Michael Moorcock: Byzantium Endures (1981)

Edition: Fontana, 1982
Review number: 1173

The creation of Maxim Pyatniski, or Colonel Pyat, is Moorcock's supreme piece of literary artistry. Many writers, even some of the best, find it hard to write a convincing, three dimensional character who has a different voice from their own. In Pyat, Moorcock's aim seems to be a narrator who is the diametrical opposite of himself in as many ways as possible. The one thing he is unable to do is to make him admirable or sympathetic - he is rabidly anti-Semitic, self-aggrandizing, foolish, vain, cocaine-addicted (and that is just what comes across in his own autobiographical narrative).

Byzantium Endures is the first of four lengthy novels, which means that it is possible to pursue Pyat's repellent personality at great length through the twentieth century. Myself, I find that a relatively small quantity of this goes a long way, despite the fascinating backgrounds (in this case, Russia just before the Communist revolution and during the subsequent civil war). This feeling was exacerbated by not having read the series in the correct order, as I purchased them as I found them in bookshops, and so there weren't really any surprises by the time I worked back to the first of them. By warned - the impact of Byzantium Endures is drastically reduced by doing this. Even taking this into account, I think that some of Moorcock's less ambitious writing is more successful, and certainly more congenial.

Jonathan Carroll: Kissing the Beehive (1998)

Edition: Vista, 1999
Review number: 1172

Most of Carroll's novels have fantastical elements - spirits, blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and so on - even if they start out seemingly realist. Kissing the Beehive is an exception to this, and is thus less individual than Carroll's other novels. It lies more within the crime than the fantasy genre, though it has other elements.

The central character and narrator of Kissing the Beehive, Samuel Beyer, is himself a best-selling novelist, who at the beginning of the novel is suffering from writer's block. We seem to be about to have a novel about the ideas he has and discards, rather like Joseph Heller's Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. He fairly quickly has an idea - he returns to the small New England town where he grew up, and begins to write about one of the most dramatic experiences of his childhood, when he and a friend found the body of a young woman while swimming in the creek. Again, Carroll confounds the expectations - the reader things that the remainder of Kissing the Beehive is to be some kind of voyage of self-discovery. In a way this is true, but the novel is far more complicated than that. When someone begins to kill the people Sam interviews, and starts leaving him taunting messages, we move partly into thriller territory. And then there is his relationship with a beautiful but obsessive fan - shades of Stephen King's Misery.

The magical commonplaces of Carroll's writing seems to be entirely absent; there are no talking dogs, ghosts of alternate realities. But the quality is still there; this is one of the best novels I have read all year.

Iris Murdoch: Bruno's Dream (1969)

Edition: Chatto & Windus, 1980 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1171

An old man lying on his deathbed, barely understanding what happens around him, may seem an unpromising central character for a novel. It may be that this is part of the reason that Bruno's Dream is not one of Murdoch's best novels, but it is certainly a theme which suited her style, which itself has dreamlike qualities, more than it would that of many writers.

Bruno's concerns are those which might be considered typical of someone in his position. He wants to seek a reconciliation with his son Miles, with whom he quarrelled because of his marriage to an Indian woman against Bruno's wishes. He suspects that those who care for him are doing so for the sake of his possessions, principally a stamp collection which is eventually destroyed when his house is flooded. Bruno's illness has affected his mind, so that a lot of the time he doesn't remember who he is talking to; he has more interest in memories of his past than in the people around him, so he misses the dramatic events which occur in the lives of the other characters, prompted by the return of Miles to the fold.

The point is, of course, the reality or otherwise of what's described, as the novel's title signposts. The story may be written in the third person, but is it actually happening or is it Bruno's dream? The reader cannot be sure (though the title for me tips the balance to fantasy). As a dream, it is remarkably lucid for someone in Bruno's condition (one of the reasons why the reader might feel it is not a dream at all), and he is able to consistently invent all kinds of things about people whose names he can't even remember when he (thinks he) meets them.

There are two famous quotations from Jane Austen in which she describes the small scale of the novels she wrote. "3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on", and the limits of her work described as "the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which with so fine a Brush". Of later writers, Iris Murdoch is one of the few who shared this delight in the miniature. There are only seven or eight living characters (a couple of people who die before the start of the novel also have an effect on the plot). In a novel on so small a scale, the author has to work hard to keep the reader's interest, so it is not surprising when the melodramatic creeps in (think of the number of elopements in Jane Austen). Here, melodrama adds to the dreamlike atmosphere - events like the flood and a farcical duel seem to be almost anti-realistic.

