Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Rick cracks up, but even in his worst moments still proves himself a leader.

Baby, it's cold outside

An interesting, '60s take on racism and imperialism as a climate change plunges Europe into deep, and seemingly perpetual, winter.  The lucky few manage to escape to Africa where they find themselves the new underclass, forced to work in the same kind of conditions that the native South Africans found themselves when subjugated by their white masters.

Although Christopher uses the story as a fable to illustrate just how wrong white behaviour was/is (obvious now, but not so evident to a sizeable proportion of the British population back when this book was written), he still falls into the trap of stereotyping black behaviour as lustful (particularly concerning white women), greedy, corrupt, incompetent, and riven by tribalism.  Which is not to say that the remnants of British civilisation maintains a "noble savagery"; far from it.  The reamaining survivors tend to a form of new feudalism (a state which Christopher has survivors of his many catastrophe novels  revert to), with only a few looking to rebuild society rather than remake it into something which supports them at the expense of others.

A new home beckons - but is eveything in the garden as lovely as it is painted?

Rick continues to feel the pressure (and the isolation)  of leadership in this increasingly compelling series.

Select options as appropriate

Bertie has (taken up a hobby/grown facial hair/started wearing something) of which Jeeves disapproves. 

Meanwhile, a (sporty/soppy/intellectual) ex-fiance now engaged to Bertie's (friend/enemy/rival in the Drones Darts Tourney) breaks off her engagement and committs herself to (improving/marrying/improving AND marrying) Bertie.

Meanwhile, Bertie's (good/bad) aunt wants Bertie to (steal something/take someone under his wing/steal something/steal something).

Meanwhile, Bertie makes an enemy of  (an American Billionaire/a Northern industrialist/a would-be Fascist dictator/a psychologist/a magistrate) by (sloshing them/coshing them/stealing something from them/becoming affianced to their daughter/niece/fiancee).

Jeeves steps in.

The status quo is restored.

A middle class assortment, trapped in a ski lodge by an avalanche, find themselves one-by-one being taken over by a parasitic lifeform which is neither malevolent nor benevolent, but merely determined on survival.   Probably an allegory for something, but if so it is lost in the mists of time as far as I am concerned.  A slightly too-large cast, with too many viewpoints make this a confusing read at times, and many of the character traits are those that recur elsewhere in his works;  the drinking, the promiscuity, the infidelity. 

I worry about Rick.  How much longer can he hold it all together?

Don't take for Granted

The second book in the Peter Grant series, and it builds nicely on the first ("Rivers of London").  Our hero is a rookie policeman, and rookie wizard.  Hold on to your Hogwarts induced heavings, he's no Harry P.    Son of a West Indian jazz man, barely able to conjure a single fireball without blowing the place up, Peter G has to rely on his wits and his ability to sense the presence of magic to solve this one, a nasty tale of jazz men being murdered by... but that would be telling.

New readers start here

The story moves at a hectic pace, and there are colourful characters aplenty mixed in with some great invention (Larry the Lark, the living fortune-telling machine is one to remember).  More widely read people than me might be able to detect influences, but to me Aaronovitch is an original - light-hearted and black-hearted at one and the same time, full og plot and full of wit.  Looking forward to the next one.

Unputdownability : I think I'll go to bed early and do some reading...

That sinking feeling...

Six complete issues of this classic 1950s horror comic, so twentyfour tales of revenge from beyond the grave, premature burial, revenge from beyond the grave, voodoo, faithless wives and philandering husbands... oh, and revenge from beyond the grave.

TftC lacks the variety of, say ShockSupenStories - and although its stories tend to have a moral (albeit most of them are along the lines of "Do this, and someone will take revenge on you from beyond the grave") there is nothing which comes close to the social commentary stories , and none of the adaptations of other writers' works (like the Ray Bradbury's seen elsewhere).

You can forgive the lack of variety - Bill Gaines provided most of the plots for Al Fedstein to write the stories, for most of the EC line of seven bi-monthly titles.  Do the maths - that fourteen short stories a month, every month.  No wonder the plots could be a little samey (or even "inspired" by other media - note the number of times a Wax Museum provides the setting). 

Still - you can imagine the chill these stories gave the unsophisticated juvenile reader, and some of the artwork is pretty ghastly (in the best possible sense).  And you can equally imagine how parents siezed up the EC horror line as the cause of all their problems (in much the same way that, say "Civil War" bubblegum cards outrgaed British parents in the 1960s, and punk rock in the late 70s).  Every generation needs something other than their own failings to take the blame for the inevitable youth disaffection.  Poor old Bill Gaines - it was him and the Communists, and his comics were easier to spot.

Volume 1 now sells for around the £200 mark - not sure that I am completist enough to go that far.  But I shall continue to pick up odd volumes of the EC archive whenever I see them at a decent price.

Unputdownability:  Like a big box of chocolates, one or two taste great, but the the whole lot in one sitting 'll make you a little bit icky.

