Jasper Kent: The Danilov Quintet; wrapping up

As fate works out, I first tried to use this thing as a way to ramble about books with Jasper Kent’s The Twelve, and here I am after a two year hiatus trying to get back in the saddle with some thoughts about the rest of what turned out to be the Danilov Quintet. 

After I bought and read Thirteen Years Later, I let Kent drift. A few years back I hoovered up the other three books and put them into my Kindle queue, but it took a lot of lockdown to get me to the point where I decided to see how it all worked out for those crazy Danilovs. Push, I said to myself, and it’s a block of three books off the queue.

When I was grumping about Thirteen Years Later ten years ago, I grumped about the focus on Iuda being a mistake. I didn’t know how committed Kent was to that mistake. Never mind the Danilovs; Iuda’s the connective tissue through all five books. He’s in all of them, and he’s the puppet master of an awful lot of the action. Sure, the big bad is your actual canonical Dracula, but the engine for the books is Iuda trying to play Dracula off against everyone else out of some weird mixture of morbid curiosity and the impulse to be awful just for the sake of being awful. 

So, how does it all go? Well, I was right that the fourth book would have the Russo-Turkish War in it, but not in any terribly important way. I was right that the last book would be the Revolution, but how easy was that to guess given the obsession with the Romanovs? In reality the action is anchored between Moscow and St Petersburg in all three books; there are outings to fun travel spots like Sebastopol and Yekaterinburg, but Kent keeps the things which matter in the cities which have always mattered the most to Russians and Russian-ologists. For the rest, the background is the general awfulness of the struggle between Tsarist Russia’s tiny middle class and the forces of Romanov autocracy. Which was a long grim slog from the efforts of the Decembrists to the Bolsheviks, and it’s hard to fight the idea that if the Romanovs had listened to the Decembrists, the two hundred years since then would have been a lot easier on everyone. 

Of course, while all of that’s going on, the Danilovs are fighting vampires, and if I were a smarter man I’d have some kind of idea of how that mirrors a fight for the soul of Russia. Anyhow, there’s a lot of vampires, and they don’t have a plan. Because most of them are stupid, and the one at the top is that particular kind of stupid that you get when no-one has the nerve to say no to you, and the one really smart one just seems to enjoy meanness for its own sake, which is no kind of plan for anything.

How much fun is any of this? Not very much. While the bad guys are bad, the Danilovs are not necesarily great company.  They’re mopey and self-absorbed, which is a very realistic thing for Russians under a curse to be, but not something that’s necessarily fun to read about.

So there’s not a lot of fun to be had. Most of it comes from the cleverness of Kent’s thinking. His notion on why vampires don’t show up in mirrors is a very clever one. Vampires look so awful that everyone, themselves included, just edits the reality out when they’re looking at them. But when they edit out what they see in the mirror, they can’t write over that missing reflection with anything else, so it all disappears. It’s clever, and he makes a very good plot point out of what happens when someone clever - Iuda, who else? - figures out how to make a mirror which vampires can see their reflections in.

The other bit of cleverness is in the fifth book. Which opens with the fun news that Dracula is dead, solving all the problems the other four books are obsessed with. With Dracula dead, he can’t threaten the Romanovs any more, and the Danilovs can relax their vigilance at last. I liked it that Dracula got killed, because Kent is true to the meta-canon. The events of the fourth book sent him off to London looking for a McGuffin, and he ran afoul of Van Helsing just as he did in the Stoker book and got schwacked. I like a bit of respect for the established verities. But what on earth is going to keep the Danilovs suitably miserable, other than the Ootober Revolution? 

A nutty plot to resurrect Dracula, what else? Which is when the whole thing really does start to feel more like the adventures of Iuda than anything to do with the Danilovs, since the nutbag in chief of the resurrection plot is Iuda’s first girlfriend, and when the resurrection does not quite go according to plan, it’s Iuda who gets brought back, not  Dracula. I had been really thinking Iuda was good and dead at the end of the fourth book and I was quite fine with that.

Credit where credit is due; Kent pulls that off. Iuda winds up sharing a body with the last surviving Danilov, and they alternate not just control of the body, but control of the narrative. Kent gives us two very different narrative voices, and a set of clever challenges for the two squabbling occupants of one body. It keeps the suspense going very well through the book and right up to an incredibly downbeat ending. Yes, sure the day is saved and the vampire plague put to bed at terrible cost, but Kent makes sure in the epilogue to remind the reader that nothing good is going to happen in Russia any time soon.

So, a bit of a slog, and it took me a long time to get there. On balance it was sort of worth the effort, but it’s not something I’m coming back to.

Unlike this on-again off-again rambling. I’m not a John Wick levels of thinking I’m back, but it’s time to get back on the horse.

 

M R Carey: The Boy on the Bridge

No-one is going to buy this unless they’ve already read The Girl with All the Gifts, and so everyone reading it is going to feel their heart sink a little as they realise that we’re back in the Rosalind Franklin, the armoured mobile lab which shows up in central London in Girl and becomes Miss Justineau’s prison. We all know that Rosie winds up abandoned in the middle of London with its crew dead or missing, so we know that the forecast for the people in this book is …  not promising.

Just like Girl, this is a book that I read in short stretches, tip-toeing through the prose and pausing at intervals to steel myself in case the next chapter turned into Benjie’s world of blood. Rosie is doomed, and the suspense is just how doomed the crew are, and to a lesser extent how Rosie winds up abandoned in London.

How Rosie winds up in London is almost irrelevant; Carey dashes it off in a couple of pages after the main action of the book has unfolded. What matter is what comes before. The heart of Girl was the three cornered relationship between a child, a mother surrogate, and a weary soldier as they cross a devastated landscape. In and around that were other tensions; ambitious scientists with no morality left and semi-expendable grunts trying to keep the world at bay. Carey’s used essentially the same template, but put new characters into it.

Melanie has become Stephen Greaves, a teenage genius who might just be smart enough to figure out how the fungal infection works, but is so damaged by childhood trauma that he can’t explain it to anyone. Miss Justineau has become Samrina Khan, a scientist who has replaced Stephen’s mother in every way that matters, and Sgt Parks has become Col Carlisle, the military leader of the expedition. They occupy the same spaces on the emotional board of the book, and yet they’re nothing like the characters from the first book, and they work out their redemptions and sacrifices in very different ways.

It’s a very satisfying book, especially for a prequel. It fills in points that the earlier (but later) book didn’t bother with, but it doesn’t make a point of explaining all the back story. What we’re told is what the story itself needs, nothing more. That’s something I can really respect having sat through Hollywood’s notions of how a prequel ought to work. But what made me put the book down at the end in complete satisfaction was the ending, which closes out both the story of the survivors of this book, and the story of the survivors of Girl. Harder hearts might argue that the ending is pat and sentimental, but for me it gave the good guys the ending they deserved.

The ending might even, for all I know, be some kind of sequel hook. What’s been done will stand on its own, and I thought the same thing when there was just Girl. So if Carey comes out with a third book one of these days, it might really be something.

Bill James: Harpur & Iles

I’ve just spent most of the reading time of the last six weeks catching up on the adventures of Harpur and Iles and for that matter Ember and Shale, and it was one of those things where I couldn’t really stop and at the same time wondered why I was pressing on. The last time I kept going when so much nothing was happening was when I watched several hours of Big Brother live. When I did that, it was because I’d been conditioned by years of movies and TV to think that if nothing happened for several minutes it was only so that the real surprise would be a big jolt. So the surpassing dullness of Big Brother kept me watching thinking “Any minute now.” Hours later I realised I was watching a new form of TV, and I’ve stayed away from it ever since.

