Johannes Cabal: Jonathan L Howard

Buying books on-line is a crapshoot of a very particular kind. You don't have the sense of physicality which comes with humping a wad of books over to the cash register and paying for them. Instead you're seeing a new writer, thinking "That looks interesting" and buying a whole lump of his books because, when you get right down to it, books are stupidly cheap for what they are and why the hell not? Then the box shows up at the door and you realize you've bought a lot more books than you would have bought if you'd been in a shop. After the usual delay, you finally get round to reading one of the books and you realize you don't like this writer's work at all, and that you've just wasted the cost of an evening's drinking for the dull disappointment of one book you don't like and three or four others that you know you wouldn't like so why even bother reading them?

I know all of this, and yet I go on buying new books in clumps through some maniacal combo of outdated preoccupations with saving postage and lunatic optimism that this time things will be different. 

And, to be honest, because sometimes I buy a whole bunch of books by someone who turns out to be pretty good.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer; The Detective; and The Fear Institute are not, by any stretch of the imagination, truly great books. But they are very well written. Howard's a naturally good writer of prose, a man who knows the value of using the right word instead of the almost-right paragraph. He might not be a masterful plotter, and his characterization is no more than the minimum needed to get through the plot, but he's nonetheless an enjoyable read. 

Cabal's the kind of character who makes great company on the page and would be terrible company in the real world; perhaps recognizing this, Howard's carefully put him in a world which isn't quite real, so as to put a bit of distance between his atrocious behavior and the happy reader chuckling at it.

Of the three books, Johannes Cabal the Detective is probably the best, combining a nice straightforward plot, a good assortment of characters for Cabal to be annoyed with, and a lot more detail about Howard's engagingly bonkers Edwardian era than we see in the other two books. The Necromancer, the first book, is a bit of a mess plot wise, a jumble of incidents which don't quite cohere into a single satisfying narrative. The Fear Institute, the third book, suffers from some of the same problems, but sorts them out better. Oddly enough, both of them end with quite affecting codas which put Cabal's singleminded pursuit of necromancy into a much more human context. 

A lot of our protagonists these days are supposed to be anti-heroes, scoundrels who we root for all the same. Cabal is not your workaday anti-hero. Although Howard softens him somewhat with his backstory, through most of the narrative Cabal maintains a steely resolve to look after number one no matter who gets hurt in the process. Mind you, in a world where reading books is increasingly a minority sport of the mildly intellectual, he's almost tailored as a character that people who read can root for; Cabal is the kind of person who would shoot someone because he doesn't agree with their grammar. This shouldn't be as funny as it actually is. 

The third book ends on an almost TV series finale level of cliff hangishness, with Cabal saved from almost certain death by a mysterious figure who he had thought long dead. The book ends without telling us who this might be. Howard should have more confidence in his own skills; anyone who's stuck with Cabal so far will be buying the next book anyhow. And on form to date, Howard is perfectly capable of not bothering to tell us who the mystery figure was; he's the only other writer I've come across who equals that wonderful insouciance in Patrick Rothfuss'sThe Wise Man's Fear. Rothfuss left out a whole chunk of the narrative and made a joke out of it; Howard's got that same glint in his eye.

The 2012 Barrel; presumably awash with oil

Eurovision has become quite staggeringly vulgar over the years; not the individual acts, but the ever ratcheting visual flash of the staging by the organizers. Azerbaijan rustled up a hall for this year's extravaganza in seven months, and still had money left over to fill the place with pyrotechnics; maybe it's time that they started applying something like US campaign funding rules to Eurovision and telling the hosts that they can't spend any more money than the first one cost.

The UK don't seem to have noticed what happened to France last year and so they sent a singer to sing an actual song, albeit a singer older than my dad and a song which makes him look young. As a nul points contender, it's got everything going for it. Hungary seems to have discovered a stash of 1980s vampire wannabes and has decided to see if the stage lighting will do the same thing as sunlight; sadly not, though I can't remember anything about the song thirty seconds after they stopped. And; this just in; Albania has its own Bjork. Keeping up the 1980s theme, she looks like a rejected costume drawing for the Flash Gordon movie's evil queen, with the comedy bonus of a hairdo that mixes the best of a beehive and ludicrous pony tail.

