Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

Edition: Fourth Estate, 2007

Alaskan detective Meyer Landsman is a mess, and the country he lives in is a mess. Following the destruction of the fledgling state of Israel by its neighbours in 1948, the southern part of Alaska, around the town of Sitka, is opened up for Jewish settlement by the American government. Now, after sixty years, the federal lease is about to come to an end, and no one knows what is going to happen when it does. When Landsman's marriage breaks up, he moves into a sleazy Sitka hotel, to drink himself to death. A bad day starts when the hotel manager wakes him up because the man in the next room is dead, not from the expected heroin overdose but because he has been shot, execution style. Then Landsman discovers that his ex-wife, also a police officer, is now his boss, and that the corpse is the missing son of the head of an extreme Orthodox sect, before being ordered off the case. In true "maverick cop" style, this just makes him work harder, to find out who doesn't want him to discover the killer, and why.

Chabon's alternate history is interesting, and reasonably believable. I could easily imagine Israel destroyed in 1948, and with a little more effort the choice of Alaska - not then a state of the USA - as an alternative Jewish land makes sense: the territory was under the control of an American federal government sympathetic to the post-war plight of the Jews, and it was not already heavily populated. The sett up feels as though it should be making the ingredients of a farce, butt the novel is not humorous, apart from the odd one-liner and the exaggeration of the maverick stereotype in Landsman: this is not Woody Allen. For a novel which is described as "a homage to 1940s noir", I'd really expect more sharpness.


The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel I really expected to enjoy. Other people thought it was really good, I'd enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by the same author, and felt that the idea behind the story would make an interesting setting. But in the event I found it heavy going. The depression of the protagonist, the desperate sense of impending doom over the Jews of Sitka, and the nastiness of many of the other characters are all contributing factors, making it hard to enjoy reading the novel. This is not necessarily a reason for not reading, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is not the first or the most depressing book I have read, by a long shot. The suggestions for why it is hard going could equally well be said of 1984, though the theme of rebellion against authority there works better at holding the reader's interest - Winston is not as clichéd a character as Landsman. Perhaps Chabon just struck a chord with me, though I can't see what it would be. I am not, after all, a Jewish policeman investigating the murder of a heroin addict.

Often a book which is difficult to read providers other pleasures, but although it is undoubtedly well written, I did not really feel that I gained much from The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Perhaps if more had been made of the chess playing metaphor, or there had been more humour, I would have enjoyed it more. In the end, I would personally rate The Yiddish Policemen's Union at 6/10.

Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer: This Rough Magic (2003)

Published: Baen, 2003

It took me a long time - around two hundred and fifty pages of reading - to get into This Rough Magic, and yet I ended up enjoying it immensely. I picked this up in the local library, without looking at it too closely, and didn't even realise that it is the second in a series.

The central part of the plot is about a (fictional) siege of the citadel on the island of Corfu in 1539, when it was held by the Venetians. The Hungarians, led by the evil King Emeric and manipulated by the Grand Duke Jagellion of Lithuania who is a demon in human flesh, carry out the attack in alliance with the Byzantines. The Corfu garrison has been regarded as something of a backwater by the Venetians, despite the island's strategic position (controlling the entrance to the Adriatic, at the other end of which Venice herself lies). Among those trapped in the citadel are the main characters, including the wild young Venetian Benito Valdosta who is the hero of This Rough Magic.

The last paragraph makes clear both the alternate history aspect of the novel (the Byzantine empire had fallen to the Ottoman Turks almost a century before the action of This Rough Magic takes place) and the nature of the fantasy it contains (non-human creatures, both good and evil, ranging from fauns and undines to demons and angels). This is a typical sort of scenario for what is becoming known as the "new weird" (a term I think is terrible), but where This Rough Magic scores is by concentrating on people who have some magical power but are not the most potent around, rather as though a superhero saga like Batman was centred on Robin rather than Batman himself. At the same time, Benito Valdosta is sufficiently heroic without the superpowers for readers to be able to identify with his character in an escapist mode, and more interesting than the bland superhero type of central character (as Hans Solo is more interesting than Luke Skywalker) or the hero who overcomes by extreme superpowers (as Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake is tending to become) - ingenuity is more involving to a reader than simple brute force.

The point at which I began to be involved in This Rough Magic was with the arrival of the main characters on Corfu. The background from the first third of the novel, which leads up to this, is quite important, and is particularly useful to those of us who did not read the first novel (the reader is given enough explanation that This Rough Magic can stand on its own), but it is not particularly interesting: judicious editing and dispersal of some of the material to form references to the past in the second two thirds of This Rough Magic would have improved the novel.