With Harpur & Iles, there should have been a nagging warning in the back of my brain. I used to buy those books as they came out, something which got more and more inconvenient and expensive the longer the series of books ran. At first they were Penguin paperbacks and you could even find them in Greek bookshops, which is where I found the first one. By 2006, they were limited run hardbacks and the only way to find them at all was on the internet. So I just didn’t buy the next one, or the one after that, and so on. At the end of March it occurred to me to wonder what had been happening to Bill James, and I discovered there’d been ten more books, all available on Kindle. Now, what I should have thought was something on the lines of “It’s been a decade, why do you even care?”, and if I’d had to think about ten physical books and the postage, and where I’d keep them after I’d read them … But it was Kindle, and they were cheap, so I just went and bought them all.

And I am not the wiser of it all. Because nothing’s happening. And it’s happening in an incredibly repetitive way. Everyone’s locked in place, for book after book, having the same conversations and doing nothing. And the conversations have a weird sameyness, no matter who’s talking; they’re all speaking in a strange mixture of formalism and ungrammatical slang, as if everyone in the nameless city had the same, completely demented, English teacher. It stops being clever, then it stops being funny, and then it starts getting in the way. Maybe if you’re not reading ten of them one after another.

I’d probably let all of that slide, but there’s one over-arching piece of weirdness which makes the stasis even harder to stay with. The first book in this series was published 32 years ago, and there’s been one every year since then. No-one has aged a day. Harpur still has two teenage daughters, just as he did when we met him first. He’s still a Detective Chief Superintendent. The world hasn’t stood still; Harpur in the recent books lives in a world with smart phones. It’s just that he, and his city, live in a bubble where no-one ages or learns anything. In the early going of the series, there was a fair bit of turnover, particularly among the criminal masterminds, but twenty years ago in my real world Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale rose to the top of their gangs and they’ve mooched along in uneasy partnership every since. 

And there are so many ways in which nothing happens. Nothing major changes; everyone is the same age and has the same worries and grievances. No-one’s position changes; any time anything appears which might threaten the status quo, it fizzles out. And even where the fizzling involves death and violence, the violence happens off-stage. We never see the action. We see the characters talk about what might happen, or think about what might happen, and then the story jumps a little into the non-future and the characters talk inconclusively about the aftermath of the action. And even the conversations go nowhere; Harpur and Iles are forever having conversations which loop around with neither one of them answering the other’s questions. I think it’s supposed to be wry, but it gets tiresome if you read as much of it in one big run as I did.

I’ve often said that I read detective stories not because of the story, but because I like the company of the characters. In a way Bill James has found a way to stretch that idea past my personal breaking point; there’s nothing but the characters. But if they’re just spinning their wheels for decades at a time … 

Shane Kuhn: The Asset

Move over Dan Brown, there’s a new worst thriller writer in my landscape.

Shane Kuhn’s The Asset is a book I hate-read, something I haven’t done in years. I was startled to realise that it wasn’t a first novel, because so much of what it made it terrible was classic first novel stuff. Marty Stu protagonist? My word yes. Love interest actually called Love? Why not? Explanations of character background which read like research material left in by mistake? Whole front half of the book. Cliffhangers resolved by idiotic fake-outs? Present and wrong. “Gritty" descriptions of things which are so wrong that they make everything else wrong by association? Oh yeah. 

Why did I even try to finish it? Largely because I’d read an enthusiastic review and I wanted to believe that there was something later in the book which would justify it. No, there isn’t. The Asset starts terrible and stays terrible all the way to the bitter end. There is nothing to redeem it. The plot’s dumb. The main character is fantastically annoying in more ways than I could have thought possible. Everyone else is hateful. The thrilling incidents cluttering up the action seem to have been pulled together by using Cards Against Humanity to reconstruct drunken memories of terrible 1990s TV spy shows. Any technical thing I could check was wrong, which swept the ground away from the over-arching conceit that this was a chilling insight into the weaknesses of the TSA’s efforts to protect US aviation.

Above all, it’s a hate letter to the TSA. The nicest TSA employee in the book is depicted as a drunk whose murder will surprise nobody; everyone else is an incompetent swine. The one great exception is our hero, who is an unappreciated genius who nonetheless has managed to carve out a magnificent career as a consultant to the TSA, being paid a fortune to give them advice they either ignore or cover up. The whole opening of the book reads like the kind of pathetic roman a clef you’d get from a guy stuck in a dead end job, a long rant in which he settles all the scores he’s got with his co-workers while imagining a world in which he gets the luxury life he dreams he deserves. Which is weird, because Shane Kuhn doesn’t seem to be a frustrated cube rat who’s somehow locked a literary agent’s kids in a basement full of acid; he’s a writer and director with a butt-load of credits, and the idea that an experienced writer is somehow spamming this stuff out is so bizarre I almost think it’s intended as a joke. Either that or he’s got a friend in the TSA and lent him his name for a week. I dunno. 

Anyhow, it’s rotten. It’s the first book I’ve actually deleted from my Kindle rather than just marking it as read and leaving it lying around. For all I know, Kuhn’s other books are better - it’s hard to imagine how they could be worse - but why take the chance?

Blake Crouch: Dark Matter

I like Blake Crouch. Not to the extent of searching out his collected laundry lists, the way I do with K J Parker, but when I read his stuff I appreciate the fact that he takes a moment to write a decent sentence without being flashy about it, and makes a real effort to make his characters feel like people even if they do wind up feeling mostly like characters in a TV show.

Dark Matter is the first thing of his I’ve read since Wayward Pines, which I liked for the sheer speed with which it got to the point; three short books, a month of action, all done and dusted from high concept to collapse. Dark Matter is even quicker; everything in the high concept is set up and knocked down in the space of a single brisk novel with a bare minimum of characters and no-one staying on stage for longer than they need to.

The high concept here is “what if you could figure out a way to move between different version of the multiverse?” Problem a) figure out a semi-plausible way for it to happen. Problem b) figure out a plausible way for it to be an absolute nightmare for everyone. Problem c) figure out a way for it to get worse. Because “It gets worse” is a Crouch trademark. Dark Matter passes those tests with flying colours. The science is kind of plausible, in a narratively useful way; yes, you can make a device which will allow multiple universes to exist in the same place, but the only way to travel between them is to take a drug which will stop your mind from automatically collapsing them down to a single universe. Now you’ve got a limitation, which is what you always need with magic of any kind.

And the “It gets worse” is genius; if you make a new universe every time you make any kind of decision, but it’s possible to travel between all these universes, how long before you start tripping over yourself?

A lot of people would have stopped there; that’s plenty to be playing about with. But Crouch decided that it would be more interesting to make the book about regret and missed opportunities, and the way in which any kind of fulfilment will always be undercut by the vague feeling that there might have been something better if you’d just done something different. Proper grown up stuff, and a bit more than I expected to trip over in a thriller.

And yet, as I got to the end, I was struck by the way that the overall arc echoed Wayward Pines; the protagonist is snatched out of his world, into another world which isn’t quite what he thinks it is. When he figures out what’s really going on he winds up on the run, and before long he’s on the run from hordes who are out to get him, but are really just like him, and in the end the only option is to escape completely into another world using the same technology that took him out of his own world in the first place. Now I’m going to have to find another Blake Crouch book and see if he does that every time.

