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The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1)

Daniel O'Malley

Start date: July 1, 2013

Finish date: July 1, 2013

Discussion: Sci-fi & Fantasy Literature

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Aug 12, 2013 Adirarotstein rated it it was amazing

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

“The Rook” is without a doubt the most compulsively readable book I have read in ages. I literally could not put it down. I felt like I absorbed it rather than read it! Each chapter crackled with suspense and page-turning power. I remember reading books in this way as a child and teenager, eagerly racing from one surprise and tantalizing mystery to the next, only coming up briefly to eat dinner or go to bed. It’s been a long time since a grown-up book managed to captur The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

“The Rook” is without a doubt the most compulsively readable book I have read in ages. I literally could not put it down. I felt like I absorbed it rather than read it! Each chapter crackled with suspense and page-turning power. I remember reading books in this way as a child and teenager, eagerly racing from one surprise and tantalizing mystery to the next, only coming up briefly to eat dinner or go to bed. It’s been a long time since a grown-up book managed to capture my attention in the same way keeping me riveted to the page until the very end. Kudos to Mr. O’Malley for achieving what I believed impossible in my life as an adult reader.
The first scene in the book is one of the best examples I can think of from recent fiction of hooking the reader right off the bat with an irresistible mystery. Myfanwy Thomas wakes up in the middle of a London park, suffering from amnesia and surrounded by the dead bodies of dozens of people wearing latex gloves. She knows she is Myfanwy Thomas, because of a letter from her pre-amnesia self in her pocket indicating that she knew this would happen and that she was betrayed by one of her associates. It turns out Myfanwy Thomas, before amnesia, was a shy, mousy woman with a talent for administration and planning, one that extended to the amnesia and horrible danger that she knew were coming for her. To this end, the pre-amnesia Myfanwy left a number of letters to her post-amnesia self that provide some of the most touching parts of the novel.
And how, you may wonder did Myfanwy know she would lose her memory in advance? Well, it just so happens that Myfanwy is a highly placed member of Britain’s Supernatural Secret Service, an organization known as the Checquy.
Apparently, our world is constantly beset by supernatural threats and magical monsters that regular human police and armies cannot deal with. Hundreds of years ago the Checquy, was formed. Part of the organization’s mandate is to identify and acquire all people in the UK with supernatural abilities and train them in the use of these abilities into becoming crack operatives for the Checquy. It is a wide ranging organization with many employees, including “retainers” who have no powers at all. However, only humans with powers can ascend to the highest ranks of the Checquy, which are named after the pieces on the chessboard. Myfanwy discovers she is a “Rook” in this organization. She has a power that allows her to psychically control the vital systems of other people when she touches them. She can hack into anyone’s nervous system, an ability that is delved into with great imagination by the author as he throws Myfanwy into a variety of bizarre scenarios.
The pre-amnesia Myfanwy showed great promise when her talent first appeared at age 9, and the Checquy was eager to turn her into a super spy. However, part of the Checquy training involves permenantly removing children from their ordinary families. In a critique of the unconsciously pro-boarding school attitude of the Harry Potter books, it turns out that the trauma Myfanwy experienced in being taken from her family by the Checquy, induced a lifelong hesitancy to use her powers. The pre-amnesia Myfanwy was always too afraid of her power and what it could do to other people to get close to anyone. Instead of being the super-spy the Checquy hoped for, she rose to her rank in the organization due to her genius at organization. With no family or social life to speak of she was a workaholic. Some of the most interesting portions in the book, deal with the surprise of some of her pompous colleauges, who kept in the dark about what happened to her, are shocked by her assertive, carefree behavior. Determined to find out who is trying to kill her and why her memory was erased Myfanwy reaches out to her loyal secretary Ingrid, Shantay, a refreshing American colleague and her newly discovered sister Brigid.

As a female reader I nearly cheered. One of the things that was so refreshing about this book was that the author didn’t feel he needed to include some superfluous romantic subplot in the story just because of the protagonist’s gender. In science fiction and fantasy there are surprisingly few depictions of positive relationships between adult female characters that are true friendships, rather than competitions revolving around men. Then there is the distressingly common practice of relegating the women completely off the page (“The Hobbit” I’m looking at you), or sidelining them as colourless romantic distractions for the protagonist. I can’t remember the last time I read a book or saw a film that prominently featured a female friendship based on their shared employment and their work as a team in the same occupational space, yet that’s how most women I know make friends in this day and age. So often authors feel the need to “balance things” when female main characters are involved by adding a male supporting character to keep the male reader interested. “The Rook” proves this technique unnecessary. This book provides is an excellent argument that a fascinating, colourful, well-motivated character will always be compulsively readable no matter what sex that character is.

