Ian R. MacLeod: The House of Storms (2005)

Published by Pocket Books, 2006

The follow-up to the wonderful The Light Ages, The House of Storms revisits the same world a century or so later.

The plot describes the machinations of Guildsmistress Alice Meynell, whose pursuit of personal power at any cost eventually leads to a terrible civil war between the east and west of England. This is not the confrontation between king and parliament which happened in the real world, which is now remote enough that it has been romanticised, but a horrific, draining conflict clearly modelled on the Western Front in the First World War.

One of the typical plots of the fantasy genre - which reflects the appeal it has to the adolescent audience - is the underhand "bad guy" adult being opposed and beaten by young teens. The House of Storms looks as though it might follow this storyline, as the first part of the novel describes a love affair between Alice's son Ralph and one of the maids at the house of the title, Invercombe near Bristol where Ralph travels to recuperate from an illness. However (to return to the point), MacLeod decides to reveal the unlikelihood of the standard plot, as Alice easily defeats their plans to flee to the Fortunate Isles; it is only realistic for experience and duplicity to overcome naivety. This leads straight to the strange second part, much of which is told from the point of view of a new character. He is a boy growing up in Einfell, the sanctuary for those whose humanity has been destroyed by over-exposure to aether, the raw material of magic. This was for me reminiscent of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, though not quite at the level acheived in that classic novel.

While The House of Storms is clearly a cleverly conceived and well written fantasy novel, it is not really as readable as The Light Ages. For this, the easy victory given Alice Meynell already mentioned is partly to blame, for it exposes the insipidity of Ralph and Marion as characters with whom the reader is meant to identity: the other main characters are too ruthless (Alice) or strange (Klade). It invites re-reading, though, and doing so is rewarding. The first time through, though, I found it hard to spend more than five minutes reading the novel without putting it down and taking a break. If you want a cute and fluffy, easy read, then The House of Storms is not for you; but for those who want something deeper, especially those who enjoyed The Light Ages, it is well worth making the effort.

Starting New Book Blog

This is the first post as a blog of my book review site. It's been running since 1998, and has over 1300 book reviews. Since blogging became popular, I've realised that this site is basically a blog: so I'm now going to start keeping new updates as a blog. This might encourage me to make entries more frequently: from one a day, the rate has gone down to less than one a month.

The site has now had over 3/4 million visitors (according to Geocities stats, which don't go back to the beginning of the site), so I don't want to just abandon it. So I'll be updating the review listings with links to the blog as I post them.

David Mitchell: Black Swan Green (2006)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006
Review number: 1316

With many considering Mitchell's previous novel, Cloud Atlas, to have been robbed of the Booker Prize a couple of years ago, and with Black Swan Green at one time the bookies' favourite from this year's long list, it was a big surprise when it was left off the short list entirely when it was announced in early September. Every year, I set out to try to read the half dozen novels on the short list, as they should include the best in literary fiction from the Commonwealth, and every year two or three of these novels are ones I find unreadable (or at least, unfinishable). The reasons for this can vary, but usually the problem is that I find them dull and unimaginative. Neither could be charges laid against Mitchell's work; his ideas are interesting, and the writing used to express them draws the reader into the world he describes.

Having said that, Black Swan Green is very different from Mitchell's first three novels. They all have some quirkiness about their narrative structure, like Iain Banks' early novels, that makes them not quite mainstream. Here, though, we have a straightforward first person narrative. In fact, the story of a thirteen year old boy in early eighties England reads like many first novels: it has a distinctly autobiographical feel to it. I don't know enough about Mitchell's life to decide whether or not it is based on his teenage years, but he is at least about the right age.

In fact, narrator Jason Taylor is almost exactly one year younger than myself; I was fourteen during 1982 not thirteen. Although I was also living in England, my circumstances were rather different from those of Jason Taylor, even though we actually shared experiences. While Jason was coping with bullying, learning about girls, discovering his talents as a poet and seeing the end of his parents' marriage, I was dealing with less subtle but more violent bullying (I still have scars on my back), learning about girls in the more restrictive environment of a single-sex school, discovering my talents in mathematics and music and learning to live with my father's disability (which followed a stroke a year earlier). These are fairly obvious similarities in our situations, which makes this book speak to me more strongly than it will to many other readers, but there were also differences. I was much more introspective than Taylor is made out to be, much less interested in popularity with others at school, for example. More of a geek, in other words. However, if I had written Black Swan Green, suspicions that it was semi-autobiographical would be well-founded.