Adam Hamdy: Pendulum

Sometimes a book is good, and sometimes it’s not good. And sometimes, it’s something which feels like it could have been good. Pendulum  is one of those books. There’s a perfectly good book in there about how much it would suck in real life to be the victim of a botched serial killing. It opens with the protagonist being hanged by some obvious loon, dodging death by sheer chance, and jumping out of a window before the killer makes up any ground. Jumping out windows hurts, which is why it hasn’t been on my to-do list in simply ages, and running off to the police to explain that some loon tried to hang you leads to stays in hospitals of various kinds, not to mention strait jackets and all kinds of drugs which might be fun if you were taking them at your own preferred pace.

As long as the book is about how a pretty ordinary schlub is out of his depth dealing with lunacy, it’s a pretty good idea. It’s not super-well-written, but at least there’s something here which hasn’t been tried before, and Hamdy is doing his level best to get across the sheer awfulness of the character’s predicament.

If only Hamdy had stuck to that. But there’s more, much much more. On the one hand - spoiler alert - the book is really about the menace of a social media, and specifically Facebook. On the other hand, about every forty minutes all hell breaks loose and a whole bunch of people get killed. Every forty minutes? That seems curiously specific. Was I sitting there with a stopwatch? No, I was sitting there with a lifetime’s worth of pop culture, shaking my head wearily as Hamdy kept thinking it was time to end the episode on a cliff hanger. Just as the world is filling up with people telling us that TV is becoming more novelistic, someone wrote a novel which felt the need to pace itself like a low-budget TV show. I don’t know what was going on there. Did Hamdy get told to cram in more action sequences, or did he get told to put some kind of novel either side of the action sequences? Or did he really think that both belonged together?

It’s a shame. There could have been a good book here. A much simpler book. A book set in England with a simple cat and mouse game with a loon and an ordinary guy trying to catch each other. Instead, there’s massive gunplay, an ocean spanning plot, a villain who is simultaneously omnipotent and an idiot, and a game of bingo for anyone who wants to read it going “Oh, that bit’s totally taken out of Speed!” whenever the plot goes into high budget mode.

Instead, the books can’t make its mind up about what it wants to be, and it winds up making no sense in all kinds of different directions. If the serial killer is just a creep getting his rocks off hanging people, then of course he needs a superhero costume and a mask. But if he’s actually a tortured anti-hero taking a complex revenge on people he despises, then it doesn’t make sense for him to dress up. He doesn’t really care what his victims think, and a costume is more trouble than it’s worth. And sure, it makes a great last act twist for the villain to be a guy with a bigger plan, but the bigger plan doesn’t make any sense of what’s been done up to now. And round and round it goes in circles.

I complain about all this because the book is at its best when it’s about the impact of wickedness. There’s a lot of work done here on the impact of trauma and the way the people are marked forever when they’re victims of violence. It ends on just that note. Hamdy had something to say here - something which doesn’t show up often enough in fiction - and it’s a shame that the fireworks are getting in the way.

Alex Gerlis: The Best of Our Spies

Having mentioned this in the course of venting about Allied, I feel like I ought to flesh it out a bit. Simply put, The Best of Our Spies is a much more plausible story about a German spy setting up with an Allied officer and trying to steal all his secrets. It’s low key, and low stakes, and nobody blows up hardly anything from one end of it to the other. It’s one of those books I read a little chunk at a time, as I often do when the characters have been put together and then put in harm’s way. It’s the book reading equivalent of squinting at things through your fingers. You get invested, the characters start to feel like real people, all trying to do their best, and you just can’t bear to keep on looking as things get worse for them.

There is no big mystery; from the beginning we know that the spy we’re calling Nathalie has been working for the Germans, and so do the British high command. She’s not going to get caught, because she’s been caught without ever knowing it, rumbled when her radio operator gets caught and turned. From that point on, British Intelligence are playing her like a banjo, manipulating her and the poor schmuck they marry her off to. The game is cynical and simple; sure, they could turn Nathalie too, but if they keep her in play, letting her think she’s still spying, the intelligence she provides to the German will have a sense of authenticity to it which couldn’t be faked.

Once the game’s afoot, the tension is not whether Nathalie will get caught; it’s what will happen when all the contradictions collapse around her. Will she survive? Will she somehow be able to keep the fake life she’s built with her clueless Allied stooge? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all; how the hell did she even get into this mess? That’s as big a puzzle, right up to the end, as how the hell she’s going to get out of it.

It’s not quite Alan Furst, because, after all, what is? But it’s solid, and it’s heartfelt, and it never seems fantastical.

It would have been a perfect source text for a good movie with Marion Cotillard and some worthwhile, unflashy British actor, a McAvoy or a Whishaw or a McGregor. It was what I was half hoping Allied would turn out to be. Instead, I think that Allied has probably made sure that this much better story is always just going to be a book.

Claire North: The Sudden Appearance of Hope

The inside of Claire North’s head is a strange place. She has the knack of coming up with weird high-concept scenarios combined with the talent to make them sing on the page. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was a weird take on reincarnation, Touch was a weird take on possession, and The Sudden Appearance of Hope is - well, I’m not sure what it’s a take on. The Invisible Man? Depression? Social anxiety?

What’s impressive about all this is the sheer consistency of it all; North is banging out a weird novel with a weird hook reliably once a year, and there hasn’t been any real fall-off in the quality of the writing. The characters still work, the writing is good without getting in the way of the reading, and the plotting is - well, honestly, plotting’s not her strong suit, or maybe it’s pacing; either way her books tend to end in a rush.

The big difference between Hope and the two earlier novels is that the bad guys are independent of the high concept. In Harry August and Touch, the narrator’s troubles come from other people with the same talents that he has. But Hope Arden’s problem is the kind of problem which makes conspiracy impossible. If no-one can remember you, you can do all kinds of things, but you can’t really form a club. Well, if you wanted to cheat, you could. You could have a world in which ordinary people couldn’t remember you, but your own kind could. That would have put Hope right into the same wheelhouse as the two earlier books, as a small coterie of parasites fell out about the best ways to exploit the herd.

North didn’t want to go there; she wanted Hope to be utterly alone. But then she needed something for Hope to push back against, so for the first time she needed a second concept in a book, something which Hope could fight. What she settled on was a creepy intensification of Facebook crossed with a creepy intensification of Weightwatchers. On the one hand a social media app which watches everything you do, and on the other hand a system for making you feel bad about yourself so that you’ll eat the right foods. For values of right which are more about selling you branded goods than making you eat healthily.

More than ever, North is taking a look at modern society and not liking what she sees. Perfection, the app in Hope, is a perfectly plausible extrapolation of stuff we’re doing right now. Perfection the company isn’t even an extrapolation; it’s a perfectly unremarkable specimen of capitalism. And there’s nothing all that novel about making money out of making people feel bad about themselves; it’s pretty much the established business model for every women’s magazine and all the companies which advertise in them. As if there’s any real distinction between the magazine and the advertising.

