Saturday 19 March 2011

Oryx and Crake







By Margret Attwood

The last time I started recording and writing about my reading I did notice the way I was deciding what book to read to try and make it look like my tastes were not so very plebean. So it is again, look, nominated for the Booker! By the author of 'The Handmaid's Tale'.
Post apocalyptic science fiction again.
From what I remember this was the one that caused Attwood to start making ridiculous assertions about how a book shouldn't be considered SF if it was, oh I don't know, about a ruined world over-run by genetically engineered hybrid animals, since SF necessarily implied ray guns and super intelligent space squid.
It's a daft thing to say, and Attwood's hardly the only one to say it. Jenette Winterson popped up a couple of years back vehemently denying that a book about the colonisation of an alien world might be SF, (others?)
Crap literary fiction is about middle aged university lecturers feeling bad about fucking their students. Crap science fiction is about spaceships firing 19,728 missiles, 1,012 of which are distracted by the enemy's active fire control systems and so on.
Good fiction, be it literary or science (if we accept the premise that there is no such thing as literary science fiction) is about ideas, and how they impact people and ultimately what it means to be human.

That lost was all written a couple of weeks ago when I was a quarter of the way into the book. It's now finished.

It's a very good book, and one I would recomend to pretty much anyone. The only Attwood I'd read before was The Handmaid's Tale - this has the same deft turn of phrase but with a less oppressive atmosphere. I shall have to look out more, The Year of the Flood is a sort of sequel. Not right now though.
Attwood's claim that O&C is not really science fiction hinges on the fact that there is nothing in the book that hasn't been invented yet. This is bollocks. And it was even more bollocks when it was written, in 2003. Genetic Engineering does exist, but without the abilities of these engineers. If anyone's hoping to hybridise snakes and rats, they're still a long way off.
The strange thing is the degree to which, while the themes of the book are, ashamedly, SF, the structure is pure stereotypical lit-fic. An elderly man, living in a world he doesn't fully understand, thinks back over his life, the mistakes he has made, the failed relationships, the best friend who destroyed the world. Fortunately he wasn't an academic, and so was never had any students to regret fucking. Apart from that though, it's textbook.
But like I said. It's good. Worth reading. I suppose it does ask some questions about humanity, but they have pretty obvious answers. As lit-fic goes it's a pretty light read, well worth it.

Saturday 5 March 2011

World Book Night: Cloud Atlas

By this point I figure that you're a reader. Sure there will probably be people you've hit the 'next blog' link and arrived here by chance, and there are doubtless some Facebook friends glancing at the first paragraph and stopping, but if you get much further you read books.
That means you probably know what World Book Night is, but for anyone who's missed it, it's a reading promotion based about the idea that 20,000 people will be giving books away to friends, family, perfect strangers.
Sounded cool. So I signed up for it. Then I realised that it was the same night as Chris and Sandra's delightful wedding. So I've basically fluffed the whole concept.
The idea was that everything would be happening on the same night. You'd have bashes in libraries, people holding parties at home to explain their love of a book, people wandeing round pubs pushing books at God knows who.
Except I am at a wedding party, watching couples dance, and fighting the urge to drink so much subsidised Landlord that I won't be able to drive home tomorrow. I have given a copy of the book to the groom, and may give some out at breakfast tomorrow, but as far as the book frenzy goes, I'm not getting it right.
The book I chose to give away was Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Not the one from Mitchell & Webb. And for what it's worth, if you're remotely interested in the book, you might want to stop reading real soon. It's one of those books where the structure is as important, perhaps more important, than the plot, and while there are reviewers clever enough to write about such works without blowing the big reveals, I have no such pretentions.
So where was I? Instead of holding on to all the books so that icoyld give them to people at a party where modern literary novels were the last thing on their mind, I've been naughtlily handing them out for several days now. I guess I have about 20 left as I write. So if you want one let me know. Except that I already advised you to stop reading.
Potential readers gone now? Or at least anyone still here fully aware of the likelihood of spoilers? OK.
Cloud Atlas is one of those strange books that isn't quite a novel. It's not a collection of short stories either, but something between the two, that I don't quite have the language to explain.
The conciet is that there are a series of separate narratives, in very different styles embedded one within the other. There's a story about an anguished American in the South Seas in the 1800s, only to have his story cut off in the middle of a sentence, to be replaced by the story of a dissolute composer in the 1920s, who at one point finds a particular story about the South Seas in a library, and is inspired to write the mcguffin of the LA detective story. Eventually the narratives reverse their flow and each unpacks into the next, before all six reach their own conclusions.
Normally I find books like this annoying. I like characters, plots, that kind of thing. When the structure becomes clever-clever it's often a sign that the writer is just showing off, and who wants that?
Cloud Atlas manages to overcome me. At least in part this is because the writing is so damn good. I would read almost any of the stories if they were blown up into novels in their own right. Well perhaps not the first, which suffered from a well written, but whiney, protagonist, but on the whole the stories would stand up perfectly well if they were presented as distinct novellas. But that would pretty much miss the whole point. The strength of Cloud Atlas is the way that each story sets up it's sucessor, and only really makes sense when completed in the light of the revelations of the sucessor become predecessor as the book unfolds.
It's a masterful work, nominated for the Booker, and, given that I have no memory of what won that year, one that I think should have scooped the prize.
I can't help but wonder if the science fiction elements in the middle stories deterred the judges. This may become a bit of a theme.

Friday 4 March 2011

The Rivers of London

By Ben Aaronovitch






So here we are with Mr Aaronovitch again, described in a review of his blog as his first novel. Obviously genre spinoffery doesn't count, or didn't reach the Americas.
It's a police procedural with magic. Peter Grant, a wet behind the ears copper turns out to have an aptitude for magic, and is apprenticed to the dapper (and perhaps immortal) Chief Inspector Nightingale, apparently the only wizard in London, certainly the only one working for the Met.
It's a nice book. Apparently sold, with sequels, for a prodigious sum, and rather crying out to be televised. Nightingale is somewhere between Morse and Chretomanci, Grant is pleasently stroppy and charasmatic. If there's not an adaptation sometime in the next few years I shall be surprised. Hopefully not brought to us by the sale people that made Demons.
I started reading this thinking it was an attempt to be an English version of Jim Butcher's Dresden series. And perhaps that came into the pitch, but it lacks the grime of Dresden. It's far more gentlemanly and... British.
It's not the most demanding of books, but entirely readable.