So this is a well written, interesting novel with a believable central character. Why, then, has it been overlooked by the Booker jury? It is more conventional than Mitchell's earlier novels, but that should not matter when many of the books shortlisted in this and other years are as much, if not more, conventional. I have commented before on the attitude of the literary establishment to science fiction even today, but there are no genre elements in Black Swan Green at all. However, authors as well-regarded as Iain Banks have never been shortlisted at all, so it may be that just being a writer associated with science fiction can be enough to taint your name in the jury's eyes.

Philip K. Dick: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)

Edition: Voyager, 1996
Review number: 1315

Philip K. Dick was not an author who concerned himself greatly with the scientific plausibility of the backgrounds to his novels in the way that many of his contemporaries (Larry Niven, for example) did. However, there are many contemporary echoes thirty years on of his paranoid tales; he writing is of now in a way that most writers in any genre can only dream about. What we get in this novel, apart from one of Dick's weirdest titles (the policeman is a fan of John Dowland), includes resonances with identity theft and the possibility of unknown celebrities as we see in so many "celebrity" special editions of reality TV shows at the moment. There is also an element of parody of the fairly common science fiction idea of a genetically superior race within mankind, as described in all seriousness by writers such as AE van Vogt (and to which the back story of many superhero comic strips can be related, from Superman to the X Men).

Jason Taverner is a product of genetic engineering experiments - a "Six", because he was produced by the sixth series of such experiments - and host of the world's top-rated TV show. But one morning he wakes up in a sleazy hotel, and discovers that not only is he unable to prove who he is and regain the privileged life that used to be his, but nobody even recognises him or remembers his work. While not precisely identity theft - identity loss would be more like it - this fits in with current fears, in the UK at least, of what might happen with the introduction of identity cards tied to a single central database, obviously due to become the country's biggest hacker target.

As our society continues every day to become more dependent on technology for smooth running, the consequences of any breakdown become proportionately more serious. Increasing complexity makes it harder to ensure the security of even the most crucial systems, as well as taking the technology as a whole beyond the grasp of a single engineer. However, introducing measures to deal with these consequences can compromise the security of the entire system: to put in a "back door" to recover a stolen identity, for example, can provide a new method to steal one in the first place.

In the end, though, Dick ends up copping out. Jason Taverner recovers his identity, but effectively this happens through Dick going outside the system he has used to set up this novel. The story slips into drug taking and the insights it gives into the nature of reality; this time the abundance of ideas in one of Dick's novels undermines the plot. Effectively, it reads as though he paints himself into a corner, but then discovers the ability to walk through walls; frustrating for the reader, who wants to know what clever idea will be used to get round the problems. Both the drugs and the nature of reality (specifically, how we know that what we experience is real and not a hallucination) are long term preoccupations of Dick's, and both are better dealt with elsewhere in his fiction. So this ending is a major disappointment in what could have been a fascinating novel.

Poul Anderson: Time Patrol (2006)

Edition: Baen, 2006
Review number: 1314

The Time Patrol stories of Poul Anderson are classics of the science fiction genre, dealing with the efforts of the eponymous group to maintain the status quo of history against the accidental or deliberate manipulations of other time travellers. This book, sharing the name of the original story which began the series, collects them all (and it is not to be confused with an earlier volume, also called Time Patrol, which contains only the first two or three stories).

The central character in the stories is Time Patrol agent Manse Everard, who is "unattached" - basically, a troubleshooter who can visit any time and place in order to sort out serious problems. (Most Time Patrol agents work in a single milieu, either as researchers studying the period or as officials regulating the activities of time travellers.) Apart from the first story, which is about Everard's recruitment, the basic plot of the remaining stories is simple and consistent: some problem requires Everard's intervention at a particular time and date.