Hope is the more interesting thing. It doesn’t do us any harm to be reminded as often as possible about the rapacity of the marketing and internet businesses, but how often are we going to meet someone who no-one can remember? Hope’s a tricky character to put on the page. Harry August and the nameless narrator in Touch were engaging bounders; well, I’m being a bit unfair to Harry there. But they had a predicament which they could control and exploit. Hope is a victim of something she can’t change or even understand, condemned to a kind of solitary confinement which should have driven her completely crazy. Since no-one can remember her, she can steal anything she wants to; if she gets caught, the person who catches her will forget about her as soon as they look away. Handy. Until you realise that it’s a death sentence if she’s admitted to hospital, because no-one will remember to check on her or change dressings or even feed her. Hope’s life is almost impossible, and North has a constant struggle to balance that impossibility with cunning workarounds which will somehow let Hope get by from day to day. I did find myself wondering about driving, though it’s not as though most drivers seem to be aware of other road users even without Hope’s unique problems.

As always, it’s just a good book. There are things which don’t quite work, and the ending is rushed, yet again, but the writing’s equal to the concept, and that makes all the difference. I’ve gone past hoping North can keep it up; clearly she can. Now I’m just waiting patiently for her to do it again next year

Ben H Winters: Underground Airlines

Did this start with the title and then Winters just had to do something with it? It’s such a great title.

It’s also a great high concept hook. Winters is good at this. The Last Policeman trilogy had a great hook; the world is ending, let’s look at it through the eyes of one guy trying to live a normal life as everything falls apart. Underground Airlines has another killer hook; what would the modern world be like if the USA still had slave states?

Spookily normal. Winters hints at the economic isolation of the USA, and the ways in which the bigger world would be different, but he keeps his focus squarely on his narrator and the day to day reality of hunting down escaped slaves. Victor’s USA is not all that different from our own; mobile phones, the internet, a hollowed out industrial economy. And four states with three million slaves, not to mention a Republic of Texas which either is or isn’t independent depending on whose propaganda you read. The Texan War fills the same space in this USA that the Vietnam war filled in the real world; a meat grinder which deflected the government just at the time when it might have started to deal with its internal contradictions.

As with the Last Policeman, a lot turns on the narrator. Henry Palace was a loveable doofus, charmingly out of his depth and gamely trying to do the right thing. Victor is a much darker character, clinging to his freedom by taking it off other people. When slaves escape to the free states, the feds hunt them down and hand them back, and Victor is one of the undercover agents who does the hunting. You need black agents to do this, and the only way the US Marshals can get those agents is by turning some of the escaped slaves on the rest. Victor is not one of the good guys. Victor is the guy who finds the good guys and betrays them.

It’s a tricky balancing act, both for the character and the writer. Victor’s smart enough to hate himself, and sneaky enough to pretend that he’s OK with what he has to do to get by; Winters is smart enough to get all of this into Victor’s voice as he tells us his story, an unreliable narrator who even lies to himself.

SF usually has three components; the gimmick, the plot which showcases the gimmick somehow, and the characters who make you care what happens. The gimmick is the easy bit, because that’s the bit you can write on a beermat; what if X were Y. The characters are usually the bit where SF crashes and burns. From what I’ve seen of Winters, he’s good at the gimmick and all the little touches which make the gimmick seem like it’s not a gimmick at all, and he’s good at the characters. It’s the plot which struggles. In the Last Policeman, the collapsing plots and pointless McGuffins were part of the character, really; Henry thought life had more meaning and complexity than it really did, and each book was about him finding out that it’s all just a mess. Underground Airlines is much darker and grittier, and so the lack of a plot which hangs together well is more of a problem for the book. The plot takes a long time to set up and then peters out far too abruptly before ending on what’s eithert an optimistic note or a sequel hook depending on whether we get another book.

I’d kind of like another book. Victor’s good company for all his flaws, and Winters kept the tension rising in the late going so that I could hardly bear to read the next chapter in case something terrible happened. And there’s a lot of stuff unpacked quickly in the closing pages which I would like to see fleshed out in another book. 

The thing which I’m still not sure about is how much of the idea is a what-if about how you could make slavery work in a modern world, and how much of it is a coded criticism of what we have instead with Asian sweatshops churning out cheap goods in horrible conditions that we all try hard not to think about.

Connie Willis; Crosstalk

This is a book you read for the pleasure of the journey, because the destination, even the itinerary, has been telegraphed in the first thirty pages. Literally nothing goes to waste; every single character is there for a reason. Pay attention; passing references which seem to be just part of the mile a minute dialogue are as often as not the introductions of key characters who are going to show up at any minute. And yet, there are no real surprises. The suspense resides mostly in wondering just how long it’s going to take before the characters finally catch on to what the reader knows.

To some extent this is pure Connie Willis. Willis has spent most of her writing career writing about misunderstanding. Nearly every book has turned on misunderstanding and error, and so of course she’s written a romance novel. All romance novels are about misunderstanding, as the heroine completely fails to recognise the man of her dreams despite the reader seeing it a mile off. The extraordinary thing about the book will elude anyone reading Willis for the first time; the plot, the surprises, the resolution are all as utterly obvious as the final outcome of the Mills and Boon romances which Willis is echoing.

With anyone else, I’d think it was the writer getting lazy, but Willis isn’t lazy. She’s getting longwinded as she goes along, but she writes well enough to make that an acceptable vice. It’s almost as though she’s saying to her regular readers; here’s one with no surprises. See how you like it.

I liked it fine; you can’t spend time in Willis’ company without enjoying yourself. Her books are full of people talking over each other in different voices, as if she’s somehow taking dictation on the set of a series 1930s screwball comedies now lost to us, and if you can’t just sink into the fun of the language then there’s something dead in you. But it’s not a good Willis book. In Bellwether she did most of the workplace chaos and comedy in a fraction of the space and with a much better pay off. And if you want drama and romance, you need only look at Lincoln’s Dreams, her astonishing second novel. For pure drama, there are very few SF books by anyone which surpass Doomsday Book. If that’s just too intense, To Say Nothing of the Dog is in some ways her masterpiece; the stakes aren’t high, but the complexity of the plotting and the depth of literary reference and sheer cleverness is extraordinary. 

In other words, if you already like Connie Willis, this is going to seem a slip, and if you don’t already like Willis, this isn’t the place to start.

In other news, if you’re Irish, there’s a lot of little things which are just going to feel like chewing tinfoil, starting with the idea that anyone christened Bridget would ever be called Briddey. On the other hand, this is Irish America, which has always felt like a terrible parody of Ireland anyhow. Maybe it’s completely true to that.

The Lone Hero; The Gray Man, Orphan X, Victor the Assassin

I’m never getting any of this time back. Ten days of reading time, a snatched minute here, a distracted lunch break there, and all I’ve got to show for it is this sense of numb bewilderment. These books are popular - Orphan X (Greg Hurwitz) even got a favourable review in the Guardian - and that must mean they’re pushing a lot of buttons somewhere. 

I’ve mumbled before that our villains tell us what we’re scared of, whether it’s vampires standing in for shadowy elites poisoning our sense of community or zombies standing in for the faceless hordes coming to take our stuff. Now I’m wondering if our heroes tell us what we admire, or what. If today’s thriller heroes really do say anything about our values, it’s scarier than zombies.

The gold standard of lone hero narrative is - YMMV - Chandler’s endlessly quotable mission statement for the noir hero

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

Today, we are not talking about those guys. We are talking about guys who can barely talk, for starters.

Well, let’s not be picky. Not everyone can be Chandler. Not every character can have Philip Marlowe’s voice. That’s not what I’m trying to pick at here. What’s bugging me is that today’s lone heroes are outsiders defined almost entirely by their ability to kill other people. Even though the Gray Man and Orphan X are explicitly put forward as people trying to be good guys, the way they go about being good guys is to schwack people who they think are bad guys. What makes them men of honor in their context is that they choose who to kill, rather than doing as they’re told by someone else.

