Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 7

How you know you’re having a good summer

- breakfast is late and leisurely, and rather than actually ending, it just peters out into a vague stirring to activities which mostly don’t require you to relinquish your still unfinished coffee; check your mails, from the one place on the verandah you can get reception; carry the used crockery back inside by dribs and drabs; tidy up last night’s spent matches and mosquito coil stubs; top up your phone credit; read.

- the news all seems to be happening a long, long way away.

- you haven’t had access to a PS3 for more than a month; you don’t care.

- your socks are all still packed neatly away in the suitcase you brought them in, surplus to requirements since you arrived.

- your favourite T-shirts are growing bleached and frayed with prolonged exposure to seawater, suncream, chlorine, sweat; you find you like them better that way, and like yourself better when you wear them.

- your hair’s a mess – long and unruly and stacked stiff with salt, suncream, chlorine, sweat; you don’t care.  Most mornings, you grin at yourself in the mirror like sharing a secret.

- your nearest supermarket car park features views out across heat-hazed open ground and ragged giant palms to the sea.

- you’ll cheerfully drive the seven kilometres of winding mountain road to the village on an empty stomach and sleep-clogged eyes to get fresh bread and coffee for breakfast.

- you buy and barbecue meat at the slightest excuse, using wood and pine cones you foraged for yourself just hours earlier; in certain places, at certain moments, as you forage, the breeze carries hints of rosemary and wild thyme.

- you haven’t eaten inside for a month now; the idea of doing so starts to seem odd.

- despite all this food, you seem to be losing weight.  Or maybe it’s just the tan.

- your three year old son mistakes Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart for the theme tune to Postman Pat – Special Delivery, and insists you play it over and over again in the car.  You comply, and after a while you start to realise that despite Ian Curtis’s mournful voice and lyrics, Love Will Tear Us Apart is actually quite a catchy, upbeat little number….

- at night the stars glimmer so brightly and the cicadas’ rhythmic chirring sounds so loud that that they seem to blend, to become two sensory aspects of the same huge single phenomenon

- you shower outside with a garden hose whose coils have been heated so long in the sun that the water comes out too hot to use for the first thirty seconds.

- you’re careful to avoid actual serious sunburn or heatstroke (obsessive care of your infant son has spilled over into looking after yourself better too), but you find flirting with borderline overdoses of sun carries the same faintly masochistic pleasures as the hangovers and Sunday mornings after of your misspent youth.

- you get your hair cut locally and they fuck it up; you don’t care.

- you rip out the inner wall on a front tyre when it slips over the edge of a ragged poured concrete track and catches (on reflection, you maybe took that corner a little too hard, maybe had the Joy Division cranked up a little too loud); no matter.  Changing the tyre in 30 degrees of heat feels like Boy’s Own fun.

- you’ve quite forgotten you’ll ever have to go home.

Wrap Music (and Tracks from the Dawn of Time)

Finishing a trilogy – it turns out – is a more protracted affair than you’d imagine.  For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to get Ringil and company out of my head, in order to clear the decks for some straight up SF, but they’re not taking the eviction well.  Had a dream about the Gil the other night, something to do with dog-food, make sense of that if you can. And a few days ago, I heard this on some nameless local radio station out in the wilds of Andalucia, and was surprised to find how well it suited one of the principal characters.  So I backed up through my dodgy vinyl hard rock collection (so near as I can recall it at a distance), and sure enough I managed to find a match for the other two as well.

Bonus points for matching protagonist to track (note – some space for ambiguity and overlap here, but in my mind at least, it’s clear).

Right.  Maybe they’ll leave me alone now, and fade out like heroes of legend should…..

Choose your Poison

Find that I’m currently enjoying this rather a lot more than this.

Still not entirely sure of the why, both certainly have their respective flaws.  Might be a question of scale, or maybe just of tone.  But if anyone were to ask, I’d have to say the Ringil books chime far closer to the former than they do to the latter.

Luke Skywalker, Left Unity and the Stuttgart Megabrothel

Having been approached by the Star Wars franchise to write a tie-in with quote “a startlingly fresh angle on the canon”, I find myself-

Okay, just kidding.  Though it is tempting to imagine which New York-based emigre Latin American or East European post-modernist writer you might hire to deliver a tie-in novel behind that title…..  No, ahem, what this is really about is a minor revelation of linkage I had a few weeks ago.  I’d greeted the foundational statements of Ken Loach’s political brainchild Left Unity back in November with a facepalm-level groan – hey, a political party that’s against inequality and injustice; how come no-one ever thought of that before?  What a genius innovation!  All those other people who’ve spent their lives working in politics must just be kicking themselves that they missed that one.  And the procedures, I mean, it’s so simple – just end capitalism.  Yes, that’s worked so fucking well every time it’s been tried before.  Oh, and on an international scale while we’re at it!  Yes.  Just oppose all forms of discrimination, fully democratise all levels and aspects of society, everywhere.  Off we go, then!

So, wearily irritated by the fact so many seemingly intelligent people seem to be drinking this particular Koolaid, off I grouched.  Didn’t even bother posting at the site because, honestly, what’s the fucking point?  I mean, have we really learnt nothing in the last few decades?  Nothing about human nature, about social dynamics, about wealth-creation, about state control, about power – nothing, in short, about who we really are?

But I did notice that the irritation felt vaguely familiar.  I’d had the same basic feeling about something else, at some other time – but couldn’t pin down what exactly it was.

It took this article about megabrothels in Germany, with its links to an article on Canadian sex trade legislation and an interview with a British sex worker, for the penny to drop.  Here again, was the same myopic well-intentioned idealism, repelled by an unpleasant aspect of human behaviour, and touting brain-dead big-stick policy-making as the cure.  Yes – just ban prostitution; that’ll work.  Oh, and hey, why don’t we have a war on drugs while we’re at it, fuckwits?  Take down that Evil Empire, why don’t you?

Ah.

Sudden recollection slammed in, of this quote from George Lucas on the subject of his inspiration for the original Star Wars (the quote is from Wikipedia here, cited as occurring in the Joseph Campbell biography A Fire in the Mind):

“I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what’s valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is”

Right.  Which is why I could never stand Star Wars once I’d reached the age of about fifteen.  Because by then, most of the literature and cinema I was consuming was precisely about showing the world (the human world anyway) the way it is.  By then, I took – and still take now – the effective mirroring and interrogation of the human condition (rather than dreamy, idealistic flight from it) as the hallmark of good adult fiction.

