The End Of The Pier Show

R. F. Kuang: Babel Rebecca F Kuang is the new wunderkind of fantasy literature. Babel is her fourth novel out of five, and she is meant to be working on a sixth, if she has not already been crushed under the weight of plaudits, awards, award nominations, advanced degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and her current work towards a doctorate at Yale. And she’s still only 27. The story unfolds in a fantasy Oxford in the 1830s, where the jewel in the Oxfordian crown is the Royal Institute of Translation — the Babel of the title — the tallest structure in the city and the foundation of the wealth of the British Empire. It is here that translators inscribe, on silver bars, words in various languages and close cognates in English. But no word in one language ever has a precise equivalent in another, and the magic invoked by the ineffable gap in between – the, um, je ne sais quoi, if you like – is used to make steam-powered ships sail faster, rifles shoot truer, carriages run more safely, gardens bloom more prettily, looms spin more quickly, and massive buildings stand tall on otherwise wobbly foundations. Anything, in fact. The Empire runs on silver bars from Babel. And Babel runs on gifted young people brought from all corners of the world to enrich its stock of languages and translations. People such as Robin Swift, rescued by a mysterious guardian from a cholera-infested slum in Canton and brought up to swell Babel’s ranks. But as Robin grows up, he learns that he is a pawn in at least two great games — to maintain the Empire, or to bring it crashing down. It’s a great premise, the writing is lucid and the characterisation is realistic and sensitive. However, the book has its problems. First is the inevitable Harry-Potterishness of a lonely boy finding his feet in what is effectively a special and magical school. Second, it’s that although supposedly set in the 1830s the characters all speak in a very contemporary idiom, which is occasionally jarring. Compared with, say, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, another magical period piece, the tone seems anachronistic. Third, the author loves to show off her considerable erudition in long expositions about etymology. I found this fascinating, but some might find that it holds up the action. Fourth are the copious footnotes, in which the author threatens to wreck the suspension of disbelief by telling us her opinions on events in the real world, as opposed to her fantasy creation. Fifth (and this is my main bugbear) is that it is utterly and quite unashamedly sanctimonious. The British Empire is rapacious, racist, ruthless, misogynistic and exploitative. So it was, but to be harangued about this on every page becomes wearisome. And nothing good can ever be said about any white person who is not working class, especially if they are male. There is virtually no humour: the author obviously missed the parallel with the Peoples’ Front of Judea (in Monty Python’s Life of Brian) when a small and seemingly ineffectual group of characters is plotting the downfall of a vast and powerful empire. And I swear that there is a conversation where one character declares to another, in almost as many words, about the Violence Inherent in the System, a line straight out of that other Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I could have done with a lot more of the fantasy and a good deal less of the social justice warfare. By the end I was left wondering about the source of the author’s deep well of animus. Then I read the acknowledgements, in which she thanks the people ‘who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable’. There’s someone on the banks of the Cherwell whose ears are burning.

 Ian Stewart: Loophole  Many will be familiar with Ian Stewart as a mathematician and one of the few of his profession who can explain maths cogently to regular mortals. Many more will know him as an honorary wizard of the Unseen University and co-author (with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen, late and lamented both) of the four volumes of The Science of Discworld. But he’s also a considerable author of SF on his own account, and Loophole is his latest. It’s a rambunctious romp involving super-powerful but dotty aliens, a terrifying plague of Von Neumann machines, and a clash of two universes that are not quite as different as they first appear. This is more than just Hard SF. Or Wide-Screen Baroque. With a fiendishly clever plot so twisty it will turn your brain into a Möbius pretzel, it verges on Wrap-Around Rococo. The science is absolutely Out There, but with Stewart as your guide you can be confident that it’s reliable, in one universe or another. At the same time the characters are human, humane (especially the aliens) and there is a generous dose of humour to lighten what might otherwise be a heavy load. If you’ve read The Science of Discworld, or any of Stewart’s books with Jack Cohen (such as Figments of Reality), you’ll know what to expect. DISCLAIMER: I provided an endorsement for the author and received a pre-publication copy.