Though the stories were written over a period of five decades and though they vary wildly in length (between about 30 and 160 pages, as reprinted here), they are very similar to each other. Anderson doesn't quite make the different periods and locations all that distinct (though having several stories set just outside the borders of the Roman Empire doesn't really help with this). Everard also remains pretty much the same through the series, maybe a little more world-weary, but basically an action hero. Like many long running series of self-contained stories, the Time Patrol tales work better in relatively small doses rather than by reading them all the way through in one volume.

Given these obvious flaws, why is Time Patrol worth reading, and why are the stories important in the development of the genre? For one thing, there is one story in the series which really stands out, which would be a classic of the genre even without the rest. Delenda Est has Everard returning from a vacation on a base in the prehistoric past to his own time (the mid twentieth century) only to discover that everything has changed. In what is effectively a parallel world, he has to work out what pivotal event has been altered, and then decide if he is morally able to destroy an entire new civilization in order to bring back his own familiar time line (or alternatively destroy the lives of all those living in his own timeline to save the new future). This single story is one of the best of all those ever written about time travel.

For the other stories, the point of this series is really the introduction of adventure to time travel, and particularly to stories involving time travel paradoxes. The fates of nations, of the godlike Danellians from Earth's far future (the beings who set up the patrol to preserve their existence) rest on Everard's capable shoulders: he is a hero who can think as well as act. In the original time travel story, Wells' The Time Machine, the use of time travel is to be a mechanism allowing the main character to see the far future (which is, of course, at least partly a reflection on Wells' present); the machine itself has very little part to play in the story. It is like the visions in The House on the Borderland, or the mental link to the future in Last and First Men: the point is the vision itself, not the mechanism by which it becomes available to the protagonist. Stories of time travel to the future tend to be like this in tone, and it is perhaps the introduction of the possibility of paradox with travel to the past which makes the idea work better as the background of a thriller. (The actual introduction of the famous grandfather paradox came as late as 1947, and even then in stories unlikely to be read by the mainstream English language science fiction fan: French genre fiction, with the exception of Jules Verne, is still considered pretty obscure.) Anderson joined other American writers of his time such as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov in bringing adventure to mainstream time travel fiction (The Door Into Summer and The End of Eternity are approximately contemporary with the earliest Time Patrol stories); Anderson's stories are the most epic of these as adventures.

Delenda Est is a must read for any science fiction fan. The rest are interesting in small enough doses, though a bit too similar to each other to make the omnibus a pleasure. So I would recommend seeking out other collections which contain one or more of the stories along with others, rather than investing in the omnibus.

Michael Moorcock: The Vengeance of Rome (2006)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 2006
Review number: 1313

After twenty-five years, the final volume of the Pyat Quartet has now at last appeared; it has spent almost all that time listed at the front of Moorcock's publications as "in preparation". The quartet as a whole must rank as one of the most ambitious novel series of the period, as well as one of the most slowly written; not content with being a historical narrative of the first half of the twentieth century, Moorcock has immersed himself in the repellent personality of Maxim Pyat and produced a study of how such a person appears to themselves while making it clear how others perceive them at the same time.

The story of The Vengeance of Rome takes Pyat from a fugitive in Morocco - the ending of the previous volume - to friendship with Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and then close links with the Nazi hierarchy in thirties Germany (extremely close in some cases), through imprisonment in the camp at Dachau to eventually meeting the young Moorcock while running a second hand clothes shop near Notting Hill in the sixties.

Like many historical novels, a lot of the fascination in this series lies in the way in which Pyat's story is threaded into the major events of the time. Though the most obvious counterpart to the quartet may seem to be George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, the tone here is much more serious, and Pyat's character and role in history are both far more ambiguous. At the heart of the whole series, and emphasised particularly in this final novel, is the conflict between Pyat's anti-Semitism and his appearance: being constantly taken for a Jew is not a good thing in thirties Italy and Germany.