Coming to the end of what I have to say about this novel, it seems that there is more to Bruno's Dream than I thought when actually reading it. Even if it is not one of Murdoch's greatest novels, it is definitely worth reading.

Paul Johnston: A Deeper Shade of Blue (2002)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002
Review number: 1170

After five crime novels set in a near future Edinburgh dictatorship, Johnston has moved on with A Deeper Shade of Blue. Set in contemporary Greece, it updates such thrillers as Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael as an Athenian private detective investigates the disappearance of a young woman on the remote Cycladean island of Trigono.

One similarity between this novel and My Brother Michael, other than the setting, is that it is quickly clear that at least part of the mystery here is connected to the activities of British agents and the (in this case rather reluctant) activities of the Resistance during the War. The tortuous politics of Greece since then are also involved (the detective himself is the sone of one of the one time leaders of the Greek Communist party - a similar connection to that existing between Quintilian Dalrymple and the rulers of Edinburgh in Johnston's other novels). In fact, everything you could imagine about the darker side of Greece seems to be a part of A Deeper Shade of Blue - black market antiquities, drug smuggling, extremes of sexual depravity, village vendettas and resentment of tourists - and this makes the novel rather difficult to get into.

The complexity of the background to the puzzle is not the only problem with A Deeper Shade of Blue. While reading it, the impression gained is that it is too long, and that each chapter is too long. Something of the tension and excitement that this sort of crime story, at the thriller end of the genre, needs is missing. There is much to enjoy in A Deeper Shade of Blue, but it should move faster.

Iain M. Banks: The Player of Games (1988)

Edition: MacMillan, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1169

The second Culture novel is a good deal less ambitious than the first, Consider Phlebas. Indeed, it is outwardly, at least, one of Banks' simplest novels. The Culture is concerned about its relationship with a distant, aggressive interstellar empire named Azad. There, position in life, and even imperial policy, are determined by a game, also named Azad, which is a massively complex simulation of life which has aspects akin to such games as chess, Diplomacy, Risk, go and bridge. Contact, the aspect of the Culture which deals with the outside, chooses a famous game player to take part in the annual grand tournament, and he is the book's central character.

The story is simple enough, but what The Player is about is a little more than this. There are several ways in which the ideas of the novel could be related to the real world, and I suspect that Banks means some or all of them. Many games, of course including the board games mentioned above, model aspects of real life, usually emphasising combat for obvious reasons. We don't tend to equate skill in such games with social success; a chess grand master may be considered clever, but most people would probably feel it was a pretty nerdish thing to be. This is partly because of the limitations of the games' representations of the real world (a simplification which also provides a reason for some people's obsession with them), but also partly that players become engrossed in the games themselves to the extent that they can't be bothered to attempt to succeed in the real world. (This is of course particularly true of computer and role playing games.) To such people, the game is the world, in the same way that Azad the game is Azad the empire.

On the other hand, one of the major tools which is used to determine government policy in the Western world, particularly in the economic sphere, is computer simulation, based on the ideas of game theory. These simulations are basically games without human players, though setting the conditions of the simulation (such as interest rates) is one activity analogous to game play, and the actions of agents simulated by the computer program form another. Azad has elements of this sort of simulation in it, particularly in the parts of the game which are affected by the philosophical statements set down by the players in advance. (The connection is clear if these are thought of as the ideologies which suggest if not determine policy.) Azad is this development exaggerated (though, curiously, without any explicit mention of computers), and the attitude that Banks seems to have to the empire is his commentary on where this might lead. Azad is a stagnated society run by an elite for their own benefit, regardless of the brutalisation of two thirds of the population (the dominant species has three sexes); even the game itself is manipulated. Of course, no government would dream of faking the results of simulations for their own ends...

Other suggestive aspects of the novel include the game-like machinations of Contact to get the Culture's champion to Azad, or the possibility that Banks is commenting on the tendency of the science fiction genre to have a hero prevail by lateral thinking, solving a puzzle about as realistic as a Bond villain's mechanism for killing the famous spy, something which makes some novels seem like poor role playing scenarios.

The Player of Games is not the only Banks novel which gives game playing an important role; the futile, impossible games in Walking on Glass are another example. Here the author is successfully playing a little game with the reader, hiding a great deal of complexity under a simple surface.