I got down this rabbit hole because Back Blast - the newest Gray Man book - was cheap and I was curious about whether it sorted anything out for Courtland Gentry, proud owner of the weirdest name in state sanctioned murder. That hinted me into The Hunter, Victor’s debut. I’m ashamed to say that I bought Orphan X by accident; it looked cheap and I got it mixed up with something else I had in my “maybe” list. I’d finished it by the time I noticed it getting a favourable review in the Guardian. I sort of agreed with that review; Orphan X is competently written and the protagonist’s superpowers are credibly undercut by his knack for getting things wrong on the big picture. But what it all boiled down to was for a couple of weeks I was immersed in a peculiar world where men were men and everything else was some kind of target, and now I’ve emerged blinking wondering what the hell it says about the world we live in.

Back Blast sorts out all Court Gentry’s problems, at the expense of turning a whole five-thriller series into the world’s longest origin story; finally the Gray Man’s off the hook and rehabilitated, and the CIA wants to put his superpowers to good use killing bad people. I’ve got just enough respect for Mark Greaney to suspect this is all going to wind up not working out as advertised and his new friends in the CIA will spend the next few books bamboozling him. But; lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and somewhere out there, there’s a factory churning out young men who can kill anything that walks and most things that don’t. Orphan X; product of an elite killing machine factory has gone into business for himself killing people because they look bad to him; by the end of the book, lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and the protagonist is set up for a life of further adventures killing more people. And The Hunter; lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and at the end the protagonist has been pushed into working for the CIA to use his killing powers for good - not that I imagine that will work at all as planned; see under you can’t trust big gummint.

And these guys are just the ones I was reading this last couple of weeks; Jack Reacher kills all around him and you can’t trust big gummint, and John Milton kills all around him, and you ...

You can never trust big gummint, and I wouldn’t argue that you should. But all these guys are loners, full of weird skills and no hobbies. Some have no money and possessions (Reacher, Milton, The Gray Man on his bad days) others have way more money than is remotely credible (Orphan X, Victor), but they always seem to have whatever they want and no real needs; maybe they like a particular kind of vodka, but half the stuff in their lives seems to be there because it struck the author as a cool signifier of some kind. There seems to be no point to them beyond their deadliness. You can read all the Marlowe books without ever getting a full sense of his life; family? previous career? thoughts for the future? A mystery, pretty much. But before you’ve got half way through any of them, you know what kind of person Marlowe is, and what he’s going to do when the going gets tough. All you know about today’s loners is that they kill stuff.

And we’re supposed to be OK with that; these are the protagonists, and the world’s their target range. They pick the people who are bad enough to kill, and by reading along we’re tacitly endorsing the choices - more than that, we’re tacitly endorsing the idea that it’s OK for lone murderers to decide who lives and and dies. Today’s heroes are vigilantes. Let’s hope I’m reading way too much into that. 

Oliver Harris: The first two Nick Belsey books

Nick Belsey’s not a nice guy. He’s not even someone I think I’d want to have a drink with, but he’s somehow compelling as a character. Like many interesting people, he’s best experienced with a bit of distance. A lot of distance, if possible. I read once long ago that adventure was just horrible things happening far away to people you don’t know well enough to really care about, and Nick Belsey’s a perfect adventurer.

What makes them worth reading is a wonderful queasiness; in both The Hollow Man and Deep Shelter, Belsey’s a man well out of his depth, just smart enough to know he’s wrestling with things he doesn’t understand. In The Hollow Man, he’s trying to figure out what happened to a Russian oligarch, and in Deep Shelter he’s trying to figure out why some nutbar is obsessed with the network of underground bunkers under London. But unlike most cops in fiction, he’s making the problems worse the longer he pokes at them. No, that’s not fair. He starts out by pretty much causing the problem, and then he struggles to solve it without anyone figuring out how much of it is his fault.

So in The Hollow Man, Belsey’s life has fallen apart so badly that when a Russian oligarch is reported missing, it starts to seem like a good idea to camp out in his mansion, and then steal his identity, and then … well, it just keeps getting worse. Grippingly. It falls apart a bit in the end game, not because the plot’s stupid, but because the climax is kind of stupid and doesn’t really add much to the real resolution of the plot. Harris actually wraps the plot up very cleverly, with just about every red herring accounted for in a perfectly reasonable way; given that most of the people driving the plot are not that smart, the dumb things which are happening make perfect sense as stuff dumb people do. And when the dust has cleared, Belsey has just about held on to his job without really solving any of the problems he started the book with.

Though it sets him up nicely for the next book, where he’s still coming in to work, just about, but all the baggage from the first book is hanging over him. Belsey’s on restricted duties now, smartest cop in the station or not. Which is just enough leeway for him to chase a suspect into a bunker. Nothing like enough leeway for anything he does next, which starts with breaking into the bunker without a warrant, deciding to loot it, deciding it would be fun to take a one night stand there, and then getting her snatched by ...

Well, that’s what it’s all about. Who snatched the girl, and how can Belsey get her back without anyone figuring out it’s all his fault that she got snatched in the first place. And for all that it’s a preposterous cold war secret state plot full of spies and nutters, it’s queasily plausible at every step of the way. Belsey has no idea of what he’s got into or how he’s going to get out of it, but he’s not too troubled by scruples. He’s scrambling from moment to moment, just trying to survive the latest catastrophe without having the time to plan for the one after that, and as his options narrow, he has to accept that all he can do is choose what really matters. He makes the right choices, more or less, and it doesn’t feel false to the character; Belsey’s a mess, but he’s a guy who knows the difference between right and wrong.

Just like the first book, the climax is a mess, but the resolution of the plot is solid and true to the characters; it’s as if Harris goes into every book with a fireworks budget and has to spend it before he can go home. And Belsey doesn’t quite save the day, or quite get fired, so I’m sort of looking forward to seeing if he’s still got a job in the next book.

I’m kind of surprised that no-one’s tried to make it all into a TV show. It would make a great modern TV cop show now that we’ve got used to the notion of smart audiences and complicated anti-heroes.

Paolo Bacigalupi: The Water Knife

Man, The Water Knife is tough going. Bacigalupi isn’t a feel-good writer at the best of times, but every time the viewpoint shifted to his doomed teenage Texan refugee Maria, I put the book down for a bit and did something else. Maria is having a grindingly horrible time, and it just keeps getting worse. And it’s not even as though I could go on-line and make a credit card donation to some charity which would intervene on my behalf to make it all better. This was a completely made-up piece of misery which would only happen if I made the effort to read about it. Well-written misery which echoed a kind of misery which is far too available right now, but still completely fictional, and so it felt way too much like punching myself in the face for no good reason.

The misery doesn’t ever let up, but about half way through the book Bacigalupi decides that he’s done enough background misery and kicks everyone into the plot. Which is something that always annoys me in books; you’ve got three or more viewpoint characters who have nothing to do with each other, but since they’re all in the same book, they’re going to move into alignment with each other somehow before it’s all over. Typically, when it does happen, it feels like artifice, like un-earned coincidence, like something dumb. How come these three characters all collide just when they need to? They’ve got nothing to do with each other, and there’s no good reason why they should all be in the same place at the same time.

