David Lodge Deaf Sentence (2008)

Edition: Penguin, 2009

The title by itself makes a lot of what Deaf Sentence is about clear. That it is about deafness, how it feels to gradually lose hearing, how deafness imprisons the sufferer in a solitary world where old pleasures become impossible or difficult; how there will be humour in the story; and even that the grim pun deaf/death (also, of course, a pair of words a deaf person would find hard to distinguish) will be revisited throughout. The use of part of the definition of the word "sentence" from one of the Oxford English dictionaries in the front matter to the novel also indicates before starting that the various different meanings highlighted in the quotation will form themes in the story.

Desmond Bates, narrator of Deaf Sentence, was a professor of linguistics who took early retirement when a good offer from his university co-incided with the realisation that encroaching deafness was causing obvious and embarrassing difficulties with lecturing and teaching. In the first chapter, he has an entire conversation at an art gallery party with a young woman, Alex, even though he is hears only a tiny part of what she says over the background noise of the party - distinguishing foreground from background being one of the problems which deafness brings. Later, he discovers that he appears to have agreed to supervise Alex's work on a doctoral thesis on suicide notes as a genre of linguistic utterance. But each meeting he has with her is increasingly bizarre, and she seems increasingly unstable...

Deaf Sentence is a typical David Lodge novel (unlike his previous work, Author, Author): funny, clever, full of satirical observation of academic life. There is also sadness, partly because of Desmond's feelings about his deafness, and partly because of his relationship with his irascible nonagenerian father. This is not a novel which paints a pleasant picture of what it is like to be old.

The centrepiece of the novel is not really up to his usual standard, however. This is a set piece description of the ordeal of the family Christmas, made worse by Desmond's hearing difficulties. This seems, unfortunately, to have escaped from a seventies sitcom and is not really imaginative enough to hold the novel together as it should given its prominence.

The main observation that Lodge makes about deafness through the novel is that it's tragic for the sufferers, but can often be comic for those around them, because of the misunderstandings it generates. He makes the contrast with blindness, which evokes pity and sympathy from onlookers, rather than laughter, embarrassment and irritation. And there is something undignified about even the most modern battery powered hearing aids (especially as users find it difficult to ensure that they have replacement batteries and do not let those in use drain too quickly), which there is not to the white stick or guide dog.

Not Lodge's best (Changing Places, Paradise News, or, on a more serious note, Thinks... would be my choices there). But Deaf Sentence is still thought provoking and funny: well worth a read. My rating: 7/10.

Linda Grant: The Clothes On Their Backs (2008)

Edition: Virago, 2008

The 2008 Booker Prize short list has once again proved dull, to the point that this, the fourth I have started, is the only one I have so far bothered to finish. As well as being an enjoyable book from the short list, it also falls into another small category, Booker-short-listed-novel-not-tapping-into-British-post-colonial-guilt. True, it does have immigrants as characters, but they're wartime Hungarian refugees, not from the former Empire at all.

Vivian Kovaks grows up in a central London flat, rented for a song by her parents who originally offered it as charity to a pair of refugees,not expecting them to stay for forty years. She, as narrator of the novel, describes her parents as mice seeking to bring her up as a mouse. A sheltered childhood, followed by study at York University, then marriage.

But there's what might be called an "elephant in the room". Vivian's uncle is Sandor Kovaks, who is a successful businessman; the problem is that his wealth is based on being an exploitative slum landlord, also in London. The character is based on a real person, Peter Rachman, who I vaguely remember reading about (probably in a much later Sunday colour supplement magazine). Vivian's parents won't admit to the relationship, but Vivian remains fascinated by her one childhood memory of her uncle, from the only time he visited their flat. Sandor is imprisoned when she is about ten, but she later meets him again, and the second half of the novel is really about her discovering what the man behind the tabloid horror stories is really like.

The major difference between Sandor Kovaks and Peter Rachman (ignoring the fact that Kovaks is fictional while Rachman was real) is the existence of living, known family members. Rachman too came from Eastern Europe, and after the war was unable to trace his family, though he continued to try to do so until his death in 1962. (Grant also has Kovaks live a great deal longer.) Sandor's brother and his family are useful inventions to the author, as it makes it much easier to explore his character through the complexities of the relationships between him and them - relationships which still exist, even if they have disowned Sandor, even changing the spelling of their surname by deed poll so that strangers will not ask whether they are related.