Lithuania is going even further back in time with a guy who thinks it's a shame the rat pack don't still dominate the world. Because the song is about how love is blind, he started it off in a blindfold; it would have been kinder to offer it to the audience. Neighboring Russia have had an epic irony bypass, and sent a banderilla of babushkas, all of whom look like veterans of the Great Patriotic War, but apparently one of them is only 44. Flesh colored boom mikes are never a great idea, but on a crew this old, they really look like big warts from just about every angle. But the crowd goes wild, so what do I know?

More than France, possibly, who seem to have caught up with what this is all about and have sent a shouty woman in a nightdress and half the French olympic gym team. I suspect this is going to capture the attention of a much smaller subset of the population than they were planning for; specifically all the people who've been hoping Cher would start touring again because she's SO fabulous.

Italy are now short of money that they've sent necromancers to dig up Amy Winehouse; honestly the only difference I can see is that Nina Zilli hasn't felt the urge to illustrate herself. Not often that the Eurovision has me mourning what might have been in the real world. Norway appear to have found themselves wondering what would happen if Justin Bieber tried to channel Eminem; the answer is that you get something disturbingly like a live action version of Flynn Ryder from Entangled; and perhaps it's best to avoid having your lead spastically flailing around the stage yelling "I don't know what I'm doing tonight." when it's so obvious that he doesn't. 

Just when I thought the Eurovision had forgotten its essential madness, Romania have saved the day with a traditional number; an overadrenalised hot chick in a tiny dress babbling gibberish at the top of her voice and a backing band all in white and playing an assortment of instruments that should never be seen together let alone played together; including a set of bagpipes and a French horn with a bundle of vuvuzelas stuck down the barrel. A welcome return to form for the show. And it seems to signal it getting back into stride; the Danes showed why they're dominating murder dramas but not pop music, and now the Greeks have rolled out with a completely mainstream piece of zorba-inflected bubblegum consisting of English catchphrases and a whole bunch of vowel sounds. That's more like it.

There's always at least one number which makes you think that the country's been subjected to a musical theatre coup, but Turkey seems to have decided that what they really need for next year is a gay tourism bonanza, possibly with vampire overtones. I don't think I've seen anything this camp since I first found out what camp meant. Amazingly, the phrase "Hello Sailor" wasn't used, but it would probably have been overkill.

Jedward have now been and gone, another cunning move in our struggle to ensure that we never have to pay to host this thing again. It's impossible to dislike Jedward, but it's equally impossible to believe that they pay attention during the choreography rehearsals, possibly because they think that as twins they have the superpower of moving as one and so don't need to practice. The outfits this year were arresting; If 1980's Flash Gordon had had a subplot where screamingly fabulous aliens invaded the earth, their armour would have looked just like Jedward's; sensibly, they didn't see any need for head protection.

Voting went pretty much the way it always does, including the ritual humiliation of the UK, who only missed placing dead last by virtue of Norway doing as badly as they traditionally do. Seems like people feel even more hacked off about the Vikings than they do about the Empire.

Ashleigh and Pudsey; So. It has come to this.

Heaven knows, I try not to let anything shock me. I am not going to pretend that the outcome of Britain's Got Talent shocked me or knocked me off stride. The news that, faced with people who could sing dance and the lord knows what else, the great British public voted for an agile dog and his owner did not me surprise me in the slightest. I'm not actually sure what it would take before the outcome of text voting in the UK mainland would make me take a deep breath and say "Well, that, I did not expect." The restoration of chattel slavery and the reintroduction of sumptuary taxes, perhaps. The replacement of the monarchy by an animated waxwork of Henry Hawley Crippen, voiced by Cherie Blair. No, wait, they already did that with 10 Downing Street, and it wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there in my life time.

