Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

THE SNOWS ARE MELTED, THE SNOWS ARE GONE
A bleak, sparesely told story. All action and observation. No interior monologues. Emotions and motivations area at best implied.
An empty world. An armless girl who is, nevertheless, hunting.
A story as unforgiving as the world the girl's world.It says: "This is happened. Work the rest out."
Yet the grim determination to overcome limitations got under my skin.

AND I AWOKE HERE ON THE COLD HILL'S SIDE
It must be fifty years since I read the opening story for the first time. It was shocking and exciting at the time and the core idea, that our exogenous nature might doom us if aliens arrived, pushing us into the same decline that the Polynesians experienced, etched itself into my memory.

This time around, I can take the time to appreciate its well-crafted brutal honesty.

I was delighted to find that one of the most famous lines from the Dracula story comes not from Hollywood as I'd thought, but from Stoker himself. As dawn approaches on his firstn night in the castle Harker writes:

I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count’s eyes gleamed, and he said. “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

This is very well done. Christie gets to grips with sort of double vision bing old brings - seeing places as they were as well as as they are. I like how the character of the Hotel morphs slowly from a charming homage to Edwardian elegance to something more sinister. Miss Marple, of course, saw the charm from the first but didn't quite trust it, labelling it as too good to be true.

I'd forgotten how much fun rollicking adventures like this can be.

Lot's of action, mixed with a little wit and a little world building.

It's fast moving feel good thing. The kind of Science Fiction that's there to entertain, not lecture or philosophise.

This epistolatory novel starts today, 3rd May. I'm going to try and read it on the days the various documents were supposedly written on.

The first entry shows Harker a great deal more interested in food and recipes than I would have expected. It also does a good job of giving the feeling that from the Danube onwards, Harker is leaving the West behind and heading into the wild and uncharted.

This feels dark and threatening. Not in the easy to keep at arm's length gothic way but in an 'I'm going to find out something unpleasant and believable aren't I?' way. I think it's going to get grim.

This is so well done, I keep sitting back and admiring how the story is told. The story itself is suprisingly gritty, mostly because its such an honest view of the people.

This feels so much stronger than the first novel. I liked the first novel, especially the ideas. This one is just as rich in ideas but the storytelling is more confident and purposeful. The result is that the tension in this story is wound tighter and I'm more engaged with Isabel.

I know that, after an hour, I've barely scratched the surface of this novel but it's enough for me to know that I'm not the target audience. The prose works and the humour is sharp edged but I don't care about the main character, the world she lives in or the world she dropped out of. I'm setting it aside.

The precision with which the dialogue maps relationships and personalities while sounding completely real and unforced is astonishing.

I love Miranda's cool assessment of the role she plays as translator between the parties in the two-hander play that is her parents' marrriage.

Miranda's to her sister, covering her time as a student at Oxford, moves the focus from how Miranda sees her parents to who Miranda is.

This starts much more quickly than the first book. it feels more confident too.

This is a strange tale that had a slow start but I'm beginning to relax into it.