The story is told in a way which is quite complicated chronologically. The first chapter and the last chapter are set much later than anything else (and are obviously intended to be from the time at which the narrator is telling the story). In the rest of the novel, Vivian apparently adds details from her childhood or illustrative incidents from later in her life as they occur to her, prompted by details in the main flow of the story. And the central part of the novel is taken up with Sandor's life story, which reaches back before the war, long before Vivian was born. But it all rings true, because it is carefully put together so that it mimics the way that people tell anecdotes in real life. Deliberately creating this kind of simplicity through underlying complexity is a skill I admire greatly.

The point of the novel, if there is one, is about the way that people's personalities are reflected in the small details of their lives such as the clothes they choose to wear. (It is exactly the sort of incidental information that creative writing courses suggest using to establish character, because these details are much more telling than a direct description of traits.) Clothe are important in the novel particularly Vivian's trawling of second hand shops to put together a wardrobe of old fashioned but stylish outfits: retro chic long before its time, and the description of how Sandor, forced to work in a slave gang of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, is never able to change the clothes he was wearing when first conscripted, for months and months.

It's not a happy story; no novel in which the narrator's husband is killed on the second day of their honeymoon could be described as such. But it is a pleasure to read The Clothes On Their Backs, which is in summary an excellent novel, something out of the usual way of things. Both Vivan and Sandor are fascinating characters, and the view of life in thirties and forties Europe is one not often encountered in novels by English writers. My rating: 8/10.

John le Carré: A Most Wanted Man (2008)

Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

Issa is, or claims to be, many contradictory people. A beggar sleeping on the Hamburg streets with thousands of euros in the purse around his neck. A Chechen imprisoned and tortured by the Russians, but with a KGB officer father. A devout Muslim, who doesn't seem to know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite, or how to show proper reverence to a copy of the Koran. Son of an important (if shady) customer of a small bank in Hamburg to make contact with the current head of Brue Frères, but not to claim the fortune which is his inheritance. An illegal immigrant, wanted by the Swedish police, who makes himself conspicuous to the German intelligence services on arrival in the country rather than lying low, with the result that he is immediately suspected of being a terrorist.

There are two people on his side. Annabel Richter, a young radical lawyer (in the pre-9/11 sense of "radical"), is assigned to Issa's case by Sanctuary, the refugee charity she works for. And Tommy Brue, respectable proprietor of the family bank. Neither entirely trusts Issa, but both feel the need to help him as much as they can.

Le Carré's last three novels (The Constant Gardener, The Mission Song, and this) share a common theme. They all seek to expose something of his view of the institutional immorality of the West's dealings with the rest of the world. Whether or not you agree with him (and to what extent), he makes what he has to say interesting and gripping. And it is sincere: this is a novel byt someone very angry. What angers him here is the American attitude to terrorist suspects. As one of the characters says at the end, Le Carré's point is that "American justice", which the US makes so much of, has become "extraordinary rendition".

I personally would still hope that not every institution is as morally bankrupt as Le Carré portrays them to be. But surely no one can deny that there is something in Le Carré's position, and that the author's anger is shared by many people from outside the privileged Western nations.

Themes which go back further in Le Carré's work are seen here, too. The troubled relationships between father an son, which are important in many of his novels, are seen here in both Brue and Issa's feelings for their dead parents. Issa also exemplifies the author's interest in the untrustworthiness of people's public personas. The tone of world weariness in the prose is common to many, perhaps all, of his novels.

While A Most Wanted Man was enjoyable on its own, I do find that with Le Carré a little goes a long way. If I read several of his novels in quick succession, the depressing tone which is so much a trademark becomes tiring. So I would tend to rate his novels higher when I read them sporadically. My rating: 7/10.

Charles Stross: Saturn's Children (2008)

Edition: Orbit, 2009

What might happen if the human race became extinct in a couple of centuries time? In particular, what would robots, computers, and other intelligent machines left behind do? This question is basically the starting point for Stross' Hugo short listed novel. The central character of Saturn's Children is a particularly obsolete robot, designed as an escort - an intelligent sex toy - for the men who no longer exist. Freya Nakamichi-47 is scraping a living, her unfashiionable body shape an unwelcome reminder to other robots of a subservient past, when she accidentally kills a member of the new machine aristocracy and has to take a dangerous job to escape from Venus.

Apart from the basic idea - it's certainly ingenious to wonder about the fate of an intelligent sex toy when there's no one to sleep with - Stross taps into many familiar themes from the science fiction genre, with a twist each time. For example, this is really a coming of age story, a staple of the genre, but who ever heard of a coming of age story with a central character already two hundred years old? Or the space journey from Venus to Mercury, courtesy of a space pod with an irritating chirpy personality which functions by having sex with its passenger during the whole trip: it has to properly cocoon and pad the internal orifices of Freya's body, and why not make this as pleasurable as possible for both of them?

