Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons (1990)

Edition: Orbit, 1992
Review number: 1179

This Culture novel, the third, combines two of the themes common in the writing of Banks' other persona (the one without the central 'M'). It has the multiple interlinked narratives (just two of them; one is a series of flashbacks, nearly in reverse chronological order), and it has some sickening, unpleasant violence.

Like many of the other Culture novels, Use of Weapons is built around a thriller style operation by Special Circumstances, which is really the covert operations section of what amounts to their secret service (in the midst of the anarchy that is the apparent form taken by their government). The mission itself isn't really what the novel is about, though (Banks' treatment of it becomes extremely perfunctory towards the end); Use of Weapons is more interested in the background of the agent Cheradiene Zakalwe than anything else.

Apart from the presence of standard Iain Banks tricks, Use of Weapons is of interest for the way in which the author subverts some of the standard cliches of the thriller genre (the Culture series as a whole tends to do this with science fiction). Thus, it features the flawed maverick central character haunted by his passed, the disillusioned missing operative selected as the only one who can carry out the mission, and so on. It breaks little new ground; and, like its near contemporary, Canal Dreams, can be seen as Banks marking time as he prepares to move to a new phase in his writing.

Joseph Heller: Something Happened (1971)

Edition: Black Swan, 1990 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1180

It took a decade for Heller to produce his second novel, and it is one on which critical reception has been divided. It is the story of Bob Slocum, a successful executive (and even after 550 pages we still don't quite know exactly what he does or what the company he works for produces) in late sixties Connecticut. He isn't particularly happy at work despite his success, and he doesn't have a particularly happy home life (he has three children, a teenage daughter and two younger sons, one of whom is seriously brain damaged). As narrator, Bob spends much of the novel looking back on his past, in a way to me reminiscent of the Talking Heads' song Once in a Lifetime. His problem is that he ought to be happy - he has succeeded in everything that is part of the American Dream - but he isn't.

The American Dream gone sour is, in fact, what the novel is about. The emptiness of the idea plays the same role here as the evils of war do in Catch 22. This is obviously a less exciting subject, and despite the extra work Heller puts in it still leaves his second novel less successful than his first - less funny, less biting, less tragic, less gripping. Where it succeeds best is in atmosphere; in this, it inhabits the same claustrophobic, dysfunctional worlds as the much later films with similar backgrounds and purpose, The Ice Storm and American Beauty. (I actually watched the latter while reading the novel, and they are so close in tone, partly because the situation of the narrator is basically the same, that the one seems almost an adaptation of the other.)

There is irony in the novel's title because it is almost entirely reflection on how Bob got to his current situation; virtually nothing happens. Something Happened is a long novel, and it is quite repetitive, making it seem even longer. This can be a bit of a problem, and some parts are hard going (the section about how his able bodied son hates gym at school, in particular). But there are plenty of interesting and funny observations about human nature to encourage the reader to keep going to the end. This is a novel driven by character and by Heller's insights into middle class America, and it is mostly successful; it's problem is that it is not a classic on the scale of Catch 22.

George R. Stewart: Earth Abides (1949)

Edition: Gollancz, 1999
Review number: 1178

Of all the post-apocalyptic science fiction novels ever written, Earth Abides is probably the most poetic. George R. Stewart wrote only the one science fiction novel, and his is one of the less well known classics of the genre. Most literary writers seem to adapt poorly to science fiction, overusing its clichés, but Stewart is one of a handful (in the company of Orwell, Huxley and possibly Atwood) to have found something to say and a way to say it which has expanded the reach of the genre.

The narrator, Isherwood Williams, is working in the high desert mountains of northern California, alone in a remote cabin, when the disaster strikes. Like John Wyndham in the contemporary The Day of the Triffids, Stewart eschews the obvious atomic apocalypse to eradicate almost all of humanity with a plague, survived only by those naturally immune or particularly remote. (Today, the plague, especially if caused by human tampering with genetics, is the fashionable apocalypse.) The novel has three main parts - the initial disaster and its immediate aftermath; the situation twenty years later, as a small group of survivors faces some major crises; and a fast forward to the last days of Ish's life, as possibly the last old American left alive.

Many novels of this type are about the process of rebuilding civilization after the catastrophe, but Earth Abides has one feature which really makes it stand out. Almost immediately after discovering what has happened, Ish sets out to travel around the States, to try and understand it. The descriptions of the deserted cities (and the handful of people that Ish does find alive) is the novel's major strength; it is an elegy for the end of the civilization we still see around us, and evokes such things as the empty city marvellously.