Still, it was weird enough to get me thinking, and most of what it got me thinking was "Is THIS what it's all about? Are all of these reality shows with viewer voting just meant to make us give up entirely on the notion of democracy?". Because you've got to wonder, don't you? There goes the British public voting for some random woman and a dog that does what she tells it to do. That's what voting gets you, is it? And then it struck me; some pretty face with a couple of sound bites, backed up by a tame poodle what hogs the camera? Didn't the UK just do this in 2010? Does reality game show land even NEED to point out the futility of voting?

The Avengers; nothing even vaguely like the best movie of the year, I hope

Right now, Avengers Assemble is scoring 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. This means pretty much every movie critic who's seen it has liked it, which leads me to think that every movie critic alive has been reprogrammed by something insidious in the 3D glasses. That or their collective expectations have beaten down so hard by watching Michael Bay movies that they greet anything better as a starving man falls on a Whopper thinking that at least it isn't a Big Mac.

So. It has come to this.

Joss Whedon has managed to leave me feeling kind of bored and uninvolved with a movie. A movie with Robert Downey Jr, Jeremy Renner and Samuel MF L Jackson in it. And Scarlett Johanssen. I think they come and take my man card off me if I fail to notice that Scarlett's in the movie, though to be honest I'm slightly more bothered that they snuck Jenny Agutter in and I didn't pick up on it till the credits.

Things I liked; I liked it that Stellan Skarsgard got to carry a big silver suitcase, in what I choose to believe was a deliberate shout out to a good simple movie, Ronin.

Eh, that's it. If you liked Chris Evans in Captain America (it was fine), watch it again. If you liked Robert Downey in the first Iron Man movie, watch that again. if you liked Thor; what is WRONG with you? If you like  Jeremy Renner, watch The Town and Hurt Locker. There's too many people in this movie, and none of them have really got enough to do, but the real frustration comes from watching a bunch of actors who are individually capable of carrying a whole movie trying to share out a movie whose plot boils down to "What can we do to avoid getting to the end before everyone's had a chance to get in a character beat or two?".

No 3D movie is complete until I've ragged on the 3D, which as usual adds nothing of importance, but lowers the contrast on the screen so that nothing is as sharp as it should be. I'm keeping an open mind about the Hobbit, and Avatar actually made 3D work for a living, but for everything else it's like a robbery where they make the victim wear the mask.

It did leave me with time to ponder the conundrum of why it is that when the aliens invade, they always trash either LA or New York. I know it's because the movies are made in the US and they're pandering to the local audience, but I'm starting to wonder if the rest of us are putting up with it because secretly it's rather fun to think that the aliens are just going to focus on wrecking America while they ignore the rest of us.

I wanted to like this, I really did. It was heralded as a thinking man's comic hero movie. In reality, it's a big sprawling mess with two big set pieces and a story that only makes sense if you assume that the characters' agents had Joss Whedon's kids in a basement somewhere and wouldn't let them out till he wrote them all a big scene. So, if you only see one superhero movie this year; wait for something better than this.

Fever Crumb

I've written before about Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet. I made the minor mistake of thinking that the Fever Crumb prequels weren't also a quartet, and so I'm frustrated and beached, three books into a four book sequence with the fourth one still hung up somewhere between Reeve's mind and the bookshop. It's hard to know whether what I've read will wrap up in as satisfying a way as the original four books, or whether the vague feeling of disappointment is a herald of bigger disappointment in a year or so.

It's not that the books are bad, nor that I didn't have fun reading them. Reeve is still juggling whimsy with grimness and mostly getting away with it. And there are big solid chunks of imagination in there; the venue for the second book, Mayda, is nicely sketched in. Still, there's always a problem in prequels; the author's imagination is hemmed in by the fact that the future is already determined. On a bad day, the action's just running on rails to a destination the reader already knows too well; on a good day, a set-up that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the pre-ordained future is cleverly revealed to be all about it. Those good days are very rare, no matter how good an author is, and when the clever reveal doesn't work, it feels clunky and contrived. One of the best characters in Mortal Engines is Shrike; and his origin story forms part of the narrative for Fever Crumb. Should be brilliant, somehow ain't. Shrike doesn't need to be explained; Reeve should have learned from watching the Phantom Menace how it's not a good plan to show us where the fascinating robots come from.