The reason that this kind of thing feels stupid in books is that the story is told the wrong way. Whenever anything happens in real life, it’s always because people have collided with each other, and a lot of the time they knew nothing about each other and never expected it to happen. And right up to the moment of the collision, they were just getting on with their lives, all stars of their own little show without any thought for the bigger show someone else might be in. And if you start with that collision; start with the inciting event; the reader doesn’t even blink. This thing has happened to these people, I wonder what’s going to happen next. But if you keep the cast apart for half the book or more, then by the time they run into each other, it feels forced and artificial, as though these people with real lives have been rammed together in service of the plot.

Not that Bacigalupi cares hugely about plot. As I’ve commented before, he’s writing about the collapse of the world, and the way it hurts people, and the way that it hurts people right now. Plot is secondary to theme and characterisation, which is why an otherwise perfectly good writer will hang everything off a McGuffin so blatant that most episodes of TV would have had a sheepish grin on their faces while they explained that they would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the …. If you haven’t figured out what’s going to turn out to be the Maltese Falcon/letters of transit/glowing briefcase about ten seconds after it’s put into play, you’re some kind of freak of nature who by chance has chosen The Water Knife as the first work of fiction you’ve ever read. 

Which is a shame. The Water Knife is set in a near future dystopia of the American south west, and I can’t help wondering how much better it would have been if Bacigalupi lived near Don Winslow and went out with him for a few beers to talk about plotting and how to make chaos into a real plot driver. Winslow makes the contemporary south west and borders into a terrifying character in its own right, to the point where I am anticipating The Cartel with a perfect measure of glee and dread that uses every shred of meaning in the word “anticipate”. Winslow could have put some plot manners on The Water Knife. 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern want your brains

Somehow it took longer to get Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the multiplex than it took to get the successor in. I put this down to the fact that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had a killer hook and a single hero, and above all was set in America, which remains the centre of the universe. Also, no-one had to worry about any recent great Lincoln movies, whereas great Pride and Prejudice adaptations are a dime a dozen.

Still, my hopes were high. There was a good notion, a decent looking cast, and if all else failed I could go back to the ticket desk and demand my money back, since I had cunningly asked for a ticket to Pride and Prejudice and the guy on the till had not corrected my mistake. I’m not sure I could have carried off the pretence that I had been looking forward to Keira Knightley’s cheekbones, but you just need a plan, not the conviction that it’s possible.

Sadly, PPZ is another one of those things which looks good on a napkin and doesn’t work at greater length. Like the Laffer Curve, and the WMD dossier and so on. The idea of the book is a great one, just the kind of thing which you’d cook up in the pub and it would be huge laughs until you were sitting in front of the typewriter the next morning, praying that the feeling of nausea and despair was a hangover, and not the realisation that you had to do the thing which had seemed so jolly the night before. The idea of a movie is slightly less daunting, because movies are idiotic to begin with and no-one’s expecting you to write as well as Jane Austen in a movie. On the other hand, producing the book was cheaper, so that’s the order we got them in, followed in short order by Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and thank God at that point the madness stopped and we didn’t get Moby Dick Nixon and Northanger Abbey Road. It seems safe to assume that there’s little risk of film adaptations of any of those titles, but if we do wind up getting Moby Dick Nixon I’m sorry for even suggesting it.

Things that go right: well, there’s a good game in the underlying zombie story, albeit a game which would make most wargamers cry. Zombies versus Napoleonic era British infantry is right in the wargaming wheelhouse, though the more reflective of us would suck our teeth and point to the absence of effective force multipliers for living infantry against the undead in an age before breech loading weapons, before going on to ponder the economic disruption of a zombie apocalypse and the way in which it would compromise the British ability to make war in their preferred way, which was to bribe other people to do all the awkward bits. Also, we’d be well out of countenance at the absence of both Wellington and Napoleon from proceedings.

Also going right; there’s a perfectly decent summer stock production of Pride and Prejudice going on in this movie; the cast are uniformly decent at doing Austen and seem a lot happier at it than they do when they’re fighting zombies. Charles Dance is lovely as Mr Bennet, Lily James impressed me more as Elizabeth Bennet than I expected her to, and Sam Riley’s Darcy was adequate, though I spent the whole movie thinking he was another ringer badged in from Game of Thrones along with Dance and Lena Headey (who is not given remotely enough to do). 

But; and it’s a huge but. For PPZ to work, the zombies have to be the thing which was missing all along from the source text. And instead, they’re just a pain the ass. At every step of the way, you’re reminded that the original book was a masterpiece, and that the zombies are making it worse, not better. I think that where the movie gets it wrong is making the zombies a big deal. The book proper is set against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, but you’d never know that this was life and death struggle for the fledgling British Empire; Austen is very properly focused on the life and death struggle to keep up appearances in the British upper middle class, and the war is a piece of background against which the infinitely more pressing day to day life of the characters unfolds. The zombie peril should have been just the same; a massive problem, which to the characters on screen was a mere distraction from their real worries. Elizabeth should have been stabbing zombies as an afterthought, not trying to save the empire. And in fairness to Lily James, she would have nailed it if she’d just been given the script.

Mark Dawson; The John Milton books

Not all of the John Milton books, because life is too short; just the first three, because Amazon had a bundle deal for three of them as e-Books and I seem to be redeveloping a mild thriller itch. 

They’re not bad. Dawson’s an OK writer and I am taken with his low-stakes approach of things; there’s an agreeable British cheapness to proceedings. Still they’re anything but indispensable, and I’m only commenting on them at all because as I was working my way through them, they struck me as a very British counterpart to Mark Greaney’s books. John Milton is a much more believable character than Courtland Gentry; he’s got a more plausible name, to start with, and it all runs on from there. He’s good at what he does because he’s experienced, not because he’s a wunderkind, and he’s out of the business because the strain made him an alcoholic, not because of some labyrinthine mystery.

Mostly, it started to sink in how the modern thriller is mired in a default of lone drifter comes to town, rights wrongs, moves on to next town. And there’s only one person to blame; Jack Reacher. Much as Harry Potter and the Hunger Games triggered a twin tsunami of magic schools and gritty dystopias for the under 16s, the huge success of Jack Reacher has left publishers everywhere looking for his understudy. 

Lone drifter is a perfectly good idea; it worked for Shane and it’s worked on and off ever since. And it doesn’t work too badly for John Milton, who’s a pretty plausible lone drifter, with good reasons to be drifting and lonely and most of all meddling. I found his economy of effort beguiling, though Dawson is going to need to find a way out of the narrative trap of always having Milton more or less sorted only to be derailed at the last minute by someone snatching the romantic interest and holding her hostage.

Still, it’s none of it the best in class. If you want lone middle aged alcoholic struggling with demons and righting wrongs, the gold standard is still Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder - the books, of course, not the movies. If you want the lone drifter putting the hurt on the bad guys, Reacher’s still the king. If you want British spies doing their subtly low rent versions of American bombast - actually, that’s Dawson’s strongest suit, but it’s a crowded field with a lot more depth to it; read Deighton, or Mick Herron, or Adam Hall; or  - an influence which Dawson winks to in the first book - James Mitchell’s Callan, the original British assassin who tries to quit his shadowy spook world but can never quite get loose.

Finally, obligatory grumble; like most guys in the field, Dawson can’t be bothered to do his gun homework, so things are littered with notions like Makarov revolvers. Guys; it’s the 21st century. If you just want some well cool hardware to name-drop and Wikipedia is too much like hard work, just go here and look at the pictures.

Cixin Liu: Three Body Problem/The Dark Forest.