The conceit of the series is that the novels are in fact memoirs edited together by Moorcock from Pyat's papers and memories of conversations the two of them had. There is an introductory page, which suggests that the main task of the (fictional) editorial hand has had to try to harmonise conflicting accounts. One of the usual characteristics of Moorcock's fantasy genre writing is that he positively revels in incompatible versions of stories; this is particularly clear in the recent Second Ether trilogy, each of which treats incompatibility in a different way. So this is a somewhat ironic statement, one of many in The Vengeance of Rome of various different kinds.

One of the most interesting of these, because it reveals a lot about the character and the author's attitude to him, occurs when Pyat is interrogated by the SS about his career as an inventor: "I invented it all", he says, apparently without realising what this suggests about his history; and yet Moorcock also states in the introduction that he found corroborating evidence for many of the incidents that initially seemed most fabulous; this is clearly a deliberate contradiction. The reader, of course, knows that this is fiction, but it is being presented as true as any memoirs - with hints like this that it is at the very least, significantly embellished.

Moorcock fans may have wished to see the quartet completed more quickly, but there are obvious reasons why the novels would be difficult to write (and those obvious reasons may not of course have affected the author, no matter how strongly the novels may suggest them). These are the requirements of historical research and the repellent personality of Pyat already mentioned, together with the difficulty of writing from the point of view of an individual whose opinions in almost every subject seem to be diametrically opposed to those of the author. (Moorcock's own views can be read in the essays in The Opium General, for example, or on his website, Moorcock's Miscellany - currently down after attacks by hackers, an event that is itself something of a commentary on his views.)

It is possible to see the Pyat quartet as a sustained attack on racism. Indeed, the idea that an anti-Semite is so unable to see that Jewish people are just as human as he is leads him to be unable to perceive his own Jewishness is a barbed comment on the stupidity of such a view. But there is much more to it than that, and ranks as Moorcock's literary masterpiece, as The Dancers at the End of Time is its equivalent in the science fiction genre.

Greg Andrew Smith: The Pledge of Three (2005)

Edition: The Lucky Press, 2005
Review number: 1312

Zack Owens, a bored schoolboy waiting for his mother to finish work, is trying to amuse himself in the office of her employer. He picks up a book on medieval history, and a piece of paper falls out. This describes the Pledge of Three, which when recited by three friends together affects their futures: one will become rich and famous, one will be unchanged, and one will die. Rather unwisely, he takes the paper and shows it to one of his school friends, who is excited by the idea and wants to try it. It is only after some disturbing dreams and seeing an odd website that Zack agrees - a few days before his mother wins the state lottery.

Aimed at young teenagers, The Pledge of Three turns out to be quite an intriguing novel. While the idea of young people becoming involved in something they don't understand is hardly original (recent well-known examples including both Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it is handled well, with an X Files-like unwillingness to decide whether it is describing magical events (putting in the fantasy genre) or a complex hoax (which would put it in the crime genre) that marks it out. The other reason why this novel is better than the average is the characterisation of Zack, who is made deeper by the way that his initial reluctance to become involved with the Pledge is overcome. Indeed, despite not being in the target age range by some two decades, I found myself keen to keep reading from chapter to chapter, and would certainly be interesting in reading sequels (The Pledge of Three being the first of a series, the Z.O. Chronicles).

The Pledge of Three is not faultless; there are occasional infelicities in the writing, particularly in the early chapters. For example, "soft-spoken" is not really the most common adjective to apply to people, but the first chapter uses it to describe two characters in the space of a few pages, which gives the reader a little jolt. I have not been a school pupil for a long time, and was never one in the US, but some details struck me as unlikely (is it really that easy to walk out of a class?) - basically, the plot and the setting could be better integrated. Once the reader is drawn into the story, which happens pretty quickly, this sort of issue ceases to matter.

Lucky Press are not a publisher I have come across before, and judging by their list, this kind of fiction, on the boundary between thriller and fantasy and aimed at the teen market, is a new departure for them. I hope that The Pledge of Three receives the success it deserves and that the Lucky Press won't be too strongly stereotyped as purveyors of lurid self-help books to get it into the shops.