Brace yourself: this is a novel set partially in Whitechapel in the 1880s that does not so much as glance at Jack the Ripper. I know, right? What even are the 1880s in Whitechapel for? Well, in this case, a young man working as a clerk for the Home Office is saved from a bomb set by Irish Republicans by a watch made by a clairvoyant Japanese watchmaker, so…sorry you asked?
Maybe you recall, coming up for ten years ago, the film version of the first book in this series, Northern Lights? Except the movie was called The Golden Compass, after the American version of the book, because Americans fall into a funk of existential dread if they don’t get to name everything themselves. It starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig? Yeah, don’t watch that. It was made when steampunk was still a thing. It has the worst child acting I think I’ve ever seen, and I was in a community theatre production of Annie. But the books. The books are…well.
It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its sequels, but for some reason I had never ventured into any of his other novels. Fforde did a live chat with the Guardian recently, which reminded me of this fact, and prompted me to give this series, “Nursery Crimes”, a go.
What to say about this novel? I can, I suppose, outline the basic structure: it’s set partly in 1840s USA (including Texas, which was an independent republic at the time, a fact I did not previously know) and partly in what I suppose would have to be described as a post-apolalyptic totalitarian steampunk dystopia. Somehow these worlds are connected by a prophetic novel written by a past character – are we reading that, or are we reading what actually happens in the future? And does an old book discovered in the future world actually relate events that happened in the past, or is it a fictionalised account of the actions of people that apparently existed?
I feel like every time I hear about this book (the first of a trilogy, because Of Course), someone is telling me how great it is. It’s Harry Potter for grown-ups! Magic school, but with drinking and sex! A story of a misfit youth who suddenly discovers the magical world is real, and has to learn to deal with it! Well, yes. It is all that stuff. But here’s the thing.
It’s terrible. I mean, just not good in any way.
Holidays are not a good time for downer reads. I knew this in theory, but it really sank in when, during a week in a beach house surrounded by my best friends, I attempted to read a book featuring a love story between a suicidal junkie and a needle exchange volunteer. Can you even imagine? I got, to my credit, a third of the way through it, before putting a pin in it and scanning back through my Kindle for a more holiday-friendly re-read. American Gods is what I came up with.
For me, a lover of fantasy generally and of Neil Gaiman in particular, diving back into this novel was like that first gulp of Friday night wine after a long, stressful working week. The premise, simply put, is that all of the gods ever worshipped by humans really exist; belief somehow generates them, and, since every culture eventually ends up in America, their adherents have brought them all there at some point. Continue reading American Gods
Twenty-six years after she began, Isobelle Carmody has published the final novel in this series. There are only seven books altogether, meaning she averaged almost four years per book, which, for something that was clearly not proof-read or subjected to any editorial process, is frankly unforgivable.
These books are exactly as bad as you think they are. The writing is clunky, the plot meandering, and the action is littered with unnecessary red herrings that fail to be resolved satisfactorily. And yet. Having started reading these novels at the tender age of I don’t really remember but probably like 14 or so, I can finally, FINALLY, put to death the part of myself that still cares about the characters that inhabit this fantasy universe.
This is probably the best-known of Mitchell’s works, not least because it was made into a film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. It’s a novel comprised of a series of nesting narratives, commencing in the colonial South Pacific, travelling through inter-war Europe, 70s California and futuristic Korea, and reaching a zenith in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, before a decrescendo back down the same path.
On an Army base codenamed Hotel Echo, in what used to be England, a class full of children is strapped into wheelchairs so tightly that only their eyes can move. They’re young, around ten, but the lessons they learn include Greek myths, calculus, and European history. Melanie, our heroine, is top of the class and has no trouble remembering her lessons. But, she asks her teacher, does the stated population of 1,036,900 include Birmingham’s suburbs, or just the central metropolitan area? “Who cares?” he replies. “It’s irrelevant. The population of Birmingham is zero.”
It’s nice how Kari and I can remain friends despite having exact opposite responses to the words “Cockney wizard detective”.
This is the fifth in a series of books that commenced a few years back with Rivers of London. There, the protagonist, PC Peter Grant, has just finished his training when he is assigned to the branch of the London Metropolitan Police Force that deals with supernatural crimes, and apprenticed to Detective Inspector Thomas Nightingale in order to be trained as a wizard. Continue reading Foxglove Summer