While not innovative, This Rough Magic integrates its various elements of medieval folklore and magic well, particularly in the different ways in which various genii loci work. It is an enjoyable read, and well worth picking up - though skimming the first third is probably a sensible idea.

Paul Park: A Princess of Roumania (2005)

Published: Tor, 2005

One author who is mentioned several times in the quotations printed on the back of A Princess of Roumania is Philip Pullman. Now, anyone who has read my reviews of the His Dark Materials trilogy will know that Pullman is an author I think massively overrated, and so I found this somewhat off-putting. The praise I had read for A Princess of Roumania in the end persuaded me to give it a try, and I am glad that I did. While I can understand the comparison to Pullman, Park has more interesting ideas, a more atmospheric setting, and, above all, the ability to write convincing characters; while many consider His Dark Materials a classic, A Princess of Roumania is much more deserving of the label.

The story is simple; in fact, it is the ultimate fantasy cliché: the lost heir. Park mixes it with alternative universes, also not especially new: hiding the lost heir in our world is something I planned to use in an abandoned novel I began in 1991, among other uses of the idea. The first slightly unusual aspect to A Princess of Roumania is that our world is the fictional one, magically created solely to hide the princess Miranda from her family's enemies. Park's Roumania is a great power in decline, threatened principally by the Germans; her father was wrongfully accused of betraying Roumania to them twenty years earlier, an event which led to the elevation of one of the Roumanian generals as the power behind the throne. The baby Miranda was hidden by her aunt, an adept of magic, with the aid of a pair of books: each describing the history of a world, one real and one fictional; when both books are destroyed, the spell is broken and Miranda is returned to the "real" world. An odd quirk means she's fifteen even though twenty years have passed: this is not explained (though of course future novels in the series may do so) and suggests that the flow of time in magical worlds is different from that in the real world, an idea which goes back to folk stories where people kidnapped by fairies find that after a single night everyone they knew is dead of old age.

The pace is slow; the point of the novel being to establish the characters and set the stage for their interactions. Quite a lot does actually happen - it just feels relaxed to read it. Park doesn't quite manage the (surely impossible) task of persuading the reader that his Roumania is more real than the world we live in, but he comes closer than a lot of writers. It is the characters which really excel. This makes Park's work reminiscent in truth of one of the other authors to whom he is compared on the back of A Princess of Roumania, John Crowley, who is one of my favourite authors of all. Involving, rather than exciting, is the order of the day; and A Princess of Roumania is guaranteed a place on my reads of the year.

Alastair Reynolds: Century Rain (2004)

Published: Gollancz, 2005

The last time I read (and reviewed) a novel by Alastair Reynolds, I felt that it would be good for him to be refreshed by moving to a new setting, separate from the future history he had used up to that point. In Century Rain, he has done just this, renewing his creativity by doing so. (I can't claim any credit: apart from anything else, I didn't discuss this issue in my review.) This novel is a science fiction noir thriller, where time travellers become involved in a murder mystery in an alternate fifties Paris.

Reynolds' future has Earth rendered uninhabitable by nanotech weapons, and the destruction wrought by them makes any artefacts obtainable from the planet's archaeology massively valuable. But when a trip to the Earth's surface organised and lead by archaeologist Verity Auger goes badly wrong, she faces the tribunal which will end her career - if she's lucky. At this point she is offered a choice: take on a mysterious task or be left to face the music. It turns out that the task is to travel through a secret tunnel in space-time (something more exotic than a wormhole, she is assured), the other end of which is in a Metro tunnel just outside a station in an alternate Paris in 1959. A colleague of Verity's was studying this version of Paris, and was killed soon after discovering something important. Verity's task is to obtain papers that this woman had left with her landlord; however, unknown to her, the landlord felt that there was something odd about the death and has hired a private detective to investigate it.

As briefly indicated, this isn't the real Paris: the German invasion in 1940 was beaten back, so the Second World War barely happened, with the result that the fifties seem almost more like the thirties, politically and technologically. The travellers from the future are not sure how this happened. There are several possibilities, ranging from someone taking advantage of the chaos surrounding the destruction of life on Earth to revise the history books and insert the Second World War, to the idea that this alternate Earth is a sophisticated simulation, to the possibility that it really is part of another timeline. For much of the Century Rain it doesn't matter what the truth is, and anyway, it is more enjoyable to soak up the Simenonesque atmosphere. Indeed, the Paris sections work better than the future sections - an observation which seems a bit odd considering in which genre Reynolds made his name! The novel is basically a clash between the X-Files and Casablanca. The reader is clearly intended to make the second comparison, as many of the famous lines are quoted from the film (which of course doesn't exist in the alternate universe). A little ironic touch is that "We'll always have Paris" is missing.

Century Rain also includes a nanotech weapon which is somehow more frightening than the murderous, spectacular and unsubtle ones commonly seen in science fiction. The Amusica virus removes the ability to process music: it becomes just background noise. It is a little unlikely to be possible, particularly if the hypothesis that the role of musical awareness in human evolution was as a precursor of linguistic processing turns out to be true. (This is a hypothesis argued for, convincingly and in detail, in Steven Mithen's recent book, The Singing Neanderthals.) The virus leaves a culture essentially without music, where those few immune to the virus for some reason are envied and hated.

Philip Kerr: A Philosophical Investigation (1992)

Edition: Vintage, 1996
Review number: 1252

Having already read a couple of Philip Kerr's thrillers that seem to be heavily influenced by Michael Crichton, I was not expecting A Philosophical Investigation to be the kind of novel that it is. It is in the crime rather than thriller genre, even if it picks the crime theme most conducive to a thriller style, the serial killer. With a serial killer, the traditional methods of detective fiction, relating means, motive and opportunity to the people surrounding the victim, are either hard to apply or hardly relevant. Even so, Kerr's novel lies between the two genres, but is closer to the core of the crime genre than the thriller. Among its deviations from the standard practises of either genre is the background - it takes place in a stylised, science fictional alternate reality that reminds me of Jasper Fforde's England of The Eyre Affair - but stripped of its silly touches.

The plot of A Philosophical Investigation is hard to describe without giving away some of the fun details that make the novel different, and which is so much better as a reader to discover for oneself. The changes made to create the alternative world are cleverly woven into the investigation; and the alert reader will pick up all kinds of literary and philosophical references and other touches - this may strike some as tedious and too clever by half, but I find it fascinating. (A familiarity with some basic ideas of Western philosophy gives a reader a big advantage - something on the level of Sophie's World should be read before this novel.) It is a rare crime novel that makes me feel inspired to read Wittgenstein - and the enjoyment is not just intellectual, as A Philosophical Investigation is full of jokes, too.

Len Deighton: SS-GB (1979)

Edition: Triad Grafton, 1980
Review number: 1248

Because of Deighton's long history as a successful thriller writer before the appearance of SS-GB, it is packaged as a thriller; but in fact it is science fiction dealing with a classic theme of that genre, and would doubtless have been classified as such if it had been a first novel. For this is alternative history, set in a Britain occupied by the Third Reich after a successful 1941 German invasion. Central character Douglas Archer is a senior officer at Scotland Yard, now under the control of the SS. Like many in occupied England, he tries to carry on with his job - criminal investigation - without getting in the way of or thinking too hard about the German occupiers. Crime is, after all, still crime. However, he is gradually drawn into a Resistance plot, much against his better judgement.

The Second World War is a conflict which, because of the hateful policies of the Nazis, has generated many myths, ideas which have become entrenched in popular culture and unquestionable, especially in Britain, no matter what their historical accuracy. These myths include the plucky but ineffective Home Guard, the dedicated airmen and so on - and one of the most powerful is the role of the Resistance in occupied countries. Everybody was apparently on the side of the Resistance, even if they were unable to do anything active, apart from a small number of moral degenerates, congenital traitors. A moment's thought would show that this could not have been the case, particularly given the exceptionally vicious fighting between rival Resistance groups in countries like Greece and Yugoslavia, but it would be hard to write a novel as cynical as Deighton's about a country that had actually been occupied without causing offence. In SS-GB, most people collaborate to some extent or another; many even welcome the Germans for all kinds of reasons; the Germans are far more attractive characters than a lot of the Resistance members.

Another reason for writing this kind of novel is the ability it gives the author to make oblique criticisms. About three quarters of the way through, in a conversation about German brutality, one character says "I wonder if we'd be as bad as they are, if we'd won the war and were occupying Germany". You don't hear much about brutality from the British and American troops occupying West Germany after the war, but it is certainly a comment with an uncomfortable resonance these days in which we hear all the time about abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. It rubs against another Second World War myth, that the Germans were all brutal bullies and the Allies honourable young men.

SS-GB is a fascinating novel, extremely convincing (being based, of course, on Deighton's exhaustive knowledge of the period).