These are quibbles, me grumbling about a good writer not quite living up to my expectations. The steely hardheadedness is still there, both in the willingness to kill off characters who would have lived through most other books and in the way in which characters get worse. Fever Crumb's saga doesn't hold a couple as interesting as Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, but it's fascinating to watch the development of Charley Shallow in the story so far; he keeps getting more and more unpleasant and selfish; I can't recall the last time I've read a children's book which goes to so much trouble to build a villain up from an initially relatable character. Knowing Reeve, I'm not betting on redemption for Charley Shallow in the fourth book; neither am I betting on his getting his comeuppance.

I had put off heading into the books for a while, fearing that I might be disappointed, and so it came to pass. How much of it was the inevitable problem of writing a prequel and how much of it was me setting my bar too high, I really don't know. Next year we will, touch wood, see how the threads get knotted together.

The Company of the Dead: David Kowalski

It turns out that this book took 15 years to finish, which is only slightly longer than I felt it was taking me to read it.

It really seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm officially not in the mood for the Titanic (and due notice be served here, it's just like any other boat in the whole world, so it gets a 'the" in front of its name, James Cameron be damned), but this was a book about time travel and alternate history which just happened to have the Titanic stuck in around the edges, so I was willing to give it a pass. When I found it in the Belfast Waterstones and realized that it was 750 pages long, I had some faint misgivings. Courage, I thought. Blackout and All Clear were crazy long and that all worked out fine. How bad can it be?

The Company of the Dead isn't entirely bad, but it falls a long way short of great. The idea in it is a good one; well-intentioned time traveller tries to stop the Titanic from sinking, only to create a world much different to, and much worse than, the one we know. So far, so the Sound of Thunder (there may be earlier takes on the idea that small changes have big downstream effects, but the Sound of Thunder is the first one I read, and even now, almost forty years later, my recollection of it packs a wallop). Kowalski had an interesting idea about what would happen next; the small changes wrought in trying to stop the sinking keep America out of World War I, which stops World War II from happening and leads to technological and social stagnation persisting well into this century. The detail of some of the trends didn't strike me as entirely plausible, but the notion of things just stultifying for a while was very credible. Most of the great empires went stagnant once they reached their expansion limits; and then they collapsed, of course, as empires will.

So Kowalski had a nice idea to begin with, and then an interesting vision of an alternate world. What went wrong? The whole middle of the book, really. Even though I'm heartily tired of the Titanic, the book would have been much better if it had stayed on the boat the whole time. What happens instead is that the book begins and ends on the boat, and then there's this huge messy middle that doesn't really work. My best guess is that there's around 500 pages in the middle of the book which could be painlessly removed without any real loss to the project. They're just a distraction. They don't really sketch in the world much, they don't - to me - do anything to elucidate character, and they don't advance the plot. It's almost like Kowalski himself didn't know where to go with his ideas and kept writing until he figured out what he wanted to do. Then, instead of being ruthless and going back over the work with a redwood-sized blue pencil, he just kept all the dead ends and side quests, winding up with a doorstop when a wedge would have got the same job done more elegantly.

It's not always a bad thing to digress all over the shop, but to get away with it requires a talent which Kowalski doesn't demonstrate here. I found myself re-reading chunks of the prose because I'd lost track of which character was the focus of the short chapter I was reading. The characters don't come to life, and although Kowalski often captures that sense of desperation which a doomed endeavor carries, sheer desperation is ultimately tiring to read about, especially when it's sustained over so many pages.

Perhaps the most important near miss in the book is with the role of time travel; Kowalski cleverly makes it just as much a mystery to his characters as it is to us, but then fails to concentrate on it, instead making the centre of the book a vast confusing conspiracy that completely ignores the mystery which ought to be the centerpiece. Parts of the mess are ultimately tied back into the whole by time travel, but by the time the knots have been tied, so much other stuff has happened that nothing carries the dramatic and emotional weight that it ought to. It's almost as though some Harry Turtledove sized pure alternate history novel has been dropped into the middle of a perfectly good time travel book, to the detriment of both. There's a perfectly good book in there about the problems of Kowalski's alternate America, but it's getting in the way of an equally perfectly good Jack Finney-esque meditation on the price you pay whether you change the past or leave things be.