Thing is, though, Star Wars sure is popular, and not just with kids under the age of fifteen.  Huge numbers of people actively enjoy the refuge from the real that idealised Hero figures and their battles against a Great Evil provide.  Which is fine, I guess, it is only fiction after all.  But I can’t help wondering whether an entertainment matrix which constantly reinforces unrealistically black and white contexts of struggle doesn’t also distil a similarly unrealistic attitude when it comes to assessing real human struggle in the real human world.  How many Left Unity supporters see themselves as Che-style X-wing pilots, swooping in to destroy the evil capitalist Death Star, because then, of course, all will be right with the universe?  How many campaigners for maintaining the criminal status of prostitution once dreamed of rescuing a captured Princess from the clutches of evil men?  Come to that, how many supporters of the Iraq war thought they were finally seeing a chance to take down Darth Vader and set a people free of tyranny just like that?

My irritation is not with the dreams.  They’re part of who we are; we all have them – wouldn’t it be nice if…….  My problem is with those who stubbornly expect, against all the gathered evidence and informed opinion from those on the ground, that their dreams can be imposed, flatly and mechanistically, onto the myriad teeming variegated mess that is the real human world.  Abolish capitalism.  Abolish commerce in sexual relations.  Stamp out Drugs.  Free Iraq.  Yeah, right.

And I have the feeling that the general failure of maturity present in that mindset, the apparent congenital inability to understand that in the real world things are actually a bit complicated than that, isn’t helped by the pervasiveness of a fiction whose primary intention is full retreat from that real world.

 

New Aunts and Catching Up in Westeros

One of the nice things that wrapping Land Fit for Heroes has given me is a sudden freedom to catch up on a whole lot of other people’s fantasy fiction; now I’m done, I no longer live in terror of involuntarily inflecting my work with traces of Martin, Abercrombie et al – I can actually go and try this stuff with my reader’s hat firmly on.  Or, to be more accurate so far, with my watcher’s eyes in, because my first step in this process has been to slump exhausted on the sofa in front of the first two seasons of A Game of Thrones.  I do actually have A Game of Thrones the novel on my bookshelf, just as I have most of Joe Abercrombie’s stuff (one of the perks of sharing a publisher is gifted access to gifted fellow authors’ work), but I was (still am) just too textually wrung out from eight months nailing down The Dark Defiles to embark on reading anything quite that colossal right now.  And anyway, I’d heard HBO stuck pretty close to the original material, so…..

How was it for me?  Ehm, yeah, good.  Not many of my personal obsessions in there as far as subject matter goes, and how anyone ever thought to compare this stuff with my own is beyond me.  But you’ve got your solid, engaging story-telling, some nice subtle character work, intricate and intriguing world build, some truly powerful moments as knowledge of the contexts deepens.  If the books measure up to this, I can see why Martin has been hailed as such a phenomenon in the fantasy field – especially given that the first book dates from almost twenty years ago.

But for all that, I’m puzzled.

Puzzled why?  Well, puzzled as I try to match up the material I’m watching with the vast, vitriolic storm about it that’s raged across the genre blogosphere the last couple of years, right from the sniffy, dismissive reception the series got from the New York Times when it first surfaced, through to the on-going whinge about G-g-g-grimdark and the charges of creepy! problematic! misogynistic! racist!  Uhh, really?

One way or another, I’m having a hard time seeing this thing as the reprehensible stain on the face of modern fantasy that various commentators have avowed it to be.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say the show doesn’t have its flaws; much though I like looking at the naked female form, I do also like there to be some faint narrative justification for it, and two seasons in I’m seeing a pretty shaky justification-to-breasts ratio.  Likewise, I’m not overfond of the constant use of cliff-hangers to drag me along; you kind of feel that a confident narrative shouldn’t need to keep falling back on that trick.  It’s very American TV of course, with the constant terror that medium has of haemorrhaging audience numbers during a commercial break, and I imagine it’s in his work for TV that Martin acquired his taste for the technique.  But still, less is more, y’all, and anyway HBO doesn’t have commercial breaks.  Oh yeah, and then there’s the Dothraki, who just seem to have lost out a bit where it comes to the world-building – unlike almost every other aspect of Martin’s social and political creation, I’m still unable to get a very clear fix on who the Dothraki are, where they are, what they’re about, how they relate to everyone else they bump up against……  Dunno, maybe it’s clearer in the books.

But still – it takes a peculiar kind of personality disorder to go violently overboard about these flaws (much the same personality disorder, it now occurs to me, as the one that so often manifests itself in shrill, stonewalling fanboy adoration of any given book/game/movie/TV show.  Other side of the same grubby coin, perhaps?).

What I reckon this genre conversation needs is some New aunts.

Coincidentally, you see, I was over at the Song of Ice and Fire message board, going back and forth on the much vexed subject of gender parity in epic fantasy contexts (women as warriors?  how many?  doing what? how likely? so forth) and up popped a regular board contributor with some hands on experience of female warriors (being one; working with others like her) in the IDF.  Asked about that experience and her feelings on the psychology involved, said contributor, name of Datepalm, responded at length and included this little gem:

“in general, my view is…nuanced.”

And you know, that’s the whole thing in a nutshell – nuance.  

Nuance is the beating heart of good critical appreciation.  Nuance allows that a piece of art may have elements with which to take issue, but that those elements need not obliterate a more general validity – and conversely that cool or otherwise delightful elements do not invalidate functional criticism.  Nuance is what you find in film reviews by guys like Peter Bradshaw and Philip French (I’d give rather a lot to read a review of Game of Thrones by either of those two gentlemen, but it appears they don’t do TV).  Nuance is the reason I read broadsheet review sections in general.  Nuance defuses fanshrill and rant.  Nuance enhances rather than tears down, puts under a microscope, not a hammer.  Nuance encourages a plurality of opinion and a complexity of interpretation.  Nuance allows that the world is a complex place, humans complex entities, and that the vast bulk of art that attempts to address the human condition carries that same complexity within it as a matter of course.

With nuance, for example, you can say things like although there’s a fair bit of gratuitous female nudity in Game of Thrones, the show also features a panoply of smart and powerful female characters and an implicit on-going critique of patriarchal power.  Perhaps it reflects – knowingly or not – our own stumbling cultural confusion where female agency is concerned.  The sort of thing, in other words, that opens a debate rather than shuts it down.  Nuance will let you wonder if the Dothraki, though they may seem to stand for an exotic savagery and Otherness, are in fact any more savage than any of the cultures and kingdoms we see in the west? For that matter, are they any more exotic or Other than, say, Winterfell, the Wall and the Night’s Watch, the Eyrie and its Sky Cells, or the Targaryens and their dragons?  Tell the truth, it’s all pretty fucking weird and Other, isn’t it?  Nuance will outclass Ginia Bellafante’s quite stunningly myopic and ill-informed dismissal of the show in the New York Times, not by beating the drums of fan fury and genre ghetto outrage, but by enumerating the ways in which Game offers a perfectly serviceable mirror for general human failings including but not limited to misogyny, infidelity (of various types) and pointless factional squabbling in the face of a larger doom, every bit as effective as more narrowly reality-based shows such as Boardwalk Empire or Rome.   Oh, and is also, like those shows, good, fast-paced, visceral but intelligent entertainment (with a number of flaws).