Michael Bishop: Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1987)

Edition: Grafton, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1129

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas is a direct tribute to the famous science fiction author; not only does it use many themes from his work, but Dick himself is one of the major characters. The novel begins with the death of Dick and the rising of a ghostly form from his body. But this is not the world we know, but an America which won in Vietnam, and where the increasingly dictatorial Richard Nixon is approaching the end of his fourth term in office. This is an America where travel is severely restricted, black people have almost all been "repatriated" to African countries, and the remaining population live in fear of the secret policemen known as "No Knocks". Dick is an almost forgotten author, though his earliest novels are still required reading for the Vietnamese who come to the States and are "Americulturated" - indoctrinated into the American dream. Dick's later work (more like the satirical science fiction for which he is really known) was never published but circulates in photocopied samizdat form, among the remnants of the sixties counter-culture. It is to one of the owners of these dangerous manuscripts, a pet shop employee, that the ghost appears, driving him on a course which both of them hope will change this nightmare reality.

Among the themes that Bishop picks up from Dick's novels are alternative realities, external supernatural intervention, a blue collar central character (rather than the middle class scientists/engineers of the genre before him), the importance of the desire to care for animals (as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and the triumph of American popular culture. Although rather uneven (in this reality, there is a lunar base, and the chapters set there fail to grasp the reader), it must be one of the best homages to another author ever written. Bishop even re-uses something of Dick's style.

To choose this way to memorialise one of the greatest of all science fiction writers - one who (eventually) massively raised the literary profile of the genre - seems entirely appropriate, and this is perhaps the best indicator of how successful Bishop has been in this novel. Genre fiction, like popular culture generally, has a tendency to forget most of its past, and so reminders of just how good some of the earlier masters were serve an admirable purpose.

Norman Spinrad: The Iron Dream (1972)

Edition: Panther, 1977
Review number: 933

Most alternate histories are simply narratives set in a world which differs from our own because an event in the past is supposed to have had a different outcome. The Iron Dream is, so far as I know, unique in science fiction because it purports to be a novel written in an alternate universe.

For The Iron Dream is supposed to present a posthumously published novel by an Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the States in the twenties to make a living as an artist for science fiction magazines before writing himself. Published in 1953, Sons of the Swastika (under which title no publisher would have touched Spinrad's novel) won the Hugo award for 1954, when in reality no award was made. The Iron Dream is a reprint, complete with scholarly commentary.

As a fantasy written by Hitler, Sons of the Swastika is pretty much what you might expect, displaying obsessions with racial purity and uniforms, and hatred for Communism thinly disguised as the Dominators who enslave millions telepathically. It manages to be exciting and readable, despite misgivings about its politics which are initially raised by the name of its author.

And this is surely the point that Spinrad wanted to make with The Iron Dream. It is not particularly about Hitler, revealing nothing about its supposed author other than what is part of the popular consciousness. Instead, it is a commentary on the appearance of right wing politics and disturbing psychological obsessions in the science fiction of the period. Sons of the Swastika may be more exaggerated than what has survived, but that is of course how satire makes its point.

There is a great deal of ironic parallel between the career of Feric Jaggar, hero of Sons of the Swastika, and the real Adolf Hitler, which is brought out by the commentary (even though this is supposed to be a product of the same alternate world). It refers several times to the unlikelihood of Jaggar's rise to power and the impossibility that Jaggar's demagoguery could unite a nation behind him in the way that it does. This is not very subtle, but it is quite effectively disturbing.

John Barnes: Finity (1999)

Edition: Gollancz, 2001
Review number: 821

John Barnes has written several novels about culture clashes (most recently A Million Open Doors); this paranoid alternative universe novel is almost more of the same. Finity is a science fiction thriller; investigation of sabotage at a huge company turns up evidence that a large number of alternate versions of reality are beginning to collide Colleagues no longer share the same idea of history, or even of recent events. In addition, something has happened to the USA, or its equivalent in every alternative reality; the rest of the world has lost contact with it, without realising.

There seem to me to be several holes in the explanations of what's going on in Finity (there is also more exposition than in most of Barnes' novels). Some things are just sloppy - Barnes surely cannot mean that there can only be a finite number of combinations of a finite number of symbols as he seems to say; an infinite collection of numbers can be built from the symbols 0-9. It is also not the case that a point has infinitely many neighbours; neighbour is not a valid concept in Euclidean space - within a particular distance of any point there are infinitely many points, but there are always ones closer than any given one). Some of his explanations of quantum physics also contain suspect statements, and the idea that use of quantum computer powered devices will swap an individual into an alternate universe seems pretty ludicrous.

