The End Of The Pier Show

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.