Nuance, in fact, will be your passport out of the usual wearisome morass of intra-genre back-biting and self-righteous oneupmanship and into a place where you can, like consumers of most other forms of fiction, appreciate a piece of work for what it is, see its strengths and weaknesses, all without feeling the need to either get down on your knees and worship at the shrine or somehow beat it shrilly and triumphantly into submission.

So yeah – who’s for some new aunts?

What’s the Tome, Mr Wolf

Just call me Santiago…..

Out in the Gulf three days (ehm, that’d be three years actually, Richard – ed.) towed behind this bloody great fish, biggest thing I’ve ever had a hook in.  But I landed it, Sunday last, and finally got it on the scales.

247k.

Yeah, that’s 247 thousand words.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present The Dark Defiles – done at last.

I know a quarter million words isn’t considered all that big of a fish in the oceans of fantasy (Game of Thrones 284k, Deadhouse Gates 272k, Name of the Wind 259k, Dance with Dragons don’t even go there), but it’s still about half as long again as anything I’ve written before, so if you’re wondering what the fuck has been keeping me all this time, well, there’s that.  And the good news is that now it’s done, you’ll have a whole fifty percent more time and space than The Cold Commands in which to enjoy the final company of Ringil, Archeth and the Dragonbane.  Plus – and this is the big thing, for me – Defiles ties the Land Fit for Heroes trilogy definitively up.  All your questions answered, all outstanding narrative threads resolved, all debts paid.

Here’s the play-out.

Penultimate Pre-pub Taste

There were times he dreamed that the cage had taken him after all; that he made some impassioned speech confessing guilt and repentance on the floor of the Hearings Chamber, and offered himself up for the sentence instead.  That the Chancellery law-lords in their enthroning chairs and finery murmured behind their hands, deliberated amongst themselves for a space and finally nodded with stern paternal wisdom, and the manacles were unlocked and his wife and children set free.  He saw it with tears in his eyes and a sobbing laugh on his lips, saw Sindrin kneel on the cold marble, weeping and hugging at little Shoy and Miril, while Shif junior just stood and looked back at him across the chamber with mirroring tears standing in his own young man eyes.

Then he woke, to his chains and the memory of what had really been done.

  Sprayborne tilted on her anchors beneath him, yearned seaward on the currents from the river’s mouth.  The damp cold of dawn seeped in through the portholes over his head and brought with it from the mudflats a stench like death.

At other times, maybe triggered by that reek, it was nightmare that took him – he dreamed, keening deep in his throat as he slept, that the rusted locks fell off the gibbet cages where they’d been heaved over the side and come to rest on the estuary’s silted bed, and now Shoy and Miril swam free, glitter-eyed and skeletal in the murky water, rising into the light to knock at Sprayborne’s hull and call for their father to come out and play……

Living punishment, as severe as the law allows, pronounced law-lord Murmin Kaad grimly into the anticipatory quiet of the Hearing Chamber.  Meted out to reflect the severity of your sins against the Fair City and its allies, and to serve as clear example to others.  Shif Stepwyr, you will see your bloodline extinguished, you will be imprisoned in the vessel you used to commit your crimes, and you will be given the rest of your natural span to reflect upon the evil you have done in this world.

He screamed when he heard it, and sometimes, waking from his dreams, he echoed those screams again.  Screamed and tore at his fetters until he bled from the old scarred wounds once more, screamed as he had in the Hearing Chamber, for the Salt Lord to come for him, for the whole fucking Dark Court to come if they willed it, to take his soul, to take him away, to any kind of torment but this, if he might just first pay back the rulers of Trelayne for what the justice they had meted out.

No-one came.

Four years now, as near as he could reckon it, since the last of his children’s weakened cries ceased and he knew he could count them dead.  Since he heard the splash of the gibbet cages thrown overboard and then the steady grating back and forth of the bandsaw they used to cut through Sprayborne’s masts and topple them.

Four years trying to sell his soul to every demon god whose name he knew, and no takers yet.  Four years chained the same way his ship was chained, in a space meant to break body and mind alike.

For the craftsman jailers of Trelayne knew what they were about.  They were well versed in the art of converting ships into dungeons – in a rapidly burgeoning city where every new square yard of building space had to be reclaimed from the marsh, prison hulks had long been the most economical way of shelving undesirables not considered worthy of execution.  Better yet, there was a helpful, finger-wagging symbolism in the trick, especially where piracy was the crime for which punishment was to be exacted.  The prison hulks were visible from the city walls on the south side, and from the slums in Harbour End too, if you had a good enough eye; clearer still from the spread of reclaimed land beyond the city’s skirts, where Trelayne’s agricultural workforce bent their backs to earn a barely sustaining crust, and from the broad sweep of marshland beyond that, where the marsh dweller clans held to their encampments and grubbed a living in whichever way they could.

For all in those places who cared to look, then, the hulks were a grim, gathered presence, like storm clouds on the horizon.  Transgress the laws of the Fair City, and look where you could end up.  Look what became of sweet-keeled pirate vessels and their crews when the force of that law was invoked.

Inside Sprayborne, the same didactic sensibility held sway for the inmates, but seasoned with an additional twist of cruelty.  They’d built the cells into the hull like the chambers in a wasp’s nest, each one sitting just above the bilges and served with light by portholes too high up to peer out of without the prisoner gouging at wrists and ankles when his restraining chains went taut.  You might see the outside world you had forgone for your crimes, but only at painful cost.

For the rest, you sat chained in damp, stinking gloom and watched the days of your life march in filtering fingers of light from the portholes, across the opposing wall of the cell from one side to the other and down again into darkness.

Wyr availed himself of the option to look outside only on those occasions that he felt his sanity going, slipping quietly away from him in the rank confines of the cell.  At other times, he refused to torment himself with what he could not have.  He was, above all and despite himself, a survivor.  He shook off his dreams each day, fed them as fuel to the rage in his belly.  He cleaned the bowls of thin stew they served him, he devoted the few clear-headed hours of strength the slop gave him to simple, mindless exercises that didn’t pull on his chains.  The evenings, he spent filing away at his fetters with one of the iron nails he had worked loose from the hull planking, until it grew too dark to see what he was doing.  It would take years to cut through a single manacle, probably a decade to free all four limbs, always assuming he didn’t run out of nails first.  And if they caught him at it, they’d just replace the irons with fresh ones or maybe simply kill him.

But it gave him something to do.  It gave him a daily focus for his fury.  It gave him hope, and he knew how vital that was.

