honour at its heart, and these themes play a large part here too. I did feel that this resemblance does make it clear that <i>A Delicate Truth</i> is overshadowed by the Smiley novels - not surprisingly: there is a reason why they are classics of the spy thriller genre.<br />
<br />
A thoughtful novel, raising concerns about the actions taken against whistleblowers by those in authority. Though readable, it is a step down from le Carré at his peak. My rating: 7/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-70666386484454725982015-04-17T09:54:00.000+01:002015-04-17T09:54:42.597+01:00David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks (2014)<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0340921609/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0340921609&linkCode=as2&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=UGPLISLRJJMV5CHB" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0340921609&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=as2&o=2&a=0340921609" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><b>Edition: Sceptre, 2014</b>
<br />
<b>Review number: 1497</b><br />
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<i>The Bone Clocks</i><b> </b>tells the story of the life of Holly Sykes, from her teenage years in Gravesend in the 1980s through to the mid twenty first century. This immediately makes it unusual: most novels are either fairly firmly set in a recognisable past (or more or less present) or in the future. Mitchell also combines, as in several of his other novels, fantasy elements with naturalistic and real world events, such as the war in Iraq.<br />
<br />
This is a novel in which it is quite hard to work out what is going on, at least at first reading. Some things are clear: Holly has the second sight (though that term isn't used by Mitchell) and has visions of the future. There are characters who have access to something they call "the script", but their role in the story is not properly explained until near the end. These characters appear mysteriously at moments in the story when an important choice is to be made by one of the more reality bound characters.<br />
<br />
<i>The Bone Clocks</i> is episodic in nature. There are lengthy gaps between the dates at which each is set, sometimes decades, and they are not all told from the same point of view. They do make the story a little bit harder to grasp, though the arrangement is not as complex as the structures of some of Mitchell's other novels (the episodes are presented in chronological order). Paradoxically, though, I found <i>The Bone Clocks</i> much harder to read than these earlier books. Each episode was individually interesting, but there is not really a sense of where things are leading to. A character is shared with <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/david-mitchell-thousand-autumns-of.html"><i>The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</i></a>, but that does not help make things clearer.<br />
<br />
The resolution of the mystery of the script does make everything a lot clearer, but it is a very long time coming (I think this is Mitchell's longest novel by quite some way). Even though I am usually a big fan of the author, I felt that it didn't really prove worth the wait. If I had been new to Mitchell's work, I probably would never have gone on to read his other novels, and this would have been a pity. So I would suggest starting elsewhere and come to <i>The Bone Clocks </i>later, if you like <i><a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2001/07/david-mitchell-ghostwritten-1999.html">Ghostwritten</a> </i>or <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2002/06/david-mitchell-number9dream-2001.html"><i>number9dream</i></a>. Even then, I feel that the books of <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Nick%20Harkaway">Nick Harkaway</a> or Haruki Murakimi are a better follow-up to Mitchell's early work than <i>The Bone Clocks</i>.<br />
<br />
The "bone clocks" of the title are human bodies, referring to the ageing process. Ageing and time are the main themes of the novel, though it is also about how something magical can touch the most banal of lives - even someone growing up in Gravesend in the eighties.<br />
<br />
Not Mitchell at his dazzling best - but still reasonably enjoyable and intersting. My rating: 7/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-664958436931528900.post-64133035313190500712015-03-29T09:24:00.000+01:002015-03-29T09:26:27.010+01:00Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0241144671/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0241144671&linkCode=as2&tag=sisbobl-21&linkId=LOKZ7CLGN2CQWKLN" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0241144671&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=GB&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=sisbobl-21" /></a><b>Edition: Penguin, 2014</b><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=sisbobl-21&l=as2&o=2&a=0241144671" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
<br />
<b>Review number: 1496</b><br />
<br />
This is Mohsin Hamid's third novel, after <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/mohsin-hamid-reluctant-fundamentalist.html"><i>The Reluctant Fundamentalist</i></a>, which I still think is the best novel to portray the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings, and his debut <i>Moth Smoke</i>, which I didn't like so much and now barely remember. <i>How to Get Filthy Rich</i> <i>in Rising Asia</i> is, like <i>The Reluctant Fundamentalist</i>, an attempt to bring attention to issues from a world that westerners tend not to think about much - this time the poverty stricken Asian communities where very rich and very poor often live almost side by side. It is much more similar, however, to Aravind Adiga's <a href="http://simonsbookblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/aravind-adiga-white-tiger-2008.html"><i>The White Tiger</i></a>, which has an almost identical theme.<br />
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Adiga's book, while noteworthy for the vigour of its protagonist, is a novel which is traditional in form. Hamid tries something different: <i>How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia</i> is told in the second person, as a self help manual, with a certain amount of amusing ironic deconstruction of what a self help book actually is (pointing out that if there is one self it is meant to help, it's the author who pockets the royalties, for instance). Each chapter follows the same format - a succinct title ("Move to the City", "Get an Education"), a short introductory paragraph about the nature of the help offered, and an instalment from the "your" story. I usually find second person narratives extremely irritating, but the self help conceit and the thought that has gone into the writing and its balance between the stark reality of life in "rising Asia" and humorous touches means that it actually works quite well.<br />
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There is very little in the novel to date the start and finish, though it covers sixty or more years, from young childhood to death, slightly unsettling in the second person. Hamid's nationality suggests that the location could be Pakistan, though he is careful not to be too specific (omitting mention of religion, for instance, or any politics beyond that of the city in which it is set) - it could be any number of places in Asia. A Pakistani background would also suggest that the novel describes a life from colonial independence to almost the present.<br />
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Returning to the comparison of Hamid's novel with Adiga's, I would say that<i> The White Tiger </i>is more profound, while <i>How to Get Filthy Rich </i>is more accessible. The same statement would still be true if <i>The Reluctant Fundamentalist</i> is substituted for <i>The White Tiger</i>. I enjoyed <i>How to Get Filthy Rich</i> <i>in Rising Asia</i>, and Hamid has something important to say (if not anything new), but I don't think it will stay with me in the same way as the other two novels have. My rating: 8/10.Simon McLeishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16433000161180042201noreply@blogger.com0