William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1848)

By using a location from The Pilgrim's Progress as the title of his novel, Thackeray suggests that it will be a moral tale, of the sort that would presumably delight the sensibilities of "decent people" in the mid-nineteenth century. But Vanity Fair is instead an attack on the values of the Victorian novel, on the lazy morality that insists that the good should be rewarded and the bad punished which permeates even Charles Dickens. In the novel, the good are deceived by the bad, taken advantage of; the bad scheme shamelessly, lying and cheating to grab worldly rewards. Much more like real life, in other words. The only morality is a lesson which the Puritan Bunyan would have agreed with (and is the point of Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim's Progress): these worldly rewards are empty, so that in the end there they do not bring happiness.

The main character is Becky Sharpe, who is both clever and amoral. She uses her looks and brains to put her background of scandalous poverty behind her: son of an artist and a French opera dancer, she marries the son of a baronet and becomes fashionable in "polite society", at least to an extent. Her machinations don't always succeed, but she still develops a strong contempt for those around her, particularly her husband. Rawdon is on the receiving end of the worst of her behaviour, because he is the only person she can openly sneer at, dismissing him as stupid and childish, and assuming he will always be loyal to her and put up with her activities. It is clear that she sees relationship almost solely as tools for manipulating others to her advantage, and the reader soon understands that she will never be happy, but she is the character that they find themselves wanting to see succeed, and they are eager to see just what she will try next. Her contempt for others causes her problems, as she cannot accept that anyone can be kind to her without an ulterior motive. When she leaves school in an early chapter of the novel, for example, one of the teachers presents her with the dictionary which is normally given to departing students, even though the headmistress refused to do so (Becky only being at the school because she teaches French as well as learning other subjects); Becky throws it out of the window of the coach as it sets off.

The big contrast to Becky, who is in fact the closest thing to a friend she has, is the virtuous and bland, Amelia Sedley. She is the typical Victorian heroine, a pattern to act as a moral compass. She disastrously falls in love with the shallow George Osborne, who always reminds me of Flashman as portrayed by George MacDonald Fraser, and continues stalwartly to believe that he is a hero, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This makes it impossible for her to have a happy ending. She is nice, pretty but not very bright, and like Becky only in being something of an outsider, at least after her father is ruined and she no longer has the money to keep her place in society.

By comparison, the male characters are less important, making Vanity Fair truly a "novel without a hero", as Thackeray's subtitle has it. The closest to a traditional hero, in terms of virtuousness if not in drive, is William Dobbin, who loves Amelia from afar. He is always nice but ineffective (despite being a successful army officer), similar to Amelia in his passive acceptance of life's vicissitudes.

Perhaps the most interesting male character, and probably the closest to a happy character in the novel, is Sir Pitt Crawley, Rawdon's father. He is something of a relic of the looser attitude to public morality of the eighteenth century, and runs his life exactly the way he wants it, indulging his taste for low class women. After leaving school, Becky takes up a post as governess to his youngest children, and he eventually proposes to her after the sudden death of his second wife. This novel would have been so different if she had been free to marry him; she has already secretly married Rawdon, but feels that Sir Pitt (already a baronet, rather than a younger son of a baronet) would have been a better catch despite his age, if he had been available. Perhaps with a cleverer, more forceful, husband  - and more money, Becky might have been able to find a measure of happiness.

One of the most famous parts of Vanity Fair is its portrayal of the 1815 Waterloo campaign, which involves both Rawdon and George who go to Belgium with Wellington's army, accompanied by their wives. Waterloo only occupies a few chapters, but has an immense effect on the characters: it is the turning part of the first half of the story. I don't know if it is deliberate, but Thackeray wrote the novel at a time when radical revolutionary fervour gripped Europe, and so it describes the end of the wars which followed the French Revolution while the serial appeared at what could have been the beginning of a similar period of violent fighting.

What actually seems more interesting to me than this episode are the humorously self-deprecating passages in which Thackeray directly addresses the reader. These still seems quite modern, despite  clear antecedents in the eighteenth century: both Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy come to mind. The tone is established in the first chapter, with an address to "Jones", who would despise the sentimentality of the details of Amelia's departure from school, if he had not already thrown Vanity Fair aside in disgust. This kind of commentary was not common in the 1840s, and may well be one of the reasons that Vanity Fair took a while to become popular: the publisher actually considered cancelling the serial at one point.