The Hunger Games; Soon to be a movie

I've never read any of the Harry Potter books. I'm aware of their content, because it's pretty hard to be a functioning adult in the 21st century and not pick up on a pop culture phenomenon on a scale that takes a woman from living on benefits to having as much money as the Queen of England. For me the most interesting thing about the Harry Potter books is that suddenly everyone's writing for pre-teens and teens and marketing the blue hell out of the product. Which did not used to be a thing. Small people are waiting with bated breath for the next volume of whatever's hip. Small people of a very different kind are waiting with even more bated breath for the next big juggernaut, now that Ms Rowling's disobligingly derailed THAT gravy train. Which is why we've all had to live through Twilight for the last five years. Next big thing after that looks like being the Hunger Games trilogy, so I thought I would finally read something which is going to be a media juggernaut and see what the fuss is all about rather than trying to figure it out from listening to people arguing about it.

It's not at all a bad book; Suzanne Collins is not a jarringly bad writer. You don't find yourself holding the book out at arms length and marveling at how broken the writing is. She's not a genuine lyrical talent either, though it's hard to tell whether the flatness in the prose is Collins' own style or the result of Collins deliberately trying to get across the voice of her narrator. Either way, it's perfectly workmanlike writing, and it motors along in a Stephen King kind of way. I read the book in more or less of a hurry, wanting to know what happens next and dreading the worst for the characters. An author's done a good enough job when I'd rather not put the book down.

Having said that, the book was less than I had expected it to be. The funny thing is how much that leaves for me to unpick about it. The Hunger Games, for any of you who have been living under a rock, is all about a reality TV show in a post apocalyptical America, in which teenagers have to duel to the death in an arena. I gather that Collins was inspired to write it out a general irritation with reality gameshows, but I have too much respect for anyone who can get a book published to buy that as her sole motivation. There's a lot more going on in her mind than just being annoyed with the TV set. She had to cook up characters and a back story and a whole bunch of other things, and then weave them into a coherent whole. If she'd just been annoyed with the TV, she'd have done what everyone else does, and yelled at it till she could find something on another channel.

Picking at the idea of people being killed for our entertainment isn't a new idea in fiction; Stephen King has covered this twice in The Running Man and The Long Walk. The Long Walk, like the Hunger Games, is set in a dystopian future America, but don't expect a sudden revival in its readership because of that superficial similarity. It's a bleak, heartbreaking piece of work, which is not quite well-enough-written to be worth reading twice. Over in Japan, the exact theme of kids being forced to battle it out till there's only one left was done - probably unimprovably - more than a decade ago with Battle Royale.

Suzanne Collins is not, in other words, the first person to have had this particular idea. She is the first person who looks likely to get rich off it. The Hunger Games has been the best selling book in Amazon's Kindle website since I first started looking at the site, and still is as I type this. Some time in the next couple of weeks, the movie is coming out, and unlike the Twilight movies, the adaptation has a pretty respectable cast; Jennifer Lawrence, who'll play Katniss Everdeen, was nominated for an Oscar; the backfield is littered with talent like Donald Sutherland. Of course the movie is going to make money, but it might actually be a good movie as well. Has Collins just got lucky? Was it just that the time was right for another blockbuster?

You can't rule out timing. Rowling created a new economic niche, an all the more marvelous achievement in a world where kids looking to pass the time have options I could have never imagined when books were my constant childhood comfort. There'a huge market out there, ever hungry for the next big thing. And the next big thing isn't about quality, necessarily. There was a time when you couldn't ride a bus or take a plane without seeing someone reading the Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code is a terrible book, that rare book which can actually make you stupider than you were before you read it. It's wrong about everything; the details, the big picture, the way that people are, even the way that they aren't. It's a book which could conceivably have got the simple matter of the sunrise wrong, if the author had taken the time to consider the dawn. And yet, it sold. Quality is irrelevant to these waves of enthusiasm which sweep along. Which is logical, really. The huge sellers are precisely those books which are read by people who DON'T ordinarily read books.

