Robin Hobb: Fool's Errand (2001)

Edition: Voyager, 2002
Review number: 1185

The start of the third of Robin Hobb's fantasy trilogies returns to the background and characters of her first (the second, the Live Ship Traders series, is set in a distant part of the same world). Following the cataclysmic conclusion to the Red Ships War in the Farseer series, the royal assassin Fitz has hidden himself away in obscurity for over a decade. Rather than being recognised as the reluctant saviour of the Six Duchies that he actually was, he is regarded with hatred as a practitioner of the forbidden magic known as the Wit. This ability to bond with an animal in a close, telepathic, relationship, is viewed with suspicion and is the occasion for malicious tales and lynchings - like a medieval accusation of witchcraft. Fitz settles into an eremetic existence in a cottage in the middle of a forest, accompanied by his wolf Wit partner Nighteyes and bringing up a foundling boy.

Most people think Fitz dead, but there are some who know the truth. In the chaos following the war, with the Queen acting as regent for her son, the last heir of the Farseer line, and trying to bring order back to the Six Duchies and restore what the war had destroyed, it seems to her and her advisers that Fitz's unique talents are needed once again. And so Fitz is dragged, reluctantly, into a new adventure.

Fans of Hobbs' other novels will not need a recommendation. The third trilogy is perhaps not the best place to start if not, though Fool's Errand is one of Hobbs more cheerful novels. (Like Holly Lisle, Hobb tends to put her characters through absolute misery, which is not to everybody's taste and which certainly becomes wearing if you read too much in a short period of time.) As usual with Hobb, I got to the end of the novel with the feeling that after a few months wait I would be keen to move on to the next in the trilogy.

Iain Banks: Espedair Street (1987)

Edition: Orbit, 1988
Review number: 1184

Ever since I first read it, not long after it first came out, Espedair Street has been one of my favourite Iain Banks novels. It is his first more or less mainstream novel, neither experimental nor genre fiction, and every time I read it it still manages to amuse and move me.

Espedair Street is a novel which is pretending to be a rock star autobiography; the story of (fictional) seventies band Frozen Gold as told by bass player and song writer Danny Weir (known as Weird). It is told using one of Banks' favourite devices, the series of flashbacks which converge to and explain the present (Danny living as a recluse, pretending to be his own caretaker in a bizarre Victorian folly in Glasgow). Espedair Street is about the emptiness that can come to fill the life of someone who has realised all his dreams on a massive scale. It's about lots of other things too - the hedonistic life of a seventies rock star (modelled on the excesses of bands like Fleetwood Mac); the things that we do that we regret and feel guilty about later, and the effects that these have on us; Glasgow and the people who live there.

Much of the pleasure (and certainly the humour) provided by Espedair Street (named after a place in Glasgow where several important events in Danny's life occur) is derived from the accuracy with which much of it mimics "warts-and-all" rock journalism, and it has in fact been turned into a radio serial which takes precisely this form, complete with music written by Banks himself. This makes it immediately believable as a novel, the ludicrous actions of band members being no madder than many documented of real musicians.

Espedair Street's main weakness is the sentimentality of its ending; this quality begins to creep into Banks' writing from this point onwards, making it more accessible but bringing occasional disappointment.

John O'Hara: Appointment in Samarra (1935)

Edition: Penguin, 1997
Review number: 1183

Set in an American small town during the Depression, Appointment in Samarra is the story of a man who takes to drink and then kills himself after a social faux pas. It was hailed as a great novel by Ernest Hemingway no less when it first appeared (though his praise was in part an attack on Sinclair Lewis, who had described it as obscene). From such a high, O'Hara's reputation could only dwindle, especially as he ended up as an author who outlived his talent. Even so, Appointment in Samarra made it into the Modern Library's list of the hundred greatest English language novels of the twentieth century.

One interesting thing about this novel is the naive style in which it is written. O'Hara is unwilling to introduce a character without telling the reader a great deal about them and their history (something that would-be authors are often warned not to do). In places this is irritating, but O'Hara usually manages to make it fascinating. These little portraits can be quite barbed, as when he says of the local doctor that "some of his patients even lived".

The central character, fairly closely based on parts of O'Hara's own early life, is massively important in this novel. Julian English begins as an insider, a rich young man who spends much of his time meeting other rich young people at exclusive clubs in and around his home town. He gives way to a drunken impulse (throwing his drink in the face of a man he doesn't like very much) and becomes an outsider, unable even really to see why he is no longer accepted. (His crime may seem trivial, but the man he attackes is someone to whom he owes a large sum of money, a particularly strong tie in the Depression, and is a pillar of the town's Catholic community while English is a Protestant, leading others to assume sectarian motives for the attack.) It is one of the strengths of Appointment in Samarra that this slight difference in status is so clearly portrayed.