At 950 pages Vanity Fair is also a very long novel for its time; the only nineteenth century novel I own a copy of which has more is War and Peace. It is also somewhat uneven, some chapters being a little dull, but overall it is a stimulating, witty, and fascinating read and deserves its classic status, on a par with the best novels of the century. For those daunted by its length, there is an excellent TV adaptation starring Natasha Little as Becky Sharpe, one of the very best costume dramas ever made, catching much of the mood of the novel (despite the decision to omit the author's commentary to the reader). My rating: 9/10.


Edition: Wordsworth Classics, 1994 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1412

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2004)

A remarkable idea is the focal point of this novel, which I am reading for the first time even though it has been around for ages. There have been thousands of stories about the development of relationships, but here there is a unique twist: one of the people involved is an involuntary time traveller, who suddenly materialises years away from his starting point when stressed.

This brings a whole new level of interest to what might otherwise have just been a run of the mill modern novel. In most relationships, the way they develop is that both parties get to know the other at about the same rate, but for Clare and Henry, this doesn't work. Clare is a child when she first meets Henry, a naked adult man in the garden of her home; he already knows her (and even has a list in a notebook of the dates when they will meet - compiled from a list she gave him years later). When Henry first (from his point of view) meets Clare, she is in her twenties and has known him at various ages for many years; he is almost like an imaginary friend who turns out to be real. So both of them have to find out about someone who already knows them well. This would alone be enough to make the story of the relationship different from almost any in fiction; the closest would be where one of the two people involved is some kind of celebrity whose life is at least on the surface well known to the other (and I can't even think immediately of an example, though I am sure there will be many).

The Time Traveler's Wife is very carefully put together so as not to be too confusing for the reader. I suspect that the writing of the novel involved complicated charts showing the different timelines, with lots of crossing out. Each section has two important cues to help the reader: at the top, the date, and the ages of the Clare and Henry in the section, and then an indication of whose point of view is being used. The story almost always follows Clare's timeline, though certain significant events appear at other points - the last meeting listed in Clare's notebook, before they meet in real time, for example. Since the time travel motif dominates the story, this is needed to make the complex tangled relationship make sense.

It is easy to see why Niffenegger's debut is marketed as general fiction rather than as science fiction - it is about the relationship, not about the mechanics of time travel. But it does share many of the trappings of the genre, not least an interest in what is known as the "grandfather paradox": what happens if the time traveller changes the past in a way which affects his future self (the name coming from the idea of him travelling back and murdering his grandfather, making his birth and the travel and the murder impossible). Henry thinks that the future is fixed, that there is no way to meddle with it; the only time Clare tries to make changes, she backs out before it would become an issue (she writes the date on a drawing that in the future Henry knows is undated; but snips the date off later so that it matches the picture as Henry remembers it). The possibility of changing the future is discussed many times, but never acted upon. This is perhaps the most common sense solution to the grandfather paradox, though it does have tough implications about free will, which is only apparent not actual. Of course, characters in a story do not have free will, but are driven by their author.

I wondered for awhile whether the time travel idea in this novel is meant to have any metaphorical meaning, whether Niffenegger is trying to say something about relationships. Of course, it is true that the participants in a relationship may have different understanding of the relationship, of each other, and of the future from each other. When a novel tells the story of a relationship from the point of view of just one of the participants, as is generally the case, this is something which can get lost, though it can also lead to effective scenes when the difference in their perception becomes clear to both participants, with comic or tragic results. In the end, I decided there is no deeper meaning, that the purpose of the time travel is simply to enable Niffenegger to examine the story of Henry and Clare from a different angle.

Thinking of The Time Traveler's Wife as the story of a relationship means that its quality should rest on the portrayal of the two characters and their interactions. Both Clare and Henry are flawed enough to be interesting, Henry more so than Clare. They come from affluent, middle class but difficult backgrounds, Clare's mother being manic depressive, while Henry's mother was killed in a road accident in front of him when he was six, pushing his father into alcoholism. (This suggests that the time travel is something of a search for somewhere to belong, with Clare being the place he finds, but that is a rather superficial way to look at a relationship, particularly looking at it from Clare's point of view.) To the reader, they are interesting, even if it sometimes feels that the novel is being expounded at a glacially slow rate.

