I apologise for the late arrival of this month’s book blog. I have been distracted by the publication of my own book, the subject of which is somewhat fin-d’espèce, if not fin-du-monde, and which you can read all about here.
Laura Purcell: The Silent Companions You’ll both no doubt recall that Mrs Gee gave me an anthology of horror stories for Christmas entitled The Winter Spirits, thus introducing me to a host of authors of whom I had not previously heard. One of these was Laura Purcell, whose story Carol of the Bells and Chains was High Victorian gothic horror set in the nursery of a grand house. The Silent Companions has a similar setting, and starts when newlywed Elsie Bainbridge comes to the decaying country pile of her new husband, who has – inconveniently – just died. Her only companion is her late husband’s rather vapid sister. With nothing else to do but explore the huge building, she unlocks a door that she shouldn’t, unleashing nursery crymes. The story intercuts with a tale in the same house just before the English Civil War, when the nursery horrors (the ‘silent companions’ of the title) first came into the house, bought by the Lady of the House from a remarkable curiosity shop run by a man called Samuels – a shop that subsequently disappears without trace. So, take Victorian Gothic and mix in aspects of Child’s Play and Needful Things. My concern, being a Red-Sea Pedestrian, is the anachronistic nature of Samuels, who is plainly Jewish, yet Jews were absent from England until the Protectorate. But this is a tale of the fantastic, so one can perhaps excuse it. And it is a fine spine-chiller.
Jess Kidd: Things In Jars Another author from The Winter Spirits here, of a story called Ada Lark about a street urchin who becomes the assistant to a fraudulent medium (is there any other kind?) Things in Jars is a mystery in which Mrs Bridie Devine, private investigator extraordinaire, is asked to track down the missing daughter of an aristocrat – a girl with remarkable powers. Mrs Devine, despite (and perhaps because of) a chequered personal history, is quite at home in the rambunctious stews of Victorian London, and mixes with a cast of characters is picturesque and outlandish as anything in Dickens – from Clara Butter, Mrs Devine’s giantess housemaid, to the ghost of a dead prizefighter who claims to be in love with our intrepid heroine. All this and bottled mermaids too in a tale told in that spellbinding, endlessly creative yet somewhat elliptical style one finds in Irish-born writers from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Spike Milligan. All in all an absolute cracker. I want to read more about Bridie Devine.
Natasha Pulley: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Pulley was the author of The Salt Miracles, my favourite story from The Winter Spirits — a mist-enshrouded and highly original tale about pilgrims to the Hebridean shrine of an obscure saint. In January I lauded The Mars House, a simply gorgeous SF trans bromance set on Mars, which is now Offspring#1’s favourite book. When we enthused to Offspring#2 about Pulley, she passed me The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which was Pulley’s debut novel. It takes place in a slightly alternative Victorian London in which Thaniel Steepleton, a government telegraph operator, comes home to find a beautiful watch on his pillow. Pocketing it, the watch sounds an alarm just before a terrorist bomb explodes that destroys Scotland Yard. The works of the watch are traced to Keita Mori, the Japanese emigre watchmaker of the title, who is suspected of having made the bomb. Steepleton is tasked with keeping tabs on Mori, and eventually comes to live with him. A parallel strand has a young female scientist who is trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether before her mother forces her to marry. The writing is crisp, the plot clever, the dialogue (in places) laugh-out-loud funny in an Oscar-Wilde-Noel-Coward kind of way, but I have a sense that, like some of Mori’s clockwork, it’s all wound up a bit too tight. Perhaps this was stress-to-impress in what became a widely acclaimed debut, before Pulley learned to relax and let some more of her affectionate style in. Having said that, there is plenty of humour in the form of Katsu, Mori’s seemingly intelligent and wayward clockwork octopus. Having read more of Pulley, her signature, apart from gay romance, seems to be the gratuitous insertion of a loveable octopus, in the same way that Trollope put in scenes about fox hunting.
Natasha Pulley: The Half-Life of Valery K By now you’ll have guessed that I have become quite a fan of Natasha Pulley. Apart from anything else, she impresses by her range: from steampunk in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street to SF in The Mars House and now historical fiction set in Russia that seems in every way as authentic as anything by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Wolves Eat Dogs). It’s 1963, and Valery K, a scientist sent to Stalin’s Gulag for some invented infraction, is transferred to a secret radiation lab not far from the Urals to be part of a team led by his old doctorate supervisor. The task is to monitor the local environment as part of controlled experiments on the effects of radiation on the flora and fauna. But there’s more to it than that, or course, and Valery risks being shot (or worse) as he tries to expose the secrets beneath the secrets. It’s rather grim (at times not even Pulley’s humour can alleviate the bitter cruelty and the Siberian chill) but is a fabulous read for all that, and contains her by-now-familiar bromance (Valery cultivates an unlikely friendship with his KGB minder). And, oh yes, an octopus. Because, why not? I have only one quibble — did they really have TV remotes in 1963?
Sophie Hannah: Haven’t They Grown? Beth hasn’t seen her former best friend Flora for twelve years, not since their children were small. Taking her now-teenage son to football practice, Beth drives past the house where Flora now lives, and, without being seen, sees Flora in her car with her own children who look exactly the same as they had been twelve years before. Such is the set-up for a crime thriller in which Beth dives down the rabbit hole to discover what’s really going on. No, not time travel, but a thoroughly convoluted, entirely unlikely but ultimately page-turningly compelling thriller. Once again, Sophie Hannah is an entirely new author to me, despite her having written scads of books (although she didn’t feature in The Winter Spirits, you’ll be relieved to know). Offspring#1 picked up this copy at a charity shop because he knows that I’m dead easy to buy presents for. I love books. Also, liquorice allsorts.