When describing the beginning of the renewed rise of civilization, most science fiction novels assume that the intellectual legacy of the past will be important, and that everything a group does will involve sensible planning (for example, ensuring the preservation of seed). This is at least partly because of the history of the science fiction genre, in that both readers and editors (especially in the States), approved of stories in which the intellectual man of science with whom they identified was able to triumph (sometimes writers seem to be trying to write a manual on "how to survive the coming catastrophe" rather than fiction). In Earth Abides, Stewart is not so optimistic about the ability of reason to reign supreme, and it must be admitted that there is a great deal of evidence on his side. Ish may be the most vocal member of the small community which grows up around him and the woman that he meets after returning from his travels, but he never manages to persuade them of such things as the importance of education and the preservation of learning. Ish is not as all knowing as tends to be the case with the characters with a scientific background in this situation, either (think of Heinlein's omnicompetent heroes for the standard examples from the time). He is caught out by the various waves of animal population explosion and collapse which follow the removal of checks and balances imposed by mankind (which occur at different times, depending on the reproductive rate of the animal concerned); as a result he is unable to have seed stockpiled before a plague of rats makes it virtually impossible to scavenge. (The group live for years mainly on tins recovered from around San Francisco.)

Earth Abides is the sole example of Stewart's distinctive voice in the science fiction genre, and it remains something of an outsider, a forgotten classic.

Carol Shields: Unless (2002)

Edition: Fourth Estate, 2002
Review number: 1177

I have started several of last year's Booker Prize short-listed novels, but this is the first which I have felt a desire to read more than the first few pages. (I have not yet attempted Yaan Martel's Life of Pi, the winner.) The ones I put aside seemed no more than pale imitations of other writers, notably V.S. Naipaul, while Unless was able to speak to me with a voice of its own almost immediately. This is precisely why I was looking out for the half dozen short listed novels, in the hope of finding something new to enjoy. I read Unless and wrote this review before hearing of Shields' death; it made me feel that I had discovered her only just in time.

Every parent knows that eventually their child will leave them for a life of their own. For Reta Winters, middle aged author and narrator of Unless, the departure of her eldest daughter Norah has been more sudden, unusual and traumatic than most. For Norah has dropped out of life almost entirely, leaving her university course and boyfriend as well as her family to spend her days sitting on a street corner with a sign on her lap bearing the single word "GOODNESS". She won't talk to her family about her reasons for doing this, so they are left to speculate about what has gone wrong (something which comes fairly easily to the rather self-absorbed Reta) and what, if anything, can be done.

Unless is set in Toronto, something which (as Reta at one point remarks) is no longer expected to limit the market for a novel, and I was occasionally reminded of another first person narrative set in the city, Margaret Atwood's Catseye. Though both also share a feminist outlook (for some time Reta is convinced that Norah's withdrawal from the world is caused by a realisation that as a woman she won't ever get as good a deal from the world as an otherwise similar man.) Nevertheless is not as hard-edged as Atwood's writing, though it does have something of a similar air (possibly a consequence of the location and feminist sympathy already mentioned). Something which is different is that Atwood's style has the intention of convincing the reader of the sincerity of the narrator, while Sheilds makes you think that Reta manages to manifest contradictory emotions, as serene and self-observing prose proclaims violent distress and overwhelming concern for another. Nobody, of course, is completely consistent, and the contrast is obviously partly a coping strategy and partly due to guilt over her role in Norah's withdrawal, whatever that might be.

Unless has one feature which is extremely unusual. The headings of the chapters, like the novel's overall title, are single words, all prepositions and conjunctions rather than the nouns and verbs which would usually fill such a role. For me, this has the effect of giving the narrative a wistful note, though I'm not at all sure why this is. The novel generally feels similar to one of my other favourites of recent years, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Unless is magical to read - and makes me intrigued as to what The Life of Pi must have in order to have persuaded the Booker judges to choose it rather than this novel as the winner.

Michael Moorcock: Blood (1995)

Edition: Gollancz, 1995
Review number: 1176

When Moorcock began writing his vast collection of tales about multiple universes and the battle between Law and Chaos, there was no such discipline as chaos theory. Blood is the novel (first of a trilogy) in which he seeks to use ideas from the mathematics of chaos, particularly self-similarity and attractors, to add to his earlier ideas.

Blood purports to be part of a collection of manuscripts inherited by Moorcock, which (says the introduction) at first seemed disjointed and unconnected but whose overall coherence was eventually perceptible. The two main threads that Moorcock presents are a bizarre fantasy set in the American South and a parody of pulp-era space opera. The fantasy takes up by far the majority of the narrative, and is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's apocalyptic science fiction. Civilisation as we know it has been changed dramatically by the appearance of pockets of physical chaos around the world; they can be used to provide power, and reckless drilling has spread their dangerous subversion of physical law. Most of the people who remain live as best they can, but there are some, the elite Gamblers, who spend their lives pitted against one another in complex games of chance and metaphysics.