If you only read one Chinese language Science Fiction book this year, The Three Body Problem will probably be it. If you’ve only read two, the other one was The Dark Forest.

The Three Body Problem is one of several different things which is getting the Sad Puppies movement all up in a wad about life, since it got the 2015 Hugo despite not having been written by a right wing libertarian middle aged American white guy, and as we know, middle aged American white guys are going through a period of suffering and neglect unparalleled in human history since shortly after amphibious life forms crawled out of the primordial ooze.

Like many people, the first thing I had to get my head round was that China had SF at all. It’s only a vibrant thousands-years-old culture of a billion people, so the thought that it might have indigenous fiction in its own language had naturally never crossed my mind. One of the minor victories of capitalism was persuading me that Mao’s cultural revolution had outlawed popular culture. The alternative notion that capitalism might have just decided to ignore any evidence that Chinese people were people ...

OK, I missed something. I don’t think I was the only person. The Three Body Problem was published in Chinese in 2008, and wasn’t published in an English language translation till last year. The Dark Forest  was the sequel, which came out in Chinese pretty soon after The Three Body Problem and was translated by a different translator soon after Three Body Problem.

I never know how much has been lost in translation, even when the translation is littered with footnotes which hint at the subtext which a foreign reader will miss in direct historical allusions. The only novel I’ve ever read in translation which struck me as a beautiful piece of writing was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow which is wonderful reading even in translation into English. The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest are not translations which anyone will read for the pleasure of the language, and I found it impossible to know whether they were just good old fashioned terrible writing about interesting ideas, or whether the flat, didactic style was an artifact of a larger cultural tradition which only a Chinese reader would understand as the art it was intended to be. Much as with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found the most interesting thing about the book was not the plot, but the insight into a society I don’t know much about. These are books in which the USA is an afterthought and Europe barely a footnote. The perspectives are unfamiliar and thought-provoking; for me at least, more so than the SF elements.

The Three Body Problem is a more readable book; that’s partly because I suspect that the translator was more on the wavelength of the original writer and partly because it’s more bedded into the present day, so that all I needed to struggle to understand was a different angle on the world that I think I already know. The SF ideas fall neatly into two groups; one great big one, and a bunch of well-cool stuff around the edges. The great big idea is that life on other planets sucks; the Three Body Problem is a matter of life and death for the population of Alpha Centauri. The chaotic interaction of three suns has destroyed all but one of the planets in the system and made life on the remaining planet a living hell of constantly changing weather. The little ideas around the edges are all about how Earth finds Trisolaris, and what Trisolaris does in response. Invade. But since this is hard SF, they invade within known physics, which means that the first book ends on the cliffhanger than the invasion fleet is on the way, and it’s going to take four hundred years to get to Earth.

The second book struggles to deal with the narrative problem of an invasion which takes longer than the history of modern thought. Sneaky Trisolaran tactics have crippled Earthly scientific progress, so Cixin Liu isn’t stuck with trying to imagine 400 years of the kind of technical progress you get in a war economy; he’s stuck instead with trying to frame a narrative with human characters who simply can’t outlive the problem the book’s built around. The big idea here is  resolution of the Fermi Paradox, which is a big bold notion in its own right; it’s so big, in fact, that warping the narrative to bring a narratively surprising pay-off kind of ruins everything else. There’s a wonderful ballsup of Earth’s defensive fleet and their efforts to preserve humanity which feels like a sketch of the midgame of Seveneves, written long before Stephenson got to it (much as there’s a bit of nano materials science in the first book which feels like it fell of Stephenson’s own desk). As Stephenson demonstrated, you could get a whole book out of an idea like that, and here it’s a sideshow, part of the mounting despair and defeatism which underpins the final climax.

Which itself is kind of anti-climactic. Not least because for some reason, the jacket copy for the English translation gives away the whole conceit of the book.

The Fermi Paradox is that there are so many stars in the universe that no matter what the odds are against interstellar travel, we should have had visitors by now; Cixin Liu’s resolution of this paradox is simple and horrifying, a Malthusian analysis which argues that the only safe move for any civilisation which spots another one is to destroy it without further ado. The whole book is leading up to that reveal, and the way in which Earth can use it to defend against certain defeat; but it’s right there on the back cover.

All that said, Cixin Liu is chucking ideas round like they aren’t even a thing. There may not be much re-read value to the translations (or perhaps even to the Chinese originals), but they’re worth one read, and the third book in the sequence comes out some time this year.

KJ Parker: The Last Witness

Suddenly, I’m reading pent up stocks of novellas. Partly because the little number badge on my Kindle “unread” collection is worryingly high and novellas are a fast way to get it looking less like a dangerous blood pressure reading. Don’t judge me. So I ripped through the Gameshouse (three more down. Don’t judge me) and swerved into Parker’s The Last Witness. Which I had been putting off for the slightly perverse reason that it was a novella, and so it would be over too quickly and I would be suffering from withdrawal symptoms with no sign of an actual Parker novel this side of the summer.

Instead it turned into a slog of approach avoidance, as Parker’s nameless narrator keeps snatching defeat from the jaws of defeat until I could hardly bear to read another paragraph. Something else would go wrong, and I’d put things down and have a wee think, and then come back to see if things could possibly get worse. Oh yes, of course they can.

The Last Witness turns on the idea that there are people - well one guy, anyhow - who can steal other people’s memories. Since no-one in fiction has ever used a power like that for good, the protagonist has naturally divided his time between using the power to further his own petty crimes, and hiring himself to much bigger criminals to cover up their much bigger crimes. There is no way a plan like this can end well, especially not in KJ Parker world, which exists under a giant arch that says in letters of fire “Your comeuppance begins here”. The tension in Parker’s books is not over whether the protagonists are going to get away with it, but over just how much collateral damage they’re going to do before it all falls around their ears. And Parker is a thorough-going tragedian in the classical mould; every catastrophe proves to have been set in motion by the very person it befalls. His genius [1] lies in how he can get an inexorable doom to come from an unexpected direction which is obvious in hindsight. This normally takes three books, or at least a full length novel, so when he tries to pack it all into a novella, the shocks and misery are compressed into such a tight space that I didn’t feel like there was room left for the poor old reader.

And yet, it’s all pulled off with panache. There’s a gut-wrenching twist right at the end, which is twisted in turn into something still more elegant. There’s also somehow enough room to ponder the problem of who you really are if your head is full of other people’s memories and you’re starting to lose track - or may be never even had track - of which ones you made yourself and which ones you stole. 

Parker can work to any length he feels like, in other words. What he can’t apparently do is figure out how to let anyone outside the US read the rest of his short fiction, which is bundled into a single collection called Academic Exercises that was published in a limited edition of 1000 copies and is now unobtainable, and as a Barnes and Noble e-book which can only be bought with an American credit card. Given the way his mind works, I can only assume that this is a cunning punishment for someone, and that at some point that someone will die and the rest of us can get on with reading the rest of Parker’s work.

 

[1] it turns out KJ Parker is a guy called Tom Holt. Who has at least two completely different literary identities as Holt together with the whole Parker empire, and presumably never sleeps.

Claire North: The Gameshouse

Your monsters tell us who you think the enemy is. If they’re zombies, the enemy is the faceless other, boiling en masse out of who knows where to destroy our world. If they’re vampires, the enemy is the hidden elite, stealthily sucking the life out of the community from a perch at the top of the food chain. I am coming to the thought that Claire North is a hidden poet of the “vampires are the enemy” school. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August has a sneaky elite, and Touch has an even sneakier one. And now along come the three short novellas of The Gameshouse with a cast of gamblers hiding among us, eking out an unnatural life through a casino which lets people gamble their lives, their memories, their senses; everything that makes them what they are.