Plot development is the most serious flaw in The Time Traveler's Wife, which is not only slow, but seems slower because the time travelling continually means that the reader is fed hints of what is to come. However, this doesn't really matter, as the main pleasure of the novel is the exploration of the central relationship. That, together with the intriguing idea, lead me to rate it at 8/10.


Edition: Vintage, 2005
Review number: 1411

Tom Holt: Blonde Bombshell (2010)

Tom Holt's latest novel seems to follow in well trodden footsteps. An advanced alien civilization finds itself threatened by the Earth's broadcasts through space, as music (not a concept previously known to them) is addictive to the Ostar. They send an intelligent bomb  to destroy the Earth, only to loose contact; Blonde B ombshell concerns their second attempt,  to find out what the Earth's hidden technology which put paid to the first bomb could possibly be, and carry out the destruction mission. All gung ho, the second bomb arrives, and sends down a probe, putting a copy of its mind in a human body created for the purpose. While it realises that "Mark Two" would not be an acceptable name for human culture, it decides that "Mark Twain" would be - a slight variation on the choice of "Ford Prefect" as the name used by the alien guide researcher in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (albeit one which is likely to go out of date less quickly).

Holt's writing generally relys on characters who are fish out of water to provide much of the humour, and Blonde Bombshell is no exception. Here, there are both machines trying to pass as human and the Ostar relationship with people: they are shaped like dogs, and keep pets who are like humans, and the inversion is a natural source of jokes. But the jokes are all essentially the same, and this lack of variety palled for me quite quickly. In essence, the problem I had with Blonde Bombshell is that I didn't find it very funny. Some Tom Holt books do strike me this way, including Wish You Were Here. This one is not as bleak, being instead a tired repeat.

I like Holt's work, but not in this case: my rating - 4/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2010
Review number: 1410

Marie Brennan: Midnight Never Come (2008)

The Elizabethan age was obsessed by Faery, something most famously seen in several Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, the spirits in the Tempest, the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, and the pretend fairies in The  Merry Wives of Windsor being just some of the best known examples), but most developed in Spenser's enormous allegory The Faery  Queen, which parallels Elizabeth with the queen of the Fae herself.

Folklore graduate student Marie Brennan has taken this thought and put together a story  of a connection of a different kind between the two queens, a pact which guarantees the security of the English realm and its fae reflection. But it is not a treaty without cost, and the queen's spymaster Francis Walsinghamn has begun to suspect that tere is an unknown player in the game with direct access to Elizabeth. He chooses one of his agents, William Deven, to investigate, knowing that the young man is already more involved than he realises: Deven has been courting Anne Marston, waiting lady to the Countess of Warwick, and known to Walsingham as a likely agent of this unknown power. And indeed Anne is a  glamour put on by Lune, a lady of the Fae Onyx court below London, to appear human so she can act as a spy for Invidiana, the Onyx Queen (the name meaning "hateful", as opposed to Elizabeth's allegorical name Gloriana, "glorious").

Atmospheric, interesting and with good characters, Midnight Never Come is well worth a read. I don't normally like books based on role playing game scenarios (I probably wouldn't have read it if I'd realised it was before borrowing it from the local library). It's biggest problem for me was the title, which comes from a play by Marlowe and which in context gives away important aspects of the ending. My rating - 7/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2008
Review number:  1409

Henry Porter: The Dying Light (2009)

Henry Porter's fifth novel is intended, so the author tells us in the afterword, to fulfil three purposes. It is obviously a thriller readable as a standalone story, but is additionally intended as a contrast to his previous novel Brandenburg and as something of a political call to arms. It is set in a near future Britain, where high-powered lawyer (and former spy) Kate Lockhart returns to the country after several years working in the States for college friend David Eyam's funeral. Eyam, was a civil servant involved in security at the highest levels, but he resigned and hid himself in a tiny town on the Welsh borders before making a sudden trip to South America to be killed in a terrorist bomb attack. Kate is told that she is Eyam's heir, completely unexpectedly; and when Eyam's lawyer is killed by a sniper driving down an English country lane and she discovers that child pornography has been planted on Eyam's computer to discredit him, she realises that she has inherited not just his possessions but a dangerous secret worth many deaths to those who wish to keep it hidden.