Dimitra Fimi: The World of J. R. R. Tolkien I don’t often listen to audiobooks. However, having listened to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion courtesy of Audible, this one came up as a suggestion. It’s a series of lectures by Dr Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow. The course covers Tolkien’s life and works and delves fairly deeply into such matters as his invented languages; his sources among the mythic traditions of Europe; the nature of evil; his influence on popular culture; and the sometimes vexed questions of race and gender raised by Tolkien’s work. If you have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and possibly The Silmarillion, but haven’t had the energy (or desire) to get stuck into the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth and the other intimidating edifices of Tolkien’s work edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien, his son and indefatigable literary executor, this course is the easiest and most entertaining way to become ridiculously well-informed about the life and works of the Great Hobbitmonger. DISCLAIMER: the author is a personal friend who I’ve bumped into at various Tolkien-related events.

Michael Cobley: The Ascendant Stars This is the final episode in the author’s Humanity’s Fire space-opera trilogy. You’ll find parts one and two reviewed here and here, respectively. By now the redoubtable and horny-handed residents of the colony planet Darien find themselves assaulted on many fronts, not only by the forces described in the earlier episode, but also some completely new ones. It’ll be no surprise to learn that everything turns out well for the good guys in the end — with the help, I regret to say, of a few McGuffins seemingly plucked from hyperspace the air — but the roll-call of characters, civilisations, plots, counter-plots and counter-counter plots has by now grown so long and the story arcs so labyrinthine that I quite lost track of what was going on and in the end had to simply let myself get carried along for the ride. The ride, such as it was, was a lot of fun, but at times I just longed for it all to end. One can have, it seems, too much of a good thing.

William Boyd: Any Human Heart I first came across William Boyd with Brazzaville Beach, a novel about infighting among scientists studying chimpanzee behaviour, and which features entirely appropriately on the LabLit List of novels featuring scientists in their natural habitats. The behaviour in Any Human Heart is, however, entirely and poignantly human. The book consists of extracts from the diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), a literary figure so insignificant that he is entirely fictional, for all that he rubs up against real people such as Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during his long and eventful life. For me it has echoes of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham in its evocation of creative talent just trying to burst through the conventions of their times, not always successfully. It’s a testament to Boyd’s skill that you can’t help but like Mountstuart, despite the fact that he is an adulterous, philandering, voyeuristic drunk. At various times a nerdy schoolboy, celebrated author, art dealer, war correspondent, impoverished pensioner, urban guerrilla (failed), English lecturer, columnist on arts and letters, prisoner of war, paedophile (inadvertent), boulevardier and spy, he is both betrayer and betrayed. His adventurous life encompasses four continents and almost the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s the twentieth century that’s the real protagonist, a period that saw perhaps the greatest changes in the entire history of our species,  full of unparalleled marvels and horrors, buffeting its human cargo with haymakers of contingency and fateful swerves like no other, and so richly documented in this affecting novel.

Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That I first came across Robert Graves in my earliest youth, as the translator and re-teller of the Greek myths that I learned at my mother’s knee. I had always been captivated by his prose, elegant and yet easy and lucid. I wasn’t really aware, however, that he was a poet of some standing, nor that he had served on the trenches in the Great War. Goodbye To All That is his autobiography, written in his early thirties after he had fled to Majorca, swearing to leave England for good (hence the title). And it’s no wonder he wanted to get away from it all. Born in 1895, Graves was sent to a series of dismal preparatory schools before being thrown at Charterhouse, a well-known public school for boys where his time seems to have been uniformly miserable. He went straight from Charterhouse to the Western Front, which he seems to have preferred to his schooldays. Most of the book concerns his war service, which he re-tells in great detail and indeed the book is now regarded as an important source of information about trench life. After the war he married, but his marriage was unhappy and after a concatenation of personal and business disasters he fled Britain’s shores to write everything down. Goodbye To All That made his name and was a literary and financial success. Given the often depressing nature of Graves’ experiences you’d think that reading this book might be a chore, but far from it. The tone is breezy and bright, and full of (often very dark) humour. I gobbled it up over a weekend and enjoyed it immensely.