The space opera sections are less serious, and are about a great struggle across the multiverse between two factions, the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity; most of the weapons and mechanisms of travel described have connections to fractals and chaos theory.

Most of Moorcock's writing seems influenced mainly by his ideas about the science fiction and fantasy genres as a whole, and by the writers he loved in his formative years. Blood is, as far as I know, unique in his output in seeming to show influences which are more individual and recent - Ballard rather than Morris and Howard, Banks rather than Peake. The space opera sections have a more general influence. The style of the novel is opaque, quite difficult to see the meaning, similar to but more successful than John Clute's Appleseed. It doesn't all work, but Blood is an interesting experiment.

Iain Banks: The Bridge (1986)

Edition: Futura, 1989 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1174

Of Banks' early experimentation with narrative forms, The Bridge is the most successful novel. Like Walking on Glass, it uses interlocked but seemingly disctinct narratives, and combines ideas from science fiction and literary fiction; its influences are writers like Kafka and Dick, while one of the threads is a Scottish dialect parody of pulp sword and sorcery fantasy, such as Conan the Barbarian. Rather than keeping the threads separated as he did in Walking on Glass, Banks uses common images and symbols to relate them even before what is happening becomes clear: geology (the book's sections are even named after geological eras), the body of an unconscious man in hospital, and, above all, bridges - including a more metaphorical link in one of the narratives between the lands of the living and the dead.

The narrative thread which makes the strongest impact on the reader is about an amnesiac, rescued from the water surrounding an immense bridge inhabited by thousands of people. It is this story, of the senseless bureaucracy and outlandish customs he encounters which reminds me of Kafka. A small literary connection is that this character shares his name with the Lieutenant in Catch 22 (another book about impossible bureaucracy) who rows to Norway.

In the end, there are two things which determine the success or failure of The Bridge, or any experimental fiction of this type, as a novel. The first is the reader satisfaction produced by each narrative, which is here consistently high even though the stories do not seem to have a particul purpose or direction to them. Then there is the way in which the connections are used to roll the narrative together in the end, and this is also quite well done though I wouldn't give it full marks (it seems rather unimaginative for a writer of Banks' gifts). The third aspect, which I don't think is quite so successful, is the justification for splitting the narrative up in the first place. Perhaps more could have been put at the end to make this clearer as the stories are brought together. (It is easy enough to work out what is going on, but it would be more satisfying if the reader could see more about what each thread means in the context of the whole.)

In many experimental novels, the only interesting thing is the ingenuity of the idea being tried out, whether it is the form of narrative, an unusual point of view, the novel's structure, or whatever. Compared to more traditional literature, which has centuries of reader familiarity with its conventions, they can be hard to read and provide little reward for the effort required. The Bridge is not like that, even if it isn't completely successful; it is a fascinating and enjoyable novel.

Tom Holland: The Bonehunter (2001)

Edition: Abacus, 2002
Review number: 1175

Dinosaur bones are something that people have been obsessed by since the earliest investigations into fossils, and the field was especially exciting in the second half of the nineteenth century for several reasons: the possibility of making sensational discoveries, and the thrill of being involved in the controversies about Darwinism and geological ideas of the ancient earth. Tom Holland has moved from historical horror novels to historical thriller with The Bone Hunter, a novel which features several men obsessed with finding dinosaurs in the American West in 1878.

Holland's story begins in a liner crossing the Atlantic, heiress Lilian Prescott returning home to New York after a trip to England culminating in her (Henry James style) engagement to a peer. She and her brother meet another passenger, a former British army captain named Dawkins, who is travelling to New York to meet their father. Captain Dawkins is, like their father, a dinosaur fanatic, but when he meets Sheldon Prescott it soon becomes clear that something is going on which is more serious than the admittedly fierce competition that exists between rival dinosaur hunters. This rivalry is stirred up when Prescott offers to see a great secret to the two best known Americans in the field; and this is is when people start dying.

The novel's first part is mainly set in New York, and is similar to another story set in the same time and place, E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. The second half, a quest into the still Wild West, is far more brutal, a picture of a sordid and vicious culture of violence without the romanticism later provided by Hollywood.

The Bonehunter is generally gripping (as might be expected from a writer who cut his teeth writing horror novels) and well written, an unusual thriller and proof that Holland can produce as good a novel without the supernatural elements of his earlier work. The one flaw it has is the treatment of the romance which grows up between Lilian Sheldon and Captain Hawkins; the descriptions of their inner feelings and of their conversations seem artificial and unconvincing.

For anyone who wants to read something different in the historical thriller line, however, The Bonehunter is a novel well worth looking out for.