From this point on, The Dying Light is a political thriller with a conspiracy theory at its centre, set in a dystopian Britain in which every move is watched by the authorities. The development of the systems which allow this and the accompanying erosion of civil liberties are Porter's main concern.He mentions the way in that events he was describing as he wrote the novel turned out to be true as he was writing, not a comforting prospect for someone writing a dystopia. Most of Porter's work has made me think him the natural heir to Len Deighton; but the campaigning nature of The Dying Light is more akin to John le Carré's recent novels, such as A Most Wanted Man. The agenda may be different, but a similar sense of outrage comes through. The comparisons to le Carré and Deighton are not just thematic, too. Porter is one of the best thriller writers to emerge in the last decade.

The theme is personal freedom, and the way in which the British public  have allowed their politicians to whittle away at personal rights to an unprecedented degree: the United Kingdom is now the most heavily surveiled nation in the world, so that  our rulers know more about what we do (theoretically) than those of North Korea or China. As with the curtailment of liberty elsewhere in the Western world, the excuse used is the fight against terrorism, which is at first sight a reasonable idea but is less so when the possibility of emergency powers being abused (as has happened on a small scale with local councils using anti-terrorism powers to track down benefit fraud) or when it fails to halt attacks. The inquests into the deaths of those killed in the 7/7 bomb attack on the London underground are happening as I type: clearly the new powers and surveillance, almost all in place in 2005, were unable to save these lives. The bombers were identified on CCTV footage, but only after the attack itself took place. At the same time, the Guardian has reported that counter-terrorism would be kept safe from the government's massive programme of cuts: the UK will still be spending billions on surveillance of its citizens. (Most of the links in this post come from the Guardian not because of its political leanings, but because of its interest in civil liberties beyond that of much of the UK press.)

One legislative move which particularly concerns Porter is the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (official description / critical assessment).This gives wide ranging powers over a thirty day period to the government in the event of a disaster (natural or otherwise), removing the right to assembly, allowing movement to be restricted to and from "sealed areas" and mobilising the armed services. It didn't originally define the emergencies in which it could be used very stringently, leading to accusations that events dealt with by the emergency services as part of their normal working would be possible triggers for the act; this has since been amended. It still doesn't provide any sanction for misuse (if the "emergency" turns out not to be one). It has been described as making it possible that "at a stroke democracy could be replaced by totalitarianism".

I have gone into detail about this partly because, as Porter points out, it is important and yet ignored by those it affects. I was already aware of the surveillance, but had never heard of the Civil Contingencies Act: this is a novel which made me want to write to my MP.

The relationship with Brandenburg is that the earlier novel is about the fall of the Soviet bloc communism, so is about the gaining of rights, while The Dying Light is about the extinction of rights. To me, the title and theme suggest Dylan Thomas' famous lines (about death):

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

To give away our rights without protest is to gently acquiesce in the dying of the light of our civilisation.

Edition: Orion Books, 2009
Review number: 1408

Andrzej Sapkowski: The Last Wish (1993)

Translation: Danusia Stok (2007)
Edition: Gollancz, 2008
Review number: 1407

"Geralt is a a hunter", the front cover tells us. Not only is this hardly the most eye-catching tagline in the history of publishing, it really undersells the virtues of Sapkowski's novel. This is not a simple fantasy novel, though this (combined with the advertising for the associated computer game on the back pages) makes it look as though The Last Wish is just a violent fantasy, the story of a bounty hunter. This is particularly ironic, as Geralt himself is continually telling prospective employers that he is not a bounty hunter.

Geralt is in fact a "witcher"; he is a hunter of supernatural monsters, and The Last Witch describes a series of his adventures in this role. The structure of the novel suggests - and I haven't looked this up to check whether it is true or not - that most of it originally appeared as a series of shorter fiction. It is episodic, with a linking thread provided by interludes between the episodes, which are thus presented as flashbacks. This is a fairly common structure in novels stitched together from shorter fiction, and needs the episodes to be quite uniform in style and quality with the linking story having some interest of its own in order to work: Sapkowski does this at least as well as any other example I can think of.

Although The Last Wish appeared in English in 2007, the story was written in the 1980s. Then, the idea of a hunter of this type would probably have evoked Bram Stoker's Van Helsing in Dracula, rather than Buffy the Vampire Slayer or possibly Anita Blake. But The Last Wish is not really like any of the stories involving these characters; it reminded me most of Jack Vance, particularly the Dying Earth stories. Much of the setting, the tone, and the dry humour are similar, particularly in the way in which Geralt's world weariness is portrayed. Laurell K. Hamilton is less interested in humour and more in the relationships - particularly sexual ones - between the characters in her Anita Blake novels; the humour in the Buffy TV series is generally darker or derived from smart banter between the teenagers; and Van Helsing is deadly serious.