In the other cells, he could hear how men from his crew went slowly, gibbering mad with the isolation and the death of hope.  They started out four years past with thumped messages in code through the wooden walls, shouted vows of solidarity to each other from cell to cell.  But all too soon the structure of their communication began to break down.  They hammered on the planking in incoherent rage, they yelled, they screamed, they wept.  Eventually, they began to cackle and crow incomprehensibly to themselves.  In the first couple of years, he’d been able to recognise voices, put individual names of men to the yelling, but that time was long past.  Now, Sprayborne’s whole hull echoed faintly with their mingled mutterings and laments, as if the men themselves were gone and only ghosts remained.

Footfalls, in the corridor along the keel.

Wyr propped himself up from the planks where he lay, stared at the filtering fingers of light over his head.  It was early in the day for food, they’d not usually feed him much before noon.  The tiny shift in routine, the trickle of difference it made, set an unreasonable jag of excitement chasing through his veins.  Something was going on.

Scrape of a key in the lock, the heavy wooden door thumped back and a familiar figure stood in the space it left.  Wyr blinked and straightened up in his chains.  Coughed and shuddered with the damp.

“Gort?”  Voice a choked husk.  Stifle the coughing, force it down.  “What you doing here at this hour?”

“Same as fucking ever.”  The jailer hefted a pail at his side, bigger than the usual, and it made a slopping sound that set Wyr’s mouth running with saliva.  “And I’m telling you now, this might be all you get ‘til day after tomorrow, depending.  Don’t scoff it all at once, eh.”

“Right, yeah.  What’s going on?”

Gort heaved a world-weary sigh.  He was a gutty sack of a man, lugubrious and slow and full of complaints.  But by the standards of prison hulk jailers, he was a prince.  He appeared to pass no judgment on the men he attended, saw them as unfortunates just like himself, caught up in the same atrocious web of chance that had landed him with this gods-forsaken job.  Previous jailers, equally unhappy with their lot, had never missed a chance to take it out on the chained prisoners at the slightest provocation, or sometimes with none at all.  It was a casual brutality, no different than stomping a cat or hurling stones at a street cur – they mostly used boots or fists, only occasionally the short studded lash they carried at their belt as the closest thing there was to a badge of office in this line of work.  But Wyr had never seen Gort’s lash come off his belt, and the worst he’d had to endure at the man’s hands were the interminable monologues on the many, many ways in which life had conspired to treat his jailer unjustly.

“Got to do the whole fucking boat and be back to Harbour End before noon, if you can believe that shit.  Like to see them up at the Chancellery manage that.  They must think – here, cop hold of this; stash it or eat it now, up to you – must think I’ve got a fucking longboat and full complement to row me out and back, ‘stead of what I have got, which is two broken down old war veterans with more scar tissue than skin barely know one end of an oar from the other. ‘course, that’s not the best of it, neither.  After this round, we’re right back out again with provisions and medicines for the yellow-n-blacks.  Well, they needn’t think I’m setting a single foot on one of those fucking decks, not on what they pay me.  Let the fucking bone men go, earn their money for a change-”

“Yellow and black?”  Voice still husky with lack of use, but a fresh pulse of interest prickled along Wyr’s nerves.  “Out here, you mean?  With the hulks?”

“Yeah, fucking plague ship, where else they going to stick it?  Navy picket brought them in last night, a whole squadron of them.”  A vague nod up at the portholes.  “Three ships, and two of them are captured imperials.  Probably where they picked it up, those southerners got some filthy fucking habits from what I hear.  All flying the pennants, anyway.”

“Plague.”  He said it like the name of a god he might worship.  The bucket of stew was forgotten at his feet.

“Yeah, just what we fucking needed, right?  On top of the war and all?  Don’t really know why they’re making us feed them in the first place.  If it’s anything like back in ’41, they’ll all be dead by end of week, and then we’ll just have to burn the ships to the waterline.  Waste of good food, waste of my fucking time coming out an extra trip every day.”  Gort’s eyes narrowed with freshly aggrieved suspicion.  “Might be, you know, this is all some Empire trick to fuck us over.  Maybe the imperials let them capture those ships on purpose, crewed them up with men what were already infected and let us take them, so we’d carry the plague right into the city.  Sort of thing they’d do, treacherous fuckers, they pretty soon forgot how we drove out the lizards for them, didn’t they.  And now look.  Hinerion taken like a peach, Empire columns marching right into the peninsula like it was their backyard.  You ask me, that raiding you did down south after the war, they should of given you a fucking medal for it.”

“What I thought,” said Sharkmaster Wyr quietly.

“Yeah, guess we all got to carry other men’s fuck ups, don’t we.  Like I should of had that harbour watch job when old Feg died, everyone knew I was his favourite for it.  Still can’t believe that little shit Sobli got it instead.  Anyway, not going to bore you with that story again.  Like I said, don’t you go eating all that at once, mate.  With this shit boiling up, could be a couple of days before I get back here again.  Right, that’s it, got to get on.  Let’s hope your old bosun’s calmed down a bit since yesterday.  Last thing I need on top of everything else, that is – him flinging his own turds at me like any of this is my fucking fault.”

The door clubbed shut again, the key grated round, and Gort went grumbling away.  Wyr got up and hobbled stiffly to a portion of the cell floor under the nearest porthole.  He took a long breath, then hauled himself up on the porthole’s lower edge, wincing as his fetters dug into recently healed flesh from a dream he’d had a few days back.

He gritted his teeth and hauled harder, got his chin over the edge and peered out.

Bright morning light, long angled ladders of it propped up against the clouds, as if the sky was prepared for boarding.  The new ships sat at anchor about a quarter league off, marked out from the hulk fleet by their masts, at the top of which the yellow and black plague pennants flopped slackly about in the breeze.  One League caravel, looked like Alannor yard work from the lines, and two bigger, fatter Empire merchantmen, the sort that would have raised a low, predatory cheer from his crew back in the day.  All three vessels flew the colours of Trelayne.  It was hard to tell in the glare of early daylight off the water, his eyes were stinging from the unaccustomed brightness, but it didn’t look as if there was anyone up on deck.

  “Hoy, look – No!  Fucking pack that in!”

Gort’s muffled bellow from a couple of cells down the keel.  Something nearly like a smile touched Wyr’s lips, then passed away.  He lowered himself back down to the plank flooring and slid fingers under the fetters on his wrists, massaging the abused flesh there as best he could.

He crouched there, thoughtful, trying to understand why the arrival of the plague ships should feel so much like something good.

 

KC and the Stunned Sign(ing) Hand

Robert M. Pirsig reckons, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that we’re all motorbikes.  Or rather, he likens the conscientious good maintenance of a motorcycle to the emotional (perhaps even spiritual) upkeep and running repairs that we ought, in good conscience, to carry out on ourselves in life.  It’s a nice analogy – feels a bit cramped set down here like that, read the book if you haven’t already, it unfolds more elegantly there – and one I still fall back on now and then almost thirty years after I first stumbled on it.