Although alternative realities are interesting, it is difficult to see any way to travel from one to another, and this is something which an author needs to face once multiple alternates are introduced. This has been done in several ways. In The Man in the High Castle, they are fictions in each other (linked by the I Ching), and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series makes them fantasies. In other Moorcock novels, alternate realities are a by-product of time travel, which is left with an unexplained mechanism, and Robert Heinlein mixes this idea with that of fiction in The Number of the Beast and the novels that followed it. Other ideas used by writers include traumatic events such as near death experiences or experiencing other universes by drug taking. In almost every case, though, these are more causes of travel between alternates than explanations of how it might be possible.

To have no real explanation, particularly when dealing with one of the well established components of the genre, is not really a problem. (The reader tends to think, "Oh yes, alternate realities" or "time machines", or whatever, and it's a concept already familiar and acceptable to them.) However, Barnes does attempt an explanation, and this is not very convincing. As a result, the novel as a whole is diminished. In general, Barnes is a writer I admire a great deal; but Finity is his most disappointing novel to date.

Michael Moorcock: The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century (1976)

Edition: Granada, 1980
Review number: 787

This novel takes two of the characters from the Jerry Cornelius quartet, the mysterious Una Persson and Jerry's sister Catherine, and tries to find more to say about them. It has an interesting structure, with each chapter set in a different alternate version of the twentieth century, but it is not as successful as the later novels of the quartet (The English Assassin, say) which use a similar technique.

There are several reasons why this novel doesn't work. Moorcock may be expert at describing background, but he has used the alternate reality device several times and has difficulty coming up with new and interesting versions of twentieth century history. He also leaves himself little space to describe them. Since some are easier to set up than others, this makes the novel rather bitty, and its central characters are ot sufficiently strong to overcome this. The writing is also rather trendily mid-seventies, containing a lot of not very interesting sex. Read the Cornelius quartet instead.

Paul J. McAuley: Pasquale's Angel (1994)

Edition: Gollancz, 1994 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 745

What might have happened if Leonardo da Vinci had concentrated exclusively on engineering, creating working versions of many of the devices he sketched? That is the intriguing idea behind Pasquale's Angel, which is set in a sixteenth century where these devices have precipitated an Industrial Revolution centred on Florence.

The central character of the novel is apprentice artist Pasquale, who becomes involved in momentous events after meeting journalist Niccolo Machiavegli. While drawing an illustration for his newspaper of an argument between one of da Vinci's entourage and visiting artist and diplomat Raphael, news comes to the office that one of Raphael's aides has been murdered. This is a minor locked room mystery which is modelled extremely closely on The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

The plot of the novel, which is rather poor, is mainly an excuse to speculate on what might have become of some of the important figures of the time in the changed background posited by McAuley. It is as a novel of ideas that Pasquale's Angel is interesting. I'm not sure how much an early Industrial Revolution is actually possible, given that the advances two hundred years later depended on economic and technological developments which had hardly begun in the sixteenth century. Capitalism was in its infancy, and materials technology, in particular steel manufacture, was not advanced enough to actually make some of the devices described, such as large scale steam engines.

Michael Moorcock: The War Lord of the Air (1971)

Edition: Granada, 1984
Review number: 411

The War Lord of the Air is one of my favourite Moorcock novels. It inspired by turn of the century adventure stories with a fantastic element, with influences such as Buchan, Haggard and Wells as well as the tradition exemplified by (say) Lanier's Brigadier Ffellowes stories. It is a precursor of the genre known as "steampunk", with its additional element of alternate history centred around alternate technology.

Whilst on a mission to a remote kingdom in the Himalayas in 1902, Captain Oswald Bastable of the British Army is caught in an earthquake. He recovers consciousness in a ruined city - but the ruins seem old. Eventually he discovers that he has travelled through time to 1973 - but not 1973 as we have experienced it. The First World War never happened, and the world remains divided up between the colonial powers. The dominant technology is that of the airship, powered by compact steam engines. Feigning amnesia (and, of course, having no knowledge of any event since 1902), Bastable attempts to make his way in an entirely new world, though actually one not as different from 1902 as the real 1973 would have been.

As in other alternate histories, part of the fun lies in seeing well known people in very different situations. There are several revolutionaries, including Che Guevara and an aged Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin), but the oddest is the clean cut young army lieutenant Michael Jagger.