So Collins didn't need to write a good book to get lucky. She needed to write a book which teenagers would like. And she did that, whether by accident or design. Accident, probably. You write the book that's in you, no matter how good you are at pitching it to an imaginary reader. Collins did her very best to write the book that was in her, and when it was done, it somehow resonated with enough teenagers to become the next phenomenon. And there it was just as the market needed another wave to surf on, and so she's minted. I'm happy enough about that; it could have happened to a lot of worse things. I'd rather see Patrick Ness or Philip Reeve rolling in money, but them's the breaks.

Still, I've got reservations. Obviously, no book published in America for teenagers is ever going to have the sheer nihilistic bleakness of Battle Royale or even The Long Walk. The Hunger Games was always going to have to pull its punches. An honest depiction of real children being forced to kill each other for the entertainment of the rich would be a hell of a tough read. The challenge that Collins sets herself is tricky. She's imagined a world in which two dozen teenagers are thrown into an arena all Thunderdome-style, and then decided to tell the story in first person narrative. So her narrator has to be the last person standing. To be the last person standing, she's going to have to kill her way to first place. It stands to reason that the last person standing in a battle like that is going to be a tough person to like.

For the most part, Collins gets around the problem by dodging it. Most of the killing is done by other kids; within the first few minutes of the tournament beginning, almost half of them are dead in the struggle to get at the weapons cache at the centre of the arena. The survivors of that melee pick each other off. Our two main protagonists get to stay above the killing until the very last, and even then the killings are feathered to keep them from looking ugly to the reader. There are good guys and bad guys, and for the most part, the bad guys do the ugly work and then get their comeuppance. And the ugliness is further distanced by making the other teenagers ciphers; we never really see them as characters, or even as names. Just as soldiers are taught to kill by teaching them not to think of their opponents as really people, the reader gets past the deaths of 22 children by keeping most of them as just numbers. How much of this is the narrator trying to keep a distance so that she can live with what she's doing, and how much the writer trying to keep a distance so that the book remains readable for teenagers?

My real headache is the background rather than the foreground. The world sketched out in the book doesn't make a lot of sense. We know, from one reference, that the Hunger Games tournaments have been going on for thirty years. We know that coal is important, and that the ruling class of the nation of Panem has access to technology almost indistinguishable from magic (invisible hovercraft?). We know that each of the 12 districts around the Capitol specializes in a single form of economic activity to the effective exclusion of everything else. Now, to some extent, this kind thinking is a standardized narrative simplification that you see all the time in fantasy and SF novels and other prose for the immature, and you ignore the implausibility and motor on. But I kind of choked on the notion that the culture's been in this kind of stasis for thirty years despite the fact that they have high technology. In just the last decade, with far less cool toys, the world has changed dramatically. It doesn't make sense that the Games would just go on and on for so long in an unchanging world.

The "this is just the way it's always been" phenomenon in genre fiction has long been a bugbear of mine, and I sometimes think that it's a cry for help; this constant invocation of unchanging societies is a kind of wish fulfillment, with writers - who are a comfortable lot, by and large, or else they wouldn't have the leisure to write - just hoping that everything will stay the same so that their comforts are preserved.

As I finished the book this morning, I found myself pondering the irony of the book becoming a movie. As the book closes, Katniss Everdeen, our narrator, is wincing at the way the powers-that-be are turning her ordeal into a three-hour TV special in which everything will be edited into shape to make a satisfying narrative. How WILL the movie address that quandary?

The thing is, it's hard to judge the overall work on the first book. When I was finished reading the first book of Patrick Ness' magnificent Chaos Walking trilogy, I knew I'd read something excellent no matter what came next. Having finished The Hunger Games, I don't know whether the things which bug me about the first book will be sorted out by the other two books in the trilogy, or made worse. There's a tension, for example, which has been created between Katniss and two other characters which I fear could yet turn into Team Jacob and Team Edward. Will I see my misgivings about the imagined world sorted out once Katniss is in a position to learn more than she knows right now? Could go either way, really. But I'd like to find out. The Hunger Games is not a great book, but it's got its hooks into me nonetheless.

PS: I just came across this, which like most things I come across is much funnier than anything I've written.