Alice Feeney: Daisy Darker When Daisy Darker’s grandmother invites her family to Seaglass, her crumbling home set on an island off the Cornish coast accessible only at low tide, you know that dastardly doings are in store. Especially as the occasion is for the grandmother to read her will. Apart from the grandmother and Daisy herself (who you soon realise is not necessarily a reliable narrator) the members of the family are uniformly appalling, and it’s no wonder that they haven’t been gathered together in the same place simultaneously all at once and together for decades, such is their mutual antipathy. In an entirely knowing nod to Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None) with overtones of Stephen King, you will probably be able to work out what’s going to happen well before the ending (though I didn’t — I’m lousy at whodunits). Despite this it’s a deliciously enjoyable summer read.

Michael Cobley: Orphaned Worlds This is the second part of a sci-fi trilogy that started with Seeds of Earth, which I reviewed last month. Here the braw and brawny human colonists of the planet Darien (who read like a collection of extras from Outlander) are assailed on all sides — by the brutal Hegemony (in which the home planet Earth is a junior partner); their even more brutal allies, the Brolturans — and, joining in the fray, a fleet of religious maniacs, together with opponents from a conflict that played out aeons before — all for control of an ancient matter-transference device beneath the planet’s surface. The author throws everything and the kitchen sink into this enjoyable space-operatic romp. (To be continued).

V. E. Schwab: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue Adeline La Rue is an illiterate peasant girl born in the French countryside towards the end of the seventeenth century. Fearing a short, brutal life of drudgery and, at best, boredom, she makes a deal with the Devil to be free. But desperate souls never read the small print (the Devil being, of course, in the details) and Addie is destined to go through life instantly forgotten by everyone she meets, and unable to make her own mark on history — except, it seems, as a muse for others. Until, that is, three hundred years later, when she meets Henry, manager of a small secondhand bookstore in New York — who remembers her. Henry, you see, has made his own, rather different deal with the Devil. Towards the end, Addie and Henry work to see if they can unstitch their own respective Faustian bargains. This book was recommended to me by Gee Minima, whose tips I always take seriously (it was she who put me on to The Night Circus, my Top Read of 2014), and with a front-cover puff from Neil Gaiman, no fewer less, The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue was a must-read. And it’s terrific. The writing is astonishingly good. The characters, both prosaic and demonic, leap off the page. If I have one criticism (shared by Gee Minima) it does tend to sag a bit two thirds of the way through and could have lost about fifty pages with no harm done.

Stephen Fry: Making History The actor, director, memoirist, techno-geek, celebrity depressive, comedian, driver of decommissioned London taxis, fellow supporter of Norwich City FC and National Treasure that is Stephen Fry also writes novels. Heavens, is there anything this man cannot do? Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this one is science fiction, noch, and it’s not half bad. It’s hard to say much of what it’s about without introducing spoilers, but suffice it to say it starts with a Cambridge history graduate just about to finish his doctorate thesis who collides with a German emigre quantum physicist, with hilarious and unpredictable results…

Michael Cobley: Seeds of Earth There’s nothing like a stonking great slab of space opera to get one back into the fun of reading after a dry spell, and as luck would have it Mrs Gee found this — and its two sequelae, because it’s a trilogy, of course it is — in a local charity shop. When a lost colony of the human race is rediscovered on a remote planet, what was once a bolt-hole in the back of beyond turns out to be in the disputed border regions between mutually hostile alien powers. Not only do the plucky colonists have to learn to play politics with hostile civilisations much more powerful than their own, they must contend with the discovery, on their planet, of an artefact of apocalyptic power left over from an age when warfare was existentially, pan-galactically, super-eschatologically ferocious. The aliens come out of Star Wars — the humans from any Peter F. Hamilton novel — the result is a blisteringly good read.

A. M. Homes: Days of Awe If  James Thurber had been born in the late twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth, and had been female (also Jewish) he might have turned out something like A. M. Homes, whose dissections of modern American life in this warm collection of short stories have the same satirical, surreal, occasionally fantastical and always affectionate tone, but which are always as sharp as a tack. I found it on Mrs Gee’s nightstand. It had been recommended by a friend. Reader, I devoured it.

Renee Knight: Disclaimer Catherine is an award-winning documentary film-maker at the top of her game. Relaxing at the end of a day, she picks up a thriller that has found its way to her bedside table. To her horror she finds that the main character is — herself. Thus starts a nail-biter full of more twists and turns than an explosion in a pretzel factory. One critic compared it with Gone Girl, and I can see the similarity, except that whereas Gone Girl swerves halfway through with a savage plot twist that feels like being hit over the head with a blunt instrument (if you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean), Disclaimer toys with you unmercifully before going in for the kill with a shocking denouement.

You’ll both recall that lately I have been keep my demons at bay by working furiously hard, both at the day job (I’m with the Submerged Log Company) and also by writing my next book. This strategy has been fairly successful (and, oh yes, the drugs) in that I am more than 52,000 words into the first draft of a billet-doux provisionally entitled The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, and so closer to the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning. It takes the theme of an article I wrote for Scientific American on the imminent extinction of humanity and expands it to book length [Cripes, no wonder you were depressed and anxious — Ed.]

A few weeks back St Martin’s Press bought the US/Canada rights, and I am just about to sign with Picador for the UK/Commonwealth rights, and publishers in Korea and Italy have also expressed an interest in translating it, yea, even before I’ve finished it, so really I should stop writing this now and get on with it.

This literary preoccupation may explain why I haven’t been very active recently either on the social media or on this blog (and, oh yes, the drugs) and haven’t read my usual monthly shelf’s worth of books. I have been reading, though — voraciously so — but it’s been of the technical kind, by way of research. I have been terrifying myself by learning about climate change. I have been finding out about drought, dearth, disease, demography and death. You know, all the ‘d’s. I’ve been digging into subjects as varied as palaeoanthropology and photosynthesis, and  in a moment I shall be rocketing off into space. You know, like you do.

I’ll send you a postcard.

Gaia Vince: Nomad Century This author’s twitter handle is @WanderingGaia, and it shows – she has traveled the world witnessing at first hand the scale of the disruption that rapid climate change is causing the human species. Humans have always been nomadic. Settled life is a mere 10,000 years old: nation states in their current form, with difficult-to-cross borders, barely 300 years. But the biggest migrations in human history are happening now, and will continue through the present century, as billions flee the global south made uninhabitable by climate change and seek to resettle in the global north. Vince sets out the scale of climate-change-caused disruption the world currently faces in stark terms — even seasoned climate-change readers will be terrified — before setting out a detailed manifesto on how the world might be saved or even made better by welcoming migrants into countries suffering depopulation, rather than putting obstacles before them. If I have one criticism, it is that the author doesn’t always give references for the many eye-catching and sometimes breathtaking statistics she quotes. But that doesn’t stop this from being an important and indeed visionary book.

… and that’s its. I read no more in May. At least, no more books. I have been deep in the technical literature researching for my own next book, and so have been distracted.

Simon Morden: Down Station Faced with a disastrous and life-threatening fire in the tunnels of the London Underground, a motley group of underground workers finds themselves thrust through a portal into the alternate universe of Down, which has its own rules and the magic is loose. This could almost be juvenile fantasy except that one of the refreshingly diverse cast of characters says ‘fuck’ a lot. Enjoyable, though I didn’t enjoy it sufficiently to seek out the sequel, The White City.

Taylor Jenkins Reid: Daisy Jones and The Six This is the recollection of a fictional 1970s soft-rock group, not modelled on anyone in particular, though comparisons with Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac are inescapable. The writing is mostly in the form of snippets from interviews with the main characters. I first came across this through the televisual adaptation on Amazon Prime, which took a few liberties with the text, but which I enjoyed more.