One of the components I find myself tinkering with a lot on my particular bike is the Humility Valve.  I’m no great fan of false modesty, I think it looks pretty uniformly ghastly painted onto all those hugely successful movie and music stars in plasticky interview or award acceptance mode, or even on moderately successful genre authors at conventions for that matter.  But at the same time, it’s only fair to recognise that genuine modesty is sometimes quite hard to manufacture when you’ve done well at something and there’s a line of people round the block all telling you how great you are.  Thing is, that kind of rush can actually be very good for your creative juices – but at the same time, let it tip over into arrogance or entitlement and you’re in trouble.  So – tinker, tinker.  It’s just one of those strip-it-down-and-clean-the-parts things that you have to keep working on, trying to make sure there’s a decent bleed balance of self-esteem/humility to keep you running real.

Doesn’t hurt to have the odd transfusion of one or the other pumped into the system either.

At Octocon in Dublin last month – which was, by the way, awesome; lovely people, lovely venue, lovely city – I had not one but two pretty massive doses of humility jacked into my veins in the space of as many hours.  First off, there was this:

 

Yes, that is a MacBook Pro I’m signing there, and the speech bubble leaking from my slightly shocked mouth reads “Are you absolutely fucking sure about this, mate???”

I mean, I own one of these beasts myself, and I don’t even like to get a grease streak anywhere on its beautiful aluminium unibody hull – let alone have some guy scrawl his signature across the base.   But this particular fan (whose name I didn’t write down and has now slipped my mind – stand up if it’s you) insisted; he had my stuff from iBooks and so the logical thing was for me to ink up his chosen reading platform.  He was then going to go away and cover the signature in sticky back cellophane to preserve it for posterity.  (Picture courtesy of my Con guide, minder and all round great guy, JC – many thanks)

Colour me humbled.

And as if that wasn’t enough, shortly after the signing wrapped up and JC led a slightly dazed Yours Truly back to the Camden Court hotel for pre-Con drinks, I bumped into one K.C. Freels – an American fan who’d flown all the way from Nashville to Dublin specifically to meet me.

Man, I hope I didn’t disappoint.

I came back from Octocon quietly fired up.  Dark Defiles is in the home straight.  I’m pulling out all the stops for this one.

See you on the shelves.

 

 

 

GoH West, young man

Last part of that is ironic – I turned 48 less than two weeks ago.  But I am indeed heading (south)west this very week, as OctoCon’s Guest of Honour for 2013 (see earlier post under excruciating pun Dublin Up).  A full programme is available here, and will apparently download as an app to your pod/pad/phone/tablet or, if you’re a real dinosaur like me, laptop, so you can then look up, bookmark and cross reference without needing to be online.  Neat, huh?  And it means you’ll be able to find out, at the touch of a screen, exactly where Yours Truly is at any given moment during the Con and act accordingly (bail out and slope off to the bar for a drink, for example).

Lots of cool stuff up for grabs in the panels – I’m especially looking forward to leaping up and down with hobnailed boots on the Luke Skywalker/Joseph Campbell confection of Hero-ism around Sunday brunch-time.  But there’s also a whole bunch of cutting edge stuff about the state of the genre and current trends within it, most of which I shall be spending my time listening to rather than holding forth on.  Take a look, see what you think.  And maybe see you there.

At Long Last, By Popular Request

I’ve had so many requests for another Read and Recommended list over the last few years, it was starting to feel churlish not to oblige.  But what with an intense couple of years moonlighting  in the games industry, the sudden impact of  fatherhood and delayed book deadlines raging out of all decent control, it felt like I barely had time to read the books, let alone write them up.  But it has been a while – since late 2009, in fact – so here, finally, is an extra long list covering that period.  Enjoy!

 

Americanah – Chimamandah Ngozie Adichie

I got into Adichie via my wife’s bookshelf and the collection of short fiction The Thing Around Your Neck, some of whose stories – Jumping Monkey Hill comes to mind – were among the best realist shorts I’ve ever read.  I’d always been a bit wary of the novels, though, warned away by my wife’s blunt observation that Adichie is a gifted writer, but what she writes is fundamentally high class romance fiction.  But I had really loved some of those shorts, and the subject matter of Americanah was just too tempting to pass up – race in America, seen through African eyes (with a side order of illegal immigrant experience in the UK) – so in I dived.  Turns out my wife is right, this is ultimately a slightly soppy romance novel, but the route it takes to get there is scenic and thought-provoking in the extreme.  It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in more than a few places, and drawn with a sly emotional intelligence masquerading as the simplicity of innocence.  The critiques Adichie offers are scrupulously even-handed, with characters coolly dissected and pinned out for us regardless of their origins, and the state of Nigerian society coming in for every bit as much drubbing as anything in the US or the UK.  In fact, there’s a twitchy, malcontent eye at work here which sees the human flaws in just about everything and so melds perfectly with the smart, youthful restlessness of Adichie’s female protagonist as she leaves Africa for the promise of the US and ends up trapped in a cultural and emotional no man’s land somewhere between the two.  The male protagonist feels like less of a good fit, he seems a bit too Bridget Jones perfect to be true, and his experiences in the UK don’t have the same in-depth ring of truth to them as those of his lost love over in the US – it’s pretty clear that while Adichie has actually lived some close approximation of what her heroine goes through, the UK sections are drawn from secondary research and there’s a sharply noticeable drop in acuity and flare where these sections are concerned.  Still, that restless critical eye gives the book a real bite not usually associated with the word romance, and it’s coupled with a deeply humane compassion that eschews easy answers or simplistic condemnation, bringing the whole thing to glimmering, joyful life.  I may just have to go back and try the other two novels, high class romance fiction or not.

 

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Massive tome from the author of the very brilliant The Blank Slate, chronicling the overall decline of violence – yes, you read that right – throughout human history.  Pinker has pulled an interesting trick here that’s likely to confound a lot of his critics and maybe some of his more pessimistically inclined fans too.  Notwithstanding his previous books, which lean hard on issues of genetic hardwiring in human behaviour, Better Angels attempts to track the moderating influence of social and cultural dynamics on violence – albeit then linking those dynamics back to inherent factors in human psychology – and to explain why it really does appear that we are living in the least violent times ever.  Despite the book’s size, and a – for me, anyway – rather difficult-to-digest middle section dealing with the statistics of warfare, this is mostly a fast, fascinating read and will probably cheer you up rather more than you’d expect, given the vast catalogue of horrific human behaviour it starts out with.  Pinker is on form stylistically as ever, mingling incisive analysis with wry humour and humanity, broad research with personal anecdote and evident revulsion at human savagery with informed optimism about the future.  Unlike Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which was refreshing but smacked rather too much of Ridley having drunk the American libertarian corporate Kool Aid, I came away from this book with my respect for the author’s scholarship wholly intact, and still a sense that cautious but genuine optimism was a reasonable stance to take.  And there’s precious little of that shit about  in these messianic doom-and-gloom times.

