Any consumer of media content of any kind will slot right into the opening of this novel. In a gritty urban setting, a grizzled and world-weary cop looks down on a dead body, possibly a prostitute. There’s a street-smart young beat cop standing nearby who knows the local working girls. There’s an incompetent subordinate who might have contaminated the crime scene. Techs are taking samples; witnesses wait nearby to be questioned. Then comes something unexpected: our detective notices a woman walking nearby, then “realises” she isn’t actually there, and unsees her.
Continue reading The City & The City
Borne is the new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, the David Lynch of literary sci fi. Don’t know what I mean? Let me give you an example by summarizing the events leading up to the action in this book. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by climate change and other, unspecified man-made disasters, an unnamed, partially-destroyed city is dominated by a biotech company (known, of course, as the Company). It’s not clear exactly what the Company makes (drugs? weapons? designer pets?), but at some point it creates Mord, a thing which grows into a giant bear the size of a building (it’s described as being three storeys high lying down). Mord develops the power to levitate and escapes the Company, wreaking havoc and destroying what remains of civilization in the city. In this environment our protagonist, a black (yes!) woman (YES!) named Rachel (fine), pairs up with Wick, a disgraced former Company employee who now manufactures biological hallucinogens in the form of beetles you insert into your ear, in a converted swimming pool that he’s made into a kind of swamp teeming with artificial life. They live in an apartment complex camouflaged as a cliff face overlooking a toxic river, which they’ve booby-trapped with weaponised biochemistry and other deterrents against trespassers. To help Wick, Rachel works as a scavenger, searching for biotech that can go into his drug-swamp-brew. The most fruitful source of this is Mord himself, and while he sleeps, Rachel climbs around in his fur looking for anything salvageable. Then comes page one.
Continue reading Borne
What happens when an oppressed people suddenly gain a huge amount of power over their oppressors? What would a truly matriarchal global society look like? Are men and women born with certain inherent characteristics, or are they the result of social conditioning (surely we can agree that one’s stupid, right)? What if women were the physically stronger sex?
Continue reading The Power
Returning to live with her mother and siblings after a mysterious absence, Eleanor’s first day at her new school begins inauspiciously, when no one will let her sit next to them on the bus. Eventually, Park takes pity on her, and over a series of bus trips they gradually develop a friendship that turns into a romance. But Eleanor’s home life is less than idyllic, and forces beyond their control are building that will threaten to topple their fragile happiness.
Continue reading Eleanor and Park
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?
Continue reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
As a person who has had a love of Agatha Christie inculcated in me from the years of my earliest literacy by older female relatives on both sides of my family, I am the first to admit that I am less than conversant in other great mystery novelists of the same period. It took me until my 30s to discover John Dickson Carr, for example – arguably the greatest of the so-called “locked room mystery” writers. My family bookshelves just didn’t deign to notice the existence of any detectives that weren’t Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or (grudgingly) Tommy and Tuppence Beresford*. No surprises, then, that Patricia Wentworth has only just appeared on the horizon of my literary radar**.
Continue reading Grey Mask ff
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.
Continue reading His Dark Materials
In the not-too-distant future, a flu-like epidemic has swept the globe. Of those who aren’t killed outright, a small but significant proportion develop a neurological complication that renders them conscious but paralysed – the Lock Ins of the title. Referred to as “Hadens” after a former (fictional) FLOTUS, an early contractor of the syndrome, they are implanted with complex nano-technology and able to interact with the outside world through the use of cybernetic prostheses. So yeah. Mind-controlled robots. A minuscule number of individuals are also left with their neurological structures affected in such a way that they can interface with Hadens, acting for short periods as their proxies (known as “integrators”).
Continue reading Lock In
I am an unashamed Le Carre fan. I think novels like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are pretty much as good as the espionage genre gets (or at least has got thus far). (I should disclose upfront that I’m not a fan of Ian Fleming, so feel free to form an opinion about that.) However, my heart belongs to Le Carre’s greatest character, George Smiley, so I may not have read this particular novel if it wasn’t for the BBC adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie (to say nothing of the glorious Olivia Colman).
Continue reading The Night Manager
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?
Continue reading Bats of the Republic