Alastair Reynolds: House of Suns Reynolds is in the top rank of SF writers working today, and here he is at the top of his game. The plot is as audacious as they get. Six million years before the main story opens, Abigail Gentian has herself cloned 1000 times, sending her clones out into the Galaxy as explorers. Six million years later, two of the shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, are late for one of the Gentian Line’s periodic reunions. And fortunately so, for they just miss the extirpation of most of their siblings. Someone, somewhere, wants the Gentians uprooted. But who? And why? Lashings of pure bravura sensawunda don’t get in the way of a gripping plot. One of his best.

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks The only other novel of Mitchell’s I’ve read is Cloud Atlas, and, like that, The Bone Clocks consists of six novellas loosely tied together, though in conventional sequence rather than nested like layers of an onion, as in Cloud Atlas. Without giving too much away, each novella eavesdrops on a decade in the life of Holly Sykes, a seemingly very ordinary English woman, from teenage runaway to dying septuagenarian, though only the first and last parts are from her point of view. The Bone Clocks is a portmanteau of everything – literary satire to contemporary reportage, near-future dystopia to out-and-out fantasy. It’s never less than ambitious – some might say indulgent – but it is held up from collapse by the sheer quality of writing. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel this satisfying since 2014. That was when I first read Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus: a very different book in many ways, but parallels The Bone Clocks in its evocation of how the fantastic may lurk even at the edges of everyday lives.

Gabriel Bergmoser: The Hunted There’s something about the harsh red centre of Australia that brings out the worst in people, worse even than Crocodile Dundee. So much is clear from this taut, exceptionally violent thriller about what happens when a young woman, caked in mud and blood, rocks up at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. Edge-of-your-seat stuff, this, but not for the squeamish.

Lewis Dartnell: Being Human A spirited canter through the ways our biology has inescapably affected world history in ways large and small. Learn how cognitive biases led to the disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade and why we call chilis ‘peppers’; how inbreeding and genetic diseases led to war; how a mosquito was ultimately responsible the union of England and Scotland; and many more nuggets that’ll open your eyes and stretch your mind. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a pre-publication copy for endorsement.

Dale E. Greenwalt: Remnants of Ancient Life There is more to fossils than bones and stones. Very rarely. soft tissue is preserved too, and Dale Greenwalt reviews what we can and cannot know about ancient life from the occasional scrap of chitin, cellulose, protein or DNA that niggardly posterity chances to leave behind. DISCLAIMER: I read a proof copy sent to me by a publication for whom I am writing a longer review.

Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography The High Frontier is a lawless place. But as Tim Marshall explains in this very readable guide to the latest in space exploration, the absence of rules makes space a dangerous place — for everyone on Planet Earth. The space programs of all the major and minor players are set out, as are the various dangers as they scramble for territory above our heads. It then goes all fizzy and futuristic at the end, and inexplicably misses out the most likely habitat for humans in space – hollowed-out asteroids, planetary surfaces being too difficult and expensive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent an advance copy by the publisher.

Robin Dennell: From Arabia To The Pacific: How Our Species Colonised Asia Our species began as a hunter of open savannah in Africa. When it left Africa into Asia, it had to contend with environments as harsh and as different as arctic tundra and tropical rainforest – which it conquered as no other species has done, simultaneously driving all other hominids to extinction. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. It’s an academic text, but don’t let that put you off, as it’s never less than completely readable. It is, though, printed on that shiny paper academic publishers seem to love, you know, the grade that makes even slim volumes like this weigh a ton. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

Arthur C. Clarke: The Deep Range I seem to have lost my reading mojo, so, frustrated by a deeply cerebral novel I could barely start, let alone finish ( I might succeed one day) I turned to this good old-fashioned SF from the good old-fashioned Arthur C. Clarke, an undemanding adventure in which a washed-up astronaut conquers his fears of space by mastering the secrets of the deep. It was written in 1957, and it shows, but I’ll make no apology for having enjoyed every minute.