 

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

I read Diaz’s Drown when it first came out back in the nineties, and was a bit ambivalent; on the one hand, I recognised a distinctive and gifted voice from a place I’d never seen, on the other hand none of the stories went anywhere much, they were more like meditations, mood pieces and character snapshots, and in the end I just got impatient with those moods and characters and the way they were all, indeed, drowning in their own muddy little lives.  So while the premise of Oscar Wao was intriguing – a fat, graceless Dominican boy hopelessly adrift in a culture that values beauty, machismo and sexual prowess above all else and clinging desperately to the life-raft of SF, Fantasy and Comicbooks for survival – I didn’t hold out much hope for where it would go.  More fool me – I burnt through the whole thing in almost a single sitting, and it clobbered me harder than such an unassuming novel has any right to.  All the stylistic verve that had been on display in Drown’s short pieces has here been tuned up for long haul, and the fragmentary nature of Diaz’s narrative inclinations harnessed to deliver at novel length.  There’s a real story here alright, a tragic one, that truly goes the distance.  Along the way, we get a savage indictment of machismo, racism, dictatorship and colonialism and, delicately observed, the very real webbing between all of the above.  The engine of this novel is rage – an excoriating rage in which Diaz spares no-one and nothing from the cold eye of truth, and you’ll tremble with that same rage yourself as you read.  Oscar Wao is an aching lament for failed humanity at every level, and a thorough-going triumph that fully deserves the Pulitzer it received.  Rumour has it that Diaz’s next is going to be an alien invasion SF extravaganza set in the Dominican Republic, and I for one cannot wait.

 

The Creed of Violence – Boston Teran

I lost track of the fairly transparently pseudonymous Boston Teran after reading his (or her?) stunning debut God is a Bullet some time back in 200o.  Not sure why, but I remember I belonged to a crime fiction book club back then and I think I might have OD’d on the form and so taken a sabbatical from it back into SF and Litfic.  Anyway, I found myself doing a re-read last year and was forcibly reminded just how savagely intense Teran’s style is, and how refreshingly in-your-face the female characters were.  So I went out in search of whatever else Teran might have written since, and I came up with this.  Creed is wrapped in hype at the moment, because it apparently sold to Universal Pictures for quote the second highest price ever paid for an unpublished manuscript unquote, and is soon to be a movie starring Leo diCaprio, no, wait, Christian Bale, maybe…..  My advice is to get it while it’s hot and before any putative movie sinks its claws in and spoils your own personal impressions of character and setting.  We’ve come a long way here since Bullet, the style is far more laconic and stripped down, and rather than being overwhelmed by the force of it, you are given a lot more space to deploy your own feelings and imagination.  If I had to guess, I’d say Teran has been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy in the last few years, and seems to want to achieve a similar kind of gaunt poetry to that found in Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy and The Road.  And the narrative is certainly in a similar thematic vein – fathers and sons, horses and guns, poverty and privation along the Tex-Mex border, sudden violence, loss and debts unpaid, desperate journeys and chases across hostile landscapes larger than man; it’s all here.  And while Teran never manages to scale the stylistic heights that you see in McCarthy, this is still powerful stuff, with the additional benefits of a far more tightly reined plot than McCarthy usually deigns to provide, and some taut political comment into the bargain.  It’s a book you’ll barrel through in a couple of sittings, but it still might just bring a tear or two to your eye by the end.

 

Freedom(‘s Opening Sequence) – Jonathan Franzen

Bit conflicted about this one.  I picked it up in a motorway service station bookshop of all places, which says something about the broad extent of its appeal (or at least of its publisher’s marketing strategy).  Given the huge fanfare it had in the critical press, and the enduring good name attached to Franzen’s previous tour de force, The Corrections, which I’d never got round to, I thought I should give it a chance.  So that’s what I did – I gave it a chance.  More accurately, I gave it a long series of no, really, this is your last chances, all based on the opening fifty odd pages.  See, the opening fifty odd pages are among the best contemporary realist fiction I’ve ever read.  They form a neat, self-contained and beautifully allegorical long short story about life in the American suburbs, gentrification and the culture wars, all built around the intriguing figure of beautiful, determined and to all appearances perfect stay-at-home wife and mother Patty Berglund.  At that point, I was all ready to class Franzen as one of the American greats, up there with guys like Pynchon and Pete Dexter, and race out and buy The Corrections immediately.  Unfortunately, Freedom starts to stumble not long after that opening sequence wraps up, then heads steadily downhill and rarely if ever recovers its early brilliance. It bounces around all over the place, takes barely relevant detours into territory that is frankly rather dull and/or not very believable, and – a cardinal sin for me – it constantly mangles its characters’ integrity in order to drag the crippled plot along. Patty in particular suffers rather badly from this treatment, which is a pity because it looked for a while there as if she was going to be the lynchpin of the whole book, and when that structural support fails, as it does rather catastrophically, what’s left is really rather un-intriguing and so-so by comparison.  Don’t want to belabour any of this, because this is after all a Read and Recommended list, and somehow I can’t not recommend this book.  But please bear in mind the recommendation is purely of the early stages of the book plus the odd burst of belated writing talent later on.  You really should read that first section.  You probably shouldn’t bother with the rest.  But of course if you read the first bit and love it the way I did, then you’ll probably be terminally hooked to the rest, the way I was, desperately trying to rediscover a magic that never really comes back.  You Have Been Warned!

 

Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis

Early in 2012, I faced the not entirely unattractive task of getting my BMW X3 back from southern Spain to central Scotland against the clock. A European car insurance specialist had screwed me royally over premiums and left me in imminent danger of owning an uninsured vehicle two thousand miles from home.  Something had to be done about this fast, so I left wife and child with the Spanish side of the family and sped north, veins awash with Red Bull and Spanish coffee. Through a combination of long hours at the wheel and utterly illegal speeds, I covered Spain from end to end on the first day, France from end to end on the second and the UK from end to end on the third (collecting my one and only speeding ticket when I was - shitfuckbollocks! - less than fifty miles from home ).  I stayed in nameless little inns and motels en route, stopping only to eat, gas up and sleep, and in the few brief fractions of an hour I had each night between crawling into bed and falling fast asleep, I read Imperial Bedrooms.  All this may have enhanced the dreamlike, hallucinatory quality of the book, I suppose, but not by much.  I’m not an Ellis fan, I tried Less Than  Zero back in the late eighties and thought it was so-so, and I bailed out of American Psycho halfway through because, to be blunt, I couldn’t be arsed with it.  But Imperial Bedrooms is a whole other thing – a haunting, moody, atmospheric noir the like of which I’ve never seen before, delivered, like a vicious sucker punch, in under two hundred paperback pages.  It’s as if Ian McEwan suddenly moved to LA, rediscovered his late seventies/early eighties psychosexual obsessions there, and decided he wanted to write them out like James Ellroy.  And it could give lessons in savagery to Ellroy and just about anybody else working in noir right now.  Basically, Ellis takes the protagonists of Less Than Zero twenty five years on, slyly exploits the gaps between book and film versions of that story – you can tell he hated the film with a passion – and takes us on a nightmarish walk through the underbelly of the Hollywood movie machine.  I doubt you’ll read a shorter, sharper, more brutal novel this year.  Prepare to flinch.