This is a novel that Robert Heinlein could have written, if hed been able to drop some of his prejudices and sexual obsessions. It has strong parallels with Friday, one of the best of his later novels. And this is not the only Heinlein novel which Stross either parallels or refers to in Saturn's Children. I noticed quick references to (short story) The Green Hills of Earth and The Number of the Beast, and I Will Fear No Evil, among others. Other writers have updated Heinlein, of course: John Barnes' Orbital Resonance is a particularly successful example. But Stross goes beyond just modernising one of the most famous science fiction authors. Heinlein was never particularly interested in robots; the artificial intelligences in his books are larger and fairly sessile: ship's computers, or the computers to run the services of a city. Thinking and writing about the design and built-in limitations of robot brains is distinctly Asimovian, Stross effectively updating the Three Laws of Robotics for today's readers. To bring together two such contrasting authors in this way is no mean feat.

Stross also has something to say about racism, servitue, identity, and theories of sociological evolution through this story. There is more to Saturn's Children than appears on the surface. Given these themes, it is not surprising that another novel he refers to is 1984.

Why the title? The reference is to Roman mythology (strictly speaking, Greek mythology as adopted by the Romans). Saturn, ruler of the Titans, bore a series of children by Rhea (not so co-incidentally the name of the first of Freya's robot model, from whom all their personalities are derived with a small amount of randomisation). When each child was born, Saturn swallowed them, because of a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him as ruler of the universe, as he had his own father. Eventually, Rhea deceived him, giving him a stone instead of a baby and bringing up Jupiter in secret, to eventually fulfil the prophecy. There is clearly a connection with the supplanting of humanity by their robot creations, as well as resonances between the personalities in the myth and the various bodies in the solar system named after them in a story which involves a lot of interplanetary travel.

The biggest problem with this edition is nothing to do with Charles Stross (at least, I hope he wasn't involved in the decision). At the back, there is something which has now become common in genre fiction, the excerpt from a new title, "if you enjoyed this book, you might like...". I am not a big fan of this in general, even when the excerpt is by the same author, and this is a particularly strange example. Michael Cobley''s Seeds of Earth seems from the chapter published here to come from a branch of the science fiction genre extremely remote from Saturn's Children, and I would judge it unlikely to appeal to the readers who enjoyed this: they might do, if they pick it up some other time, but the contrast between the two is jarring. Surely the point should be to encourage the reader to try it, not pick a random entry from the publisher's new releases which is more likely to put the reader of the excerpt off buying it. Perhaps in this case, the excerpt should have been accompanied by, "if you didn't think much of this novel, one you might prefer instead is...".

I was reading this - at home, not attending - during the 2009 WorldCon, Anticipation. So I was in the middle of Saturn's Children when the winners of this year's Hugo Awards were announced, including the best novel, the category for which it was short listed. Did it win? No. Did it deserve to win? I can't actually answer that, as I haven't yet read all the short listed novels. However, I did think it would have been a better choice than the actual winner, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Good though that is, I felt that Saturn's Children has a lot more to say and is a bigger achievement. It renews some familiar, well loved, parts of the science fiction genre for the twenty first century. My rating: 8/10.

Thomas Pynchon: Vineland (1990)

Edition: Voyager, 2000

On opening Vineland, it is almost immediately clear that this is going to be a riotous novel. By the third chapter, the reader has been introduced to a man who makes his living by annually throwing himself through a plate glass window wearing a dress to qualify for mental illness disability benefit, a punk band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones, hired unheard to play at a traditional Mafia wedding by pretending to be Italian, and an FBI agent who may also be an escaped lunatic.

There is a bit of a dip in quality in the middle, once the flashbacks to the early seventies begin to take over, and from that point on Vineland is less funny. I don't think this is just due to my inability to conentrate, though I was extremely tired while reading this section of the novel.

The theme of Vineland is the hippy dream turning sour, and in particular the effects of the US government's attempts to extinguish the counter-culture. The main narrative is set in the mid-eighties, during Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, and it is clear that Pynchon wants to make two points: first, that the repercussions of this crackdown affected lives both on the hippy side and in the law enforcement agencies right through the next fifteen years; and, second, that it was worth warning his readership about parallels between Nixon and Reagan.

"Vinland" is of course the name used by the Vikings to (almost certainly) mean the American continent, so implies that this is a novel about all of America - in other words, Pynchon intends to write what has been described as "the great American novel". However, reading it suggests that actually he wanted to subvert and satirise the idea of the great American novel. By making Vineland in the book a small (fictional) town in northern California, he is perhaps making a dig at the limited horizons of eighties American culture, and this is doubled by concentrating on hippy culture, never involving anything other than a small minority of US citizens.