This is an excellent fantasy novel, and I will looking out for more by this writer - 8/10.

Robert J. Sawyer: Wake (2009)

Edition: Gollancz, 2009
Review number: 1406

J.K. Rowling aside, who is the most successful science fiction / fantasy writer of all time? One candidate would be Michael Crichton, who wrote more books turned into famous films than any other writer I can think of: Jurassic Park, Westworld, The Andromeda Strain. He's not an author I like very much, either as a novelist or screenwriter; although his books are really thrillers with SF themes, I tend to find them dull and have never actually managed to get to the end of any of them; the films work rather better, but even so are not my cup of tea. This is a view I appear to share with others in SF fandom; as a writer he was rarely nominated for an award (the only major one being the British Fantasy best novel nomination in 1995) despite his popularity.

The reason I bring up Michael Crichton is that I expected Robert J. Sawyer to be a similar writer. I first came across his work through the TV series of Flashforward, based on one of his novels. I watched the first two episodes, then gave up because (like Heroes) it seemed to be rehashing the same thing every week and neither moving forward at any speed in the overall story arc nor having interesting single episode stories. But the basic idea was interesting, and seemingly tailor made for TV adaptation, especially because the final episode was scheduled be shown on the date that everyone had seen on their vision of the future. While the plot meant that a TV adaptation seemed more appropriate than film, this seemed to me to be a very Michael Crichton style idea. So I didn't really think of reading any of his novels.

I'm not entirely sure why I added Wake to my list of books to read after giving up on Flashforward. I probably saw a favourable mention in a blog somewhere, or a review on SF Site. (A bit of checking reveals that it is because of its nomination for the 2010 Hugo: one of a large number of awards and nominations.) But I am glad that I did. It turns out, you see, that Sawyer is not at all like Michael Crichton as a writer. Wake is more like Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross: someone who knows about computers and has interesting ideas about their future which they discuss through science fiction. (He is one of the most enduring online presences in science fiction, as his home domain name, http://www.sfwriter.com/, suggests.)

After that long digression, I should at least say something about what Wake is about. There are three strands to the story, all of which are about cognitive awakening. The main one is the story of Caitlin, who was born blind and who is offered the chance to regain sight through an operation which connects her visual cortex to a hardware device which she nicknames the "eye-Pod". But as well as learning to see - and this is very interestingly imagined by Sawyer - she also discovers that connecting the device to the Internet means that she can "see" the structure of the Web. And part of what she sees forms the second major strand: in the background, there are what appear to be cellular automata, which begin to seem to be an emergent intelligence from the lost an corrupted packets which never expire (Internet communication is made up of packets with a "time to live" value, decreased by one each time they pass through a router; if this value is corrupted or they pass through routers with buggy software, this could lead to packets which never reach their destination and are never destroyed). The third strand is about a chimpanzee which begins to produce representational art: recognisable portraits of one of the people who look after it. This is not so closely integrated into Caitlin's story, but that may well be left to the second part of the WWW trilogy.  A fourth strand, about a dissident Chinese blogger, has loose ends which will clearly be picked up later.

The theme is clearly the development of consciousness, and is heavily influenced not just by current ideas about how machine intelligence might arise but also by the writings of Helen Keller, on how it felt to begin to be able to connect with other people after living blind and deaf since childhood - unlike Caitlin, she was not born blind but became so following an illness as a baby. Another background influence is the work of Julian Jaynes, who controversially argued that the modern human consciousness did not come into being until very recently (3000 years ago or so), early literature describing individuals who did not act in ways commensurate with fully integrated minds. Caitlin, as a bright teenager interested in such topics because of her blindness, makes a good conduit for Sawyer to introduce the concepts he wants to discuss.

This is one way in which Sawyer achieves one goal of good science fiction writing. In a genre derided for clumsy "info-dumps", finding a naturalistic way to explain the clever ideas and concepts behind your writing is important to many authors. Readers do not want to see endless conversations in which the participants tell each other things they already know, for the benefit of the reader, or to have lengthy explanatory sections or footnotes. Sawyer manages to do this really well here, and the combination of interesting ideas and good writing makes for a fascinating and enjoyable reading experience. As the Hugo nomination shows, this is one of the SF novels of the year, and is deservedly so. My rating: 9/10.