 

The Lock Artist – Steve Hamilton

This one came right out of left field – it was handed to me by my editor Simon Spanton, not to blurb, because it was already out by then, but simply because he thought it was one of the freshest books he’d read in a long time.  And I must concur.  Hamilton habitually writes a species of noir featuring a more or less generic reluctant ex-cop PI named Alex McKnight and though they’re well enough written, I never really warmed to the basic conceit.  But this is something completely different.  It is, I suppose, a crime novel, detailing as it does the rise of an uncannily gifted young lock breaker with an awful secret in his past that has struck him mute, but there’s a quiet, almost allegorical dynamic going on here that reminds me of early Rupert Thomson or maybe Paul Auster if he could just let the fuck go and have some fun.  Just as with Thomson’s Five Gates of Hell, the criminal elements in this book feel less realistic than they do emblematic or mythological, and the story unfolds almost like some gritty, latter-day fable for our times.  Above all, what holds The Lock Artist up above the norm of crime genre fiction is the writing, which is quietly masterful and creates whole swathes of deeper implication out of very straightforward relationships and circumstance.  It is that rare thing, a fresh take in a genre creaking with cliche, and you come away from it refreshed and eager for more.  Unfortunately, this is a stand-alone, so there isn’t any more – so savour it while it lasts.  Meantime, maybe I’ll go back and have another shot at a couple more of the Alex McKnight stories after all.

 

Naming the Bones – Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh is, if such a thing is possible, the Dark Echo of Iain Banks – she has the same essentially Scottish flavour to her work, but where Banks’ novels are steeped in the  joie de vivre of wine, women and song, Welsh mines a far more sinister take on those same joys.  In place of cheery drunkenness and hangover, you have grimly methodical inebriation and lasting damage.  In place of innocently intense sexual love, darkly obsessive and destructive sexual need.  In place of resolution and emotional triumph, survival – but only just.  Naming the Bones has all of these dark qualities, laid down in a prose that’s like being tied up ever tighter with strips of red and black silk.  It is undoubtedly Welsh’s best work since her stunning debut The Cutting Room, and may be her best full stop.  It starts out the  seemingly innocuous tale of a restless young Glasgow academic on the trail of a mysterious vanished poet, and ends up a nightmarish spiral of threat and dread beyond anything purely physical and into the realm of the existential.  It could almost be horror fiction, but for the lack of any actual in-your-face horror.  It could almost be poetry, but for the brisk, thriller-like pace of the prose.  It could almost be a thriller but for the haunting lack of certainty or resolution. In the end, Naming the Bones is more and better than any of these – it’s a ghostly amalgam that not one writer in a thousand is capable of, and a virtuoso performance that left me in awe.

 

Never Count Out The Dead - Boston Teran

Features here because along with the Creed of Violence, I tracked down Teran’s back catalogue and the writing in these earlier books is so significantly different it could almost be a different author. In fact, among the theories dealing with who exactly Boston Teran is, one claims that it’s an umbrella pseudonym for an entire association of collaborating authors.  Not sure that I buy that, but never mind - Never Count out the Dead is the follow up to God is a Bullet and shows a clear maturing of the wild talent Teran unleashed in her (or his?) debut.  The novel features a broader, more nuanced cast, a wider spread of settings (though the hostile desertscape of Bullet comes calling once again), and a far more complex plot.  But it carries exactly the same levels of intensity throughout, the language is the same outrageous, almost physical force radiating off the page at you the way it did in Bullet, it continues Teran’s liking for uniquely gritty, densely realised female characters, and it ends in one of the most stunning climactic action sequences I have ever read.  And where the line between good guys and bad guys was pretty unequivocally drawn in Bullet, Never Count Out the Dead features a pivotal female character, Dee Storey, who never allows you to assign her safely to one camp or the other, and who must count as one of the all time great noir women.  Teran is at one and the same time over-the-top emotional and implacably grim here, never dodging the harsh realities but never ducking the human potential for something better either, and you come away from the book simultaneously shaken and enthused, unsure quite what you’ve been through, but wrung out by it all the same.  (NB – avoid the follow up The Prince of Deadly Weapons like the plague; it’s a dizzyingly bad car-crash of a book, a terrible waste of a brilliant premise and some fine secondary character work too.  It’s far worse than just straight bad, because you can see the bones and nuggets of the outstandingly good thriller that might have been buried underneath.  Really, avoid.)

 

 The Road – Cormac McCarthy

This one needs no introduction really, but if you haven’t read it yet, you really should – I’m inclined to think it’s McCarthy’s best work to date.  It’s also, after a fashion, a genre novel – a father and son hobble painfully across a post-apocalyptic landscape that makes most apocalyptic landscapes in genre look like so many amusement park rides.  It’s cold, it’s grey, pretty much everything is dead and covered in ash.  Food is scarce and the only other humans in evidence are marauding bands of cannibals.  There are none of those Oregon-trail-style plans for rebuilding a new, simpler, homespun and (it’s always hinted) better world.  Here there’s just a gritted determination to head south in hopes that it might be warmer there, and to stay alive one day to the next.  McCarthy’s rambling, string-of-barely-related-anecdotes style of narrative, which made the back end of his Border Trilogy, frankly, a bit of a slog, works far better here – the grim, undifferentiated day-by-day rhythm of the story suits the material perfectly; survival, inch by inch, and a stubborn refusal to yield is what this story is about, and needs no orchestrated three act bollocks to function.  You stumble from incident to incident exactly the way the characters do, and you end up feeling their weariness and desperation bone deep.  On the few occasions that there’s some relief – a storm cellar fully stocked with canned and pickled food, a single can of coke still jammed in a machine, a safe pair of hands to carry a burden onward – you feel the precious value of these things as if you were starving for them yourself.  And then there’s the grim elegance and economy of McCarthy’s prose, which has never been better than it is here.  The Road is bleak and brutal, and what grudging seeds of hope it sheds are cunningly layered and hidden deep, but for all that, it really is a novel of great beauty and power.  If you have yet to experience McCarthy, this would be an excellent place to start.