Gravity's Rainbow and V. might have a bigger literary reputation, but of the Pynchon novels I have read - not all of them by any means - this is the most accessible, and the funniest. Each chapter in the first half made me laugh out loud at some point, even on re-reading. It has an easier plot to follow than Gravity's Rainbow in particular, which also helps make it an easier read.

I would rate Vineland at 7/10.

E.E. "Doc" Smith: First Lensman (1950)

Edition: Panther, 1972
Review number: 100



The second novel in Smith's Lensman series, First Lensman is a unified narrative (unlike Triplanetary which precedes it). It follows on directly from the events of the first book, detailing the later stages in the fight against drugs and corruption led by Virgil Samms. (Samms plays a comparatively small part in Triplanetary, which was more concerned with the swashbuckling adventures of his sub-ordinates.)

The first half of the novel is an explanation of the origins of the Lens after which the series as a whole is known. Various problems are beginning to dog the Triplanetary Service. Corruption is taking hold, particularly in the fight against drugs; criminals are impersonating officers of the Service, using faked ids. A mysterious conviction grows that answers to these problems can be found through a visit to the planet Arisia, shunned as a "ghost planet" both by legitimate spacemen and by pirates and drugs runners.

Arriving at Arisia, Samms meets an entity who calls itself "Mentor". He is given a mysterious artefact, a Lens; it is a telepathic crystal, tuned to his mind alone and capable of enhancing the powers that his mind possesses. Mentor assures him that no one will be given a Lens who is unworthy of one, and that only the incorruptible will wear them.

Samms is a bit bemused by this generosity, but the reader knows the background to it: the eons-old war between the Arisians and Eddorians, the Arisians continually trying to build up civilisation, the Eddorians to knock it down.

The second half of the book tells of a North American presidential election (Canada, the US and Mexico together forming a single state) fought by the officers of the Triplanetary Service (as 'Cosmocrats') on the right and the pirates and drugs runners on the left. Smith's politics are one of the most difficult aspects of his writing style for a modern European reader to swallow - as they cater rather more for stereotypical American political viewpoints a US citizen may find them easier to accept. He persistently holds the belief that any intelligent person must support the right, with the left only gaining votes through stupidity, corruption and vote-rigging. It is a view perhaps explicable in an American of his time, who had lived through some of the most corrupt scandals of American town-hall politics. Smith's right wing politics were of a reasonably benign kind, characterised by a strong belief in intelligent capitalism most clearly expressed in Subspace Encounter. He was relatively free from racism, particularly when compared to contemporaries, though this is perhaps debatable given the almost complete absence of non-white human beings in his novels.

The first half of First Lensman is easier to read, then, than the second, though the ins and outs of the political campaign are an interesting change from the standard military space opera trappings of the rest of the series. If Heinlein's novels transfer an idealised American small-town background to everywhere in the universe (see review of Rolling Stones), then this novel takes a similar approach with an American large town.

Fred Vargas: The Three Evangelists (1995)

Translation: Siân Reynolds, 2006
Edition: Vintage, 2007

Fred Vargas' only standalone novel so far is an intriguingly different detective story. This is clear from the bizarre opening, in which retired opera singer Sophia Siméonidis wakes one morning to find a new tree has been planted in her garden overnight. After worrying in silence for a month, she approaches her next door neighbours, three effectively unemployed historians (known as the Evangelists because their names are Matthias, Marc and Lucien) and a senior policeman forced into disgraced retirement. She asks them to pose as council workers and dig up the tree, once they suggest that it would be a good way for someone to hide a body.

When nothing is found, it seems as though the whole thing was just a fuss over nothing, until Sophia goes missing. Then the Evangelists begin looking into the mystery in earnest, feeling that their research skills and the fact that they are not policemen might make it possible to discover things that the official investigation cannot. While this latter reason is commonly used in crime fiction to justify amateur investigations, it is not one that would be recommended by police forces around the world!

The Three Evangelists is a character led detective story, with quirky touches like the tree lending extra interest. (I have been told that this sort of whimsy is typical of Vargas, and that to some it might become tiresome after two or three novels.) It has a brilliantly put together ending, where the pace suddenly picks up for the last few chapters and the solution is revealed.

Vargas has now won three of the last four International Crime Daggers, despite other writers translated into English having a higher profile. The Three Evangelists was the first of her winners, and clearly deserved to do so. This is not just a well written detective story, it is different from the usual run of things in the genre and so stands out all the more. I would rate it at 8/10.