Quite why the Gameshouse wasn’t a full length book I don’t know, but I suspect it didn’t work for North’s preferred way of getting the job done; both her novels have been told through the eyes of one of the bad guys, and the story she wanted to tell this time needed more than one set of eyes. Still she can’t resist the buttonholing urgent narrator, sidling up to us with an apologetic grin and a carefully elliptical explanation of how, really, he’s the good guy, if you just look it from his point of view. The first two novellas are ostensibly the stories of Thene and Remy, but they’re told to us by someone else, chattily showing us just as much of their story as he chooses, reeling in our sympathies as Thene and Remy try to escape their fates. Thene uses the Gameshouse to try to escape from a a loveless marriage in 17th century Venice, and Remy uses everything he can find to try to escape from a bad gamble being managed by the Gameshouse. The odds are stacked against them, but why? And why are we being told about it?

And then, in the third novella, we get some answers, and meet the narrator of the first two novellas, before we end on a cliff hanger which I don’t imagine North will bother to resolve. The resolution of the plot isn’t the point; the point is that once again shadowy figures move around our ordinary lives, taking a little here and a little there and somehow winding up with more than us, and less than they wanted, and a landscape around them that’s shattered by their passage. Whatever could that remind us of? Could this possibly echo celebrity culture more cuttingly?

And yet, Claire North has a full length novel coming out in a couple of months. At this rate I expect it to end with an explicit statement that she’s only being allowed to write these books because seeing things as fiction stops us from thinking that they’re real enough to spark a revolution. 

Ace Atkins: The Redeemers

Hi there, Quinn Colson, how’s it been?

If you buy The Redeemers, Atkins’ fifth Quinn Colson book, hoping to find out what Colson’s up to and how he’s cleaning up his hometown, brace for a disappointment. The last book ended with him on the verge of being fired from his Sheriff job, and in this one, he’s every bit as swept aside from the action as he has from local politics. The action in The Redeemers turns on a grotesquely bungled local robbery, and we spend most of the book eavesdropping on the - I was going to say planning, but it’s really not the right word - lead-up to the robbery, its inept performance, and the feeble-minded cover-up. Which is a two layer cover-up, since the idiots who pulled off the heist are dithering between staying ahead of the law and taking advantage of each other, while the more senior criminal elements of Tibbehah County are trying to figure out how to make sure the law doesn’t trip over various incriminating documents which got stolen along with the money.

And Quinn has just about nothing to do with any of it, since he’s been un-elected sheriff and has decided to take the same interest in supporting Tibbehah County as it took in supporting him. He’s not even sulking, just taking some time for himself. All the investigation is falling on the new Sheriff, who’d be out of his depth as a hall monitor in a decent public school, and Deputy Lillie, who knows better than to think anyone in Mississippi is going to let a woman take charge of things.

Near the end, Atkins remembers that this is Quinn Colson number five and throws some action Quinn’s way. In signature Atkins style, it’s simultaneously weirdly implausible and grubbily realistic. It makes no sense at all that anyone would bother shooting Quinn at this point, but what happens next is grim, muddled and all too believable. People don’t walk off injury in the world of Quinn Colson, and I was sort of surprised he didn’t wind up just like his buddy Boom Kimborough.

Do not ask me who gets redeemed, or who does the redeeming. Most of the Colson family problems are just as bad at the end as they are at the beginning. And while Johnny Stagg has been swept off the board along with most of his sinister backers, this has simply cleared the board for a new generation of criminals who will be both meaner and less fallible than Johnny. I shall miss Johnny, a horrible small town scoundrel with the sense to realise his own limitations. Johnny was ghastly, but he knew enough to leave something for the other guy, and treat the occasional orphan to the occasional lollipop. 

I have to hand it to Atkins. Here’s a book which is mostly about dreadful people screwing up and it stays readable all the way through. He has the knack of throwing together characters who look like stereotypes, but can still surprise you. In any other book, the new Sheriff would be some kind of despicable stooge, but Rusty’s his own guy from the get-go. Kind of an idiot, and out of his depth, but honest, and just smart enough to see where he’s going wrong. The book’s full of people like that, which is what kept me reading. These guys weren’t going to do anything right, but the path they’d find to disaster was a wonderful mix of malice and good intentions, or at least the kind of good intentions that selfish idiots work out when they’re drunk and desperate. 

And the decks are cleared for heaven knows what. I honestly thought that book 5 was going to draw a line under things and wrap up the sequence, but there’s plenty of life left in the Colsons and Tibbehah, and a whole new set of problems dusted off and ready for next year.

Mick Herron: Nobody Walks

Although you wouldn’t think it from my comments on Slow Horses, I became quite the Mick Herron fan afterward, painstakingly hoovering up all of his published work except for the impossible to find collection of short stories which his website still insists is available on Kindle; if you’re reading this, Mick, make your website true. I want to give you more of my money.

Herron-logy breaks into two big lumps and some bridging material. Lump one is the Zoe Boehm books, which share Zoe and some other recurring characters, and drift in and out of contact with the secret state as the books unfold. Lump two is Slough House, which is all about the secret state, and which has another book coming out one of these days. Hovering round the edges are Reconstruction and Nobody Walks, both of which are about the secret state colliding with more ordinary problems, but somehow failing to involve Zoe or Slough House. Salted in and around all the books are stray cross references which make it clear that they’re all happening in the same world, as characters in Reconstruction comment on the outrageous behaviour of villains from the Boehm books, and the screw-ups in Reconstruction echo into Slough House and so on. Herron’s characters are scraping by in a big disappointing world, where everyone knows everyone, and no-one really knows what they’re doing. The winners, more often than not, are the people who know it’s less important to have a plan than it is to have the sense that no-one else’s plans are going to work either, and the steely reflexes to pounce at the first sign of failure.

I bought Nobody Walks more or less as methadone while I waited for some more Slough House (or even some more Zoe Boehm). The title and the jacket copy sounded bleak, and Herron’s last stand-alone didn’t end cheerily for anyone. And so it proves. Happy endings are in short supply all around. But man, it’s good while it lasts. Herron’s got a fine easy style, even if I’ve complained in the past that the sharp dialogue isn’t as distinct as the characterisation behind it. Herron can sketch a character in a few lines, but can’t always give the same character a voice as distinctive as he deserves. Mind, that’s pretty much his only weakness. The plots are clever and grounded in a solid appreciation of human weakness and happenstance; Herron’s working statement seems to be “Things happen for a reason. A dumb, selfish reason."

All in all, it’s a good book which I ripped through in a couple of days. But writing this reminds me that the real credit belongs to Zoe Boehm. I know that Herron prefers to refer to them as the Oxford series, but I can think of no better way to explain what’s really going on than the reaction I had to the fourth book, Smoke and Whispers; it opens with the news of Zoe’s death and the return of the main character from Herron’s first ever book to investigate that report. I read the whole book in a gallop, hoping against hope that the rumours of her death had been greatly exaggerated. That’s good writing right there. What’s perhaps more notable is that it’s good writing about women; in those four books, Herron gives us female characters who don’t just feel like men with girl names. There’s an eye for detail in all of his writing, and somehow that eye has caught something that most male writers gloss over.