 

The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

I owe my Australian (now ex-)publicist Brendan Fredericks for this one – he’d just finished it back in 2009, and was raving about it as he squired me about the various gigs in my Oz tour.  I filed the enthusiasm away, but forgot about it in the rush of events once I got home.  Fast forward a year and a half and there’s the UK edition just out and staring at me from a shelf in Waterstones, so I grabbed it and – thank you, Brendan!  What you’ve got here is an unashamed attempt to write a novel of ideas as TV soap opera.  So the narrative deals with sleepy suburban events centring around a slap given to an undeniably obnoxious child by a frustrated adult at a supposedly friendly family barbecue.  The consequences of the incident spiral out of control, and as we skip from viewpoint to viewpoint along the way, more and more is revealed about the principal actors and bystanders, to the moral detriment of just about all concerned.  And along with the moral issues inherent in the slap incident itself, we also take in a diverse range of the social issues at play in contemporary Australian society – class, race, gender, religion and sexuality, the generation gap, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and the struggle to define yourself in the quicksand of it all.  Tsiolkas is pretty much even-handed in his treatment of all this, and his reportage from inside his own Greek immigrant Australian identity is garnished with savage critique of old style machismo, in-group/out-group relativism and ethnic rivalry.  Perhaps less clear-sighted is the treatment of youth, which Tsiolkas seems to have an overly optimistic view of, and it was here that I felt we strayed a bit into genuine soap opera territory.  That aside, this is a fascinating, fast-forward read in which every character, no matter how flawed or wrong-headed, grabs your sympathy for the time you’re with them and leaves you with a sense of loss when their p.o.v. is gone.  And when you close the book, you’ll miss them all the way you miss favourite family members after a shared weekend.  This is character building that will live in your head long after the story is gone – don’t miss it! ( NB – read the book before you see the TV dramatisation too, because though it is a pretty close fit, the TV version does egregious harm to one of the strong female characters, dragging her down from Tsiolkas’s flawed but tough original into something weepy and emotional that, again, would best suit a genuine day-time soap.)

 

The Spanish Holocaust – Paul Preston

Spain was a brutally repressive fascist dictatorship until 1975, and didn’t transition to anything you could properly call democracy until 1977.  This is something that gets forgotten far too often, mainly because Spanish society back in the seventies put together a form of unwritten social contract called El Pacto de Olvido (the pact of forgetting), in which everybody agreed to write off the horrors of the civil war and the repression that followed without attempting to place blame with any particular faction.  Lots of nasty shit went on, went the gist, atrocities were committed on both sides but it’s all over now, so let’s get on with building this democracy and let the past go.  It was a kind of Truth and Reconciliation moment, without any actual truth or reconciliation.  As a result, the wounds have festered ever since, a grubby bandage of pretence about what happened endures, and the bulk of the Spanish right wing still steadfastly refuses to countenance any more honest assessment of the war and the Franco era that followed. Paul Preston has been on their case for the last thirty years, and this is his masterwork – over five hundred pages of meticulously documented research into the atrocities committed by the Nationalist army and the Franco regime, starting with the deep political, social and cultural soil they were rooted in and following tirelessly through right to the death of the tyrant.  Not that the book is not about letting the Republican left off the hook for their share of the savagery either, but it apportions that share with scrupulous attention to the documented facts, and the stark truth is that while atrocities were indeed committed on the Republican watch, these were limited outbreaks of vindictive rage in response to long social repression by an unholy alliance of church and ruling class, and the Republican government worked constantly (though somewhat feebly and inefficiently) to staunch them at every turn.  By contrast, Preston finds that Franco’s Nationalists practised a quite conscious process of extermination and political terror throughout the war, and in the long years of brutal repression that followed.  Pretty much all the standard tricks were there – extra-judicial executions, “disappearances”, unmarked mass graves, political rape, torture chambers, concentration camps and slave labour, and while the sheer numbers of dead don’t approach the levels achieved by the Nazis in Germany, it doesn’t seem to have been for want of trying.  Preston’s general conclusion is that Franco’s forces behaved the way a colonial army of occupation would in a conquered nation, and that, for the duration of the Franco regime, the ruling oligarchy treated the Spanish population not like countrymen to be governed but as the vanquished and despised inhabitants of a separate, colonised land.   It’s a powerful accusation, but the book makes the argument beyond any reasonable doubt.  And the echoes of that brutal class war reverberate through Spanish political and social life even today. For anybody who wants to understand modern Spain, this is required reading of the utmost importance.  And for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of right wing political hegemony, this is a pretty good worked example to start with.  Grim but vital stuff.

 

Stonemouth – Iain Banks

I re-read The Crow Road this summer, partly to try out my brand new Kindle and partly in honour of Banks’ passing.  It’s funny, but I’d forgotten quite how much is packed into that novel – everything from desirable women dancing on Range Rovers at drunken Scottish bashes to pastoral ambling through richly described hills and glens to murderous violent intrigue to sulky teenage rebellion to quietly profound musings on the nature of mortality.  It would be a bit unfair to say that Stonemouth treads the same ground again, but you’ll certainly find a lot of the same fun ingredients in the mix – not least the fascination with prestige 4x4s.  But where Crow Road was a gratuitously rambling Bildungsroman covering years and generations, Stonemouth is tightly focused on just eight days in the life of its young protagonist, and bears most of the hallmarks of a straightforward thriller.  As with Crow Road, sexual allure and bad behaviour is the engine that drives the plot, but there’s a far harder edge on this one; in place of genteel West coast families of teachers, writers and minor nobility, you’ve got East coast clans of drug dealing gangsters and trawlermen, and even the hero has a slightly spivvy London whiff to him when we’re introduced.  And there’s less gentle humour, more ironic savagery and social comment – despite Banks’ almost pitch perfect rendering of his young protagonist, this is clearly a book by an older, more impatient man, who sees less reasons to be cheerfully upbeat than the man who wrote Crow Road, and whose victories in the face of the human condition are much harder won.  It’s gritty, intriguing stuff, and it grips from page one, the collage of mysteries and references to past events hurrying you onward to a crescendo that’ll have your heart in your mouth right to the end.  This is vintage Banks at its finest.

 

Wolfhound Century – Peter Higgins

Got passed this one as a pre-publication sneak preview courtesy of my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, which is why you’ll find a blurb line from me on the front cover.  What hits you about Wolfhound Century right from the opening paragraph is the strength of the writing.  A freshly turned metaphor and a deft couple of details and you’re right there, riding on the shoulder of the novel’s protagonist, a world-weary detective in a world you think you recognise – until suddenly you don’t.  Higgins has taken thriller influences from writers like Martin Cruz  Smith, John Le Carre and Ian Fleming, to name but three of the most obvious, and spliced them to a second world fantasy that’s richer than any I’ve seen since Mieville’s Perdido Street Station.  But the whole is much more than the sum of these venerable parts – there’s something genuinely fresh and exciting in this blend of Russian derived folklore and magic, Soviet-style state barbarism and as yet arcane Abrahamic mystical elements.  It’s a world we haven’t yet seen, a set of assumptions we can’t yet make, and the launch pad for a fascinating trilogy.  Higgins has struck a rich vein here, and I can’t wait to see what he mines from it next.