John Dickson Carr: Fire, Burn! (1957)

Edition: Carroll & Graf, 1994
Review number: 1168

John Dickson Carr is best known to those interested in old-fashioned crime fiction for his detective Gideon Fell, who solved the many variations on the locked room mystery theme which Carr thought up. Fire, Burn!, though still a locked room mystery, is very different. The detective, John Cheviot, is a Scotland Yard superintendent, who finds himself travelling back in time to 1829, to the earliest days of the Metropolitan Police. This is before the days when policemen began to be respected (a situation to which we seem to have been returning for some time), before the institution of the CID, before the ideas on which modern police work is based. He meets a woman with whom he falls in love, but has to risk alienating her and breaking the code governing honourable conduct (in the days when duels were still being fought) in order to solve his case.

Since the publication of Fire, Burn!, historical crime stories have become big business. It is really a precursor to this genre, but it has this unusual time travel aspect as well. One of the major difficulties with the genre is that readers expect modern investigative methods - sifting of evidence, attention paid to forensic detail including examination of the body, elimination of suspects by logical deduction, being willing to suspect anybody - which would have been considered strange and even improper in the past. (The tendency which is still sometimes seen today to automatically blame society's outsiders was often the principal method of criminal investigation.) Difficulties inherent in suspecting or even questioning members of the upper classes are often glossed over for the sake of the plot. By bringing his detective from the future, Carr neatly sidesteps all these problems, and also makes the contrast between the expectations of eighteen twenties society and those of a nineteen fifties policeman the core of the novel.

This makes Fire, Burn! more serious than the majority of Carr's massive output, and it is successful as a carefully documented historical novel as well as in the genre more familiar to the author.

José Carlos Somoza: The Athenian Murders (2000)

Original title: La caverna de las ideas
Translation: Sonia Soto, 2003
Edition: Abacus, 2003 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1167

This novel seems to have been one of literature's recent success stories. It is basically a crime novel, an investigation into the death of a young student at Plato's Academy, initially thought to have been caused by a wolf attack but leaving grounds for suspicion of something more sinister. The Athenian Murders takes the form of a translation of an ancient manuscript telling the story, complete with copious footnotes by the translator, who is fascinated by the literary convention of eidesis of which it forms part (that is, the presence of meaningful images in the text not part of the story, such as repeated metaphors). He becomes convinced that some secret is hidden in the narrative's images (the word eidesis comes from the Greek for image), and is eventually rather neurotic about them.

Reviewers have described The Athenian Murders as a hybrid of The Name of the Rose and Pale Fire. It is in reality not much like The Name of the Rose, which is a fairly lazy comparison made for any historical crime novel with literary pretensions. Pale Fire is far closer, but it is a comparison which really shows up the shortcomings of Somoza's novel. The enjoyable aspect of Nabokov's idea (which is to illuminate the obsessions of the annotator through his misunderstanding of the text, and thereby satirise at academic literary criticism) is completely missing in The Athenian Murders. The translator does become obsessed, but it is about something so pointless as to be almost unbelievable - the use of the repeated images is interesting, but hardly enough to convince a reader, as it does the translator, that they reveal a secret of vital importance. (I don't know that much about it, but the form of the word eidesis leads me to suspect that a secret does not have to be involved at all, and that it could be used in other ways - as part of an intellectual game, as we have here in the way that the images are used to link each chapter to one of the labours of Hercules, or as by many writers from Aeschylus on, to use the subconscious to heighten the mood of a passage.)

There are other problems with The Athenian Murders, as far as I was concerned. A minor one is the occasional error in the background Some of these are quite obvious and jolted me out of Plato's Athens; an example is the use of the American rattlesnake as a simile in the supposedly ancient text. (Since the novel is full of ironies, this hint of modern authorship may be another, but it doesn't really bear that appearance besides being far more subtle than the rest of it.) The main problem that the novel has is its ending, and this affects the whole of the last quarter or so of the text as Somoza leads up to it. As always when criticising the ending of a novel, it is hard to talk about it without giving it away; the least I can say is that it is banal and dull, pretty much at the level of "and then I woke up, and it had all been just a dream".

It's hard to tell how much of this is the fault of the translator rather than the original author, since my feeling is that anyone who dumbs down by changing the title to something as silly as The Athenian Murders rather than keeping the reference to Plato's famous metaphor from The Republic could easily have completely destroyed the intellectual content of the rest of the novel.