I really shouldn't - but Philip Reeve is such a great story teller.  Within moments of opening one of his books, you are absorbed into his reality, which he fully furnishes and makes wholly believable.  In "Larklight" we are in a Victorian world as seen through the eyes of a "Boys Own paper" hero with an annoyiong older sister, a deceased mother, and a semi-detached scientific father.  Only difference is, they live in a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells outer space domicile, in a breathable aether that fills a universe full of planets easily reached by alchemical engines.  But in this comfortable, British Space Empire of Kieller Dundee marmalade and Victorian engineering ingenuity lurks a great danger in the form of ten-legged spiders from Saturn.  Oh.  And pirates. 

Thank goodness for the British Secret Service, and backbone, and stiff upper lips.

Even when writing for a younger audience than those that the "Mortal Engines" books are aimed at, Reeve never patronises.  He never insults, and he never stoops to slipping in "adult" jokes, though there are nudging references for the more savvy of his junior readers.

Beautifully, and amusing, illustrated throughout by David Wyatt.

Unputdownability:  like a Saturday morning serial, you can't wait for the next episode.

We become... addicted!

It'll turn out all Wight in the end

The difficulty with coming across a "serial" character so late in the day is that it is difficult to feel particular empathy with their problem (and all serial detectives seem to have a "problem" these days).  In the case of DI Andy Horton, it is the fate of his disappeared mother, something which takes up an awful lot of his internal processes during the course of this book without making any significant progress towards a solution - very frustrating for the new reader.

While this is all going on, a somewhat overcomplicated case involving a transvestite corpse found bobbing in the sea off the Isle of Wight is being solved and an important lesson is learned - that I don't really enjoy police procedurals as much when they are not written by Ed McBain.

Unputdownability :  Every time I did, I had to backtrack when I picked it up again, just to clarify who was who.

The yellow, black and purple of the Gollancz covers were the first things I learned to loook for when I moved up to the adult library. That, and the PG Wodehouse "Signature" edition jackets from Jenkins.
So I was delighted when I saw a bunch of them in a bookshop, all wrapped aropund ten classic SF novels, and I decided to reintroduce myself to an old favourite; "Dune". I last read this in 1974, just after I started work - it got me through quite a few Tube journeys, books weren't usually that thick in those days.   It bears re-reading nowadays, for the grand scale and the dashing (and sometimes slapdash) plotting.  The writing is surprisingly old-fashioned - the omniscient narrator who can tell you wahat every character in the room is thinking has long fallen out of fashion, but once re-accustomed to it, it becomes bearable if not over-used.  I am left, as I was many years ago, with the impression that Herbert started out with a swashbuckling story of interplanetary fueding, and ten found his story taking over - it becomes more psychedelic the further you get into it, and more portentous and (occasionally) more pretentious. 

Oh well, if you are going to delve into SF's back catalogue, you might as well go for The Master.

Actiually, by this stage of his writing, RAH was far too interested in showing how clever he was, and how well constructed his philosophical arguments were.  So the story itself is episodic, disjointed, and less than satisfying by modern standards (but in its day won, I think, a Hugo for Best SF Novel of the year).

It is astonishing the extent to which Heinlein's world of 5000 years in the future has changed so little from the world of 1960, but RAH isn't there to construct a future technology, merely a future quasi-stratocracy (not actually a military rule per se, but a democracy where only ex-military can vote) and a vehicle for his less than right-on views.  Sometimes I think the only liberal view RAH had was concerning intra-familial love;  Time Enough For Love and Farnham's Freehold both have characters and situations which espouse (*ahem*) "close and loving family relationships".

Never mind.

Don't read this expecting all the excitement of the Vehoeven movie, or the CGI cartoon "Roughnecks" that graced breakfast TV about 15 years ago - don't even expect all the characters to have the same gender.  And take it all with a pinch of generous salt.  Thems was different days, after all.

Unputdownability:  Another day, another chapter.

Thirteen years in the writing
according to the publishers, and they offer a money-back guarantee if you don't "love" the book. 

I really wish that I did - thirteen years is a long time to commit to telling a story, but I am not sure that this one is quite as epic, or deep, or meaningful as its gestation period might suggest.  

A family wins a lottery.  Two feckless young men decide to get themselves a big slice of that pie.  One of them develops delusions of religious grandeur.  A semi-retired cop suspects.  

I know that there are probably some big themes, and that the author has something to say.  Sadly, for me, the characters are underdeveloped, or too crudely sketched, or lack a coherent sense of purpose and personality.  There is no moral centre. Tension is largely absent;  will the old cop get fired or will he uncover the truth?  Will the blackmailers get away with it all?   This reader didn't really care one way or the other.  I kept reading, but more to find out whether things reached a satisfying conclusion or not.  

Unputdownability : Thirteen years to write;  I suppose I had better give him a chance.

Don't let the stickers put you off.
The ones that say "Channel 4 Book Club" and "Bathtub Best Read Award" and "HobNobs Recommended Teatime Novel".  OK, I might be making some of them up, but it did take me about ten minutes to scrape all the various shouty stickers of the front of this one.  The "Man Booker Shortlist" blurb can also be a bit off-putting - is this going to be a "worthy read" or a populist?