As Myfanwy is introduced to the organization of the Checquy, so are we as readers. The exposition provided by the pre-amnesiac Myfanwy’s letters never weighs the story down and is often funny and entertaining. Current day Myfanwy investigates the different members of the Checquy trying to retrace her predecessor’s steps. Soon it becomes clear to her that the “Grafters” a group of Belgian alchemist-scientists are behind the new wave of mischief washing over the UK. Instead of finding and honing the talents of people born with supernatural powers, the Grafters create super-powered monstrosities through their manipulation of biological matter— grafting super-powered organs onto non-powered humans to create disgusting biological weapons. One of these biological weapons is provides one of the most stomach turning passages in the novel. It is a flesh creature that absorbs other human beings, dissolves parts of their bodies with stomach acid within itself and then repurposes parts of their brains, bones and musculature into making itself bigger. The episode involving this repulsive thing was a somewhat discursive part of the narrative and as it was completely disgusting and highly disturbing, I personally could have done without it. In fact, my only complaint with the book was that some of the passages involving the Grafters’ creations were so disgusting.

Some of the humour in the book brought on favourable comparisons to other science fiction and fantasy humourists like Jasper Fforde and Douglas Adams (why are they all British?). There are some excellent comic descriptions in the book. The part with the future forecasting duck in particular caused me to laugh out loud.

I read in the author’s interview at the back of the book that this is the first book in what will be a series, and I am definitely looking forward to the next instalment if it as absorbing as the first. I am hoping that in the next book the post-amnesia Myfanwy will continue to grow as a character. Right now she is often reacts through instinctive, as befits someone who is brand new to life in the world, without the hang-ups born of trauma and mistakes. Her life is constantly under threat and she fights back through her ingrained combat training and instinctive use of her powers. While she lacks the extensive emotional baggage that hampered her previous self, I do find that these little “weaknesses” are important in helping to humanize and endear a character to the reader. Perhaps this is why I found myself warming slightly more to the doomed, anxiety-prone pre-amnesia Myfanwy than to her more assertive, butt-kicking descendent.

I find it interesting that while the dangers besetting the world are identified by the Checquy as “supernatural” their main antagonists, the Grafters, seem more science fiction in character, like some GMO biotech firm run amock. I have noticed a recent trend in some fantastic fiction critically categorized under “the New Weird” label; There seems to be an increased fascination/horror with the intricacies of biological organisms and artificial hybridization. Often these depictions seem steeped in disgust and aversion, focusing on the less appealing of the bodily processes. Or perhaps it is just the over-saturation of the fiction and film marketplace with zombie depictions has raised the public appetite/tolerance for such things. Hard to tell. No matter what the reason, it is evident to me that robots and aliens as the main agents of terror in science fiction are being joined and possibly replaced by a terror of the “composite creature” or artificial hybrid.

The terror of the machine, epitomized by the monotone voice of HAL 9000 and the emotionally detached steel of the robotic Terminator, which served as society’s main fictional visions of future technology in the past are being replaced as the possibilities of biotechnology are realized in the modern day. The ascent of a fictional vision of high technology as something involving the human mastery of biological matter is a strand of science fiction that hearkens back to some of the root texts of the genre, like HP Lovecraft’s “Harold West: Reanimator” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstien. ” While in the past, alien invasion stories often served as metaphors for society’s fear of immigrants or spreading communism, and robot stories exemplified fears over the increased mechanization in modern life, the resurgence of “Grafting” stories in modern speculative fiction seems to indicate how far issues related to organ transplantation and biotechnology have penetrated the public consciousness. The vision of humanity’s high technology future as dominated by metallic robots and underground “Caves of Steel” bereft of all natural greenery, is beginning to feel old fashioned. A modern science fiction author might just as likely envision a future where buildings are grown rather than built and decomposed instead of demolished. While our current mindset may be one of wary acceptance of a slowly evolving biotechnology, it is interesting, in fiction at least, to explore the possibilities of hybridizing humanity. This new literature of “grafting” provides the writer with a different kind of creature to explore. Rather than the genre’s standard unfeeling robots or unfathomable aliens, expect to see more frequent depiction of something warmer and more emotional in the future as our fictional vision of future technology changes to match present day developments.
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Feb 02, 2013 Jeni rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The letters to herself were an ingenious way to do backstory, and it's refreshing to see a female lead without a love interest and be fine with that. ...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Barb rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi-suspense, mystery, fiction

Great book! I was hooked the entire time. It's about a spy in a supernatural version of MI5 whose memories are erased. I highly recommend if you're into that sort of thing. ...more

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