While this all makes for an interesting read, it hardly amounts to sufficient reason to put Appointment in Samarra in the top hundred novels. What is unusual about it for its date is its sympathetic portrayal of feminine sexuality in the person of Julian's wife. D. H. Lawrence is famous for having introduced the woman as an openly sexual being into literature, but the women I know who have talked about this have told me that he doesn't really describe what, say, a female orgasm feels like; his portrayal is more a masculine idea of what it should be like. It seems to me that O'Hara is more believable in what he says, even if this is the aspect of the novel which was attacked as obscene. (I obviously can't be sure, as I have never experienced sex as a woman!)

The title of the novel deserves some comment. There is a story which I thought was in the Arabian Nights (though my dictionary of quotations attributes it to Somerset Maugham). A man in Baghdad met Death in the marketplace, a sure omen of his death. Although he saw that Death looked surprised, the terrified man leapt on his horse and galloped to Samarra. But there Death took his soul - no one can cheat death. The point of this little story is the reason for Death's surprise - it was because he met the man in Baghdad when he had an appointment with him for the next day in distant Samarra.

Ann Patchett: The Magician's Assistant (1998)

Edition: Fourth Estate, 2002
Review number: 1182

Sabine has worked most of her life as a magician's assistant, hopelessly in love with her partner Parsifal even after she realises that he is gay. Then Parsifal's lover dies of AIDS, and he marries Sabine because he wants her to inherit everything he and Phan had without a massive tax bill (Phan was a programmer who wrote a massively successful game); he dies soon afterwards not from HIV but from an unexpected aneurysm. It is only a few days later that Sabine discovers that almost everything that Parsifal told her over the past twenty years about his family background has been a lie; instead of being from New England, his parents and siblings dead, he came from Nebraska, and he has left a letter with his lawyer asking that his mother and sisters be provided for. And so they come to Los Angeles to meet Sabine, visit Parsifal's grave and see a city none of them have ever visited before, and Sabine begins to find out something of her husband's true past, and why he had cut himself off from it so profoundly.

This, then, is a novel of discovery, but not the self-discovery which is so common a literary theme (though as Sabine gets to know her ex-husband's real family, she learns some surprising things about herself too). It is mainly about being able to move beyond initial snap judgements to a better understanding of people.

Patchett uses the setting to help herself underline the differences between Parsifal's life as a stage magician, accepted as gay by his friends and successful in his profession, and the repressive atmosphere of his upbringing in what must be one of the most old fashioned small towns in the United States, to judge by this account. She does this with the simple device of setting the novel's action in winter, so that Los Angeles remains a place of warmth while Alliance lies under a blanket of freezing snow.

This particular edition of The Magician's Assistant has a massively misleading blurb, which has led my local library to classify it as fantasy. (Mind you, they have also put Michael Connelly's Void Moon in the science fiction section, for even less reason.) The novel is described as being about Sabine's discovery of powers of actual magic - which might make for an intriguing fantasy novel - and this simply is not what The Magician's Assistant is about. There is one aspect of the supernatural in the apparent reunions with Phan and Parsifal that Sabine experiences in her dreams, and there is a hint that she goes beyond the possible in one magic trick that she performs, and that's all; far less than in magic realist novels like Midnight's Children that no library would put into the fantasy genre shelves.

Raymond Chandler: Killer in the Rain (1964)

Edition: Penguin, 1969 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1181

There is one official, authorised, collection of Raymond Chandler short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, and then there are the eight collected in Killer in the Rain. So why was Chandler against the re-publication of these stories (he was very unhappy when several of them appeared in other, unauthorised collections). They are all early, and the development of the famous Chandler style and of the character who eventually became Philip Marlowe is easy and interesting to trace. The problem is not, though, that the stories betray an apprentice writer; they only appear to do so in relation to Chandler's later work.

When Chandler came to write his first novel, The Big Sleep, he turned back to these short stories - not just for inspiration, but for plot and character, and even for the details of description. (he aptly described this process as "cannibalization".) He then did the same for his next three novels, with the result that any fan of Chandler's work will find much that is already familiar in Killer in the Rain.

The result of this is paradoxically that these stories might well appeal to Chandler novices - the stories are good enough in their own right, and authentic examples of his work - and to die-hard fans. The latter will find themselves constantly running into nuggets that they recognise, which is a fascinating experience, and they can start to trace how both Chandler's style and one of the most famous characters in both literature and film developed. And, of course, that would also make the collection indispensable for Chandler scholars.

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.