Neither.   Funny, touching, sad, happy,  the Oddessey of the two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters (murderers for hire), across America in pursuit of their nominated victim is highly episodic but always driven towards the final confrontation (and beyond).  Eli begins to dream of a different life but cannot turn his brother from the path of relentless violence.  They gain fortunes.  They lose fortunes.  Eli falls in love.  Repeatedly.  He even waxes affectionate about his broken down old nag.  Eventually they catch up with their intended victim.  And that's where the fun really starts.

They're gunna get you!

The language is exquisite, clever without ever being intrusive.  The dialogue is great - mannered and natural.  And the narrator's voice never once falters.

I doubt that I shall read a better book in the rest of 2012.

Unputdownability:  I read from page 1 to page 325, and went straight back to Page 1 again.

So many recommendations and good reviews so I thought I would give this one a spin, and it probably falls under the heading of  "biggest disappointment of the year".  Michelle Paver is a children's writer, and I'm sorry to say that it really shows.   It is as if she has set out with a warning from her publishers not to frighten anybody too badly, and there's no chance of any bad dreams being initiated by this novel.

An amateur research team set out for the Arctic wilderness, and a string of misadventures reduces their number to one who carries on the project while waiting for the others to join back up with him.  He feels lonely.  He thinks he sees a ghost.  Someone tells him the place is haunted.  He does see a ghost.  He runs away from the ghost.

The research is thorough and unfortunately, it tends to show - Paver doesn't miss many opportunities to shoehorn in a brand name, or a contemporary reference.  But good research doen't necessarily make for good storytelling, and not for good adult storytelling. There is insufficient tension, the pace is frightfully slow, there is little real sense of menace, the "reveal" is in a dream, and even then only fitfully related so that the true horror is
so concealed as to be almost Lovecraftian, and not in a goosd way - you know how HPL was fond of saying that things were so gruesome that he couldn't describe them?  Well, a bit like that.

Unputdownability : I only didn't put it down because I so dreaded having to pick it back up again.

Hard to believe  
that Meg Gardiner went for so long without an American publisher, especially with the likes of Stephen King singing her praises.

Her Evan Delaney series was a terrific five novel series full of suspense and great writing, and with Evan's story pretty much told, Gardiner has now turned to a newer character (I say "newer" but this is already the fourth in the series), the forensic scientist Jo Beckett.  

Jo gets tangled up in a kidnapping that has her beset on all sides by opposing parties of evil-doers as well as the weather that threatens the lives of the teenagers she is doing her utmost to save.  

Taut writing, bags of tension and plenty of "He's behind you" moments.

Unputdownability : The page-turning gets faster and faster...

Not a good representation of the contents

The Ragged Edge...
was the US title of  John Christopher catastrophe-survivors novel.  As with "The Death of Grass", Christopher telescopes time to show us the descent into feudalism and lawlessness that follows a natural disaster, in this case world-wide seismic activity.

It might be possible to suggest that earthquakes of the magnitude Christopher describes would cause much more damage, and that the effects would not be a few mere aftershocks, but instead a continuous upheaval that ensured that no life survived, but at the end of it all the science doesn't matter.  What counts is his depiction of people at the ragged edge of civilisation, some of them intent on making a niche for themselves as rulers of new micro-kingdoms, some intent on create a more harmonious communal existence.

This was one of the first "science fiction" books I ever read and, of course, it isn't "science fiction" at all, but a story of people under extreme conditions.  And forty five years after that first reading, I still remember vividly so many of the scenes and incidents;  a tribute to John Christopher's writing powers.

Unputdownability : desperate for the hero's salvation, but afraid to turn the page in case something nasty happens.

When you think that no-one could find a fresh angle on the Arthurian myths...

 Philip Reeve finds one.  This is a the story of a servant girl caught up in a raid carried out  by the war chief Arthur, and used by his fifth century spin-doctor cum PR man Myrddin to create the myth of the Lady in the Lake.  This is no fantasy world of swords in stones, fulfilled prophecies and magical powers.  Instead it is a group of all too real humans, with their politics, lusts and weaknesses, being manipulated by a single man who wants to see the Britons united and opposed to the saxon invaders.

Reeve's strengths are many - great plotting and pacing, and distinctive voices for his characters.  And his ability to write from the standpoint of a young girl (a strength also demonstrated in the "Mortal Engines" and  "Fever Crumb" series) is quite remarkable - never mawkish, infantilised or patronising.

Unputdownability : I was up at four o'clock reading the final chapters.

I still haven't brought myself to read the final McBain 87th Precinct book, "Fiddlers", published shortly before his death.  I don't want it ever to be over, this relationship with his cast of assorted cops.  So instead I find myself dipping into the back catalogue from time to time, re-reading and enjoying as much as ever.

"Lullaby" is from a less than happy period in the existence of the 87th Precinct.  I don't know if it mirrored some feeling of the author's that the world, or New York at least, wasn't what it had been.  There is little of the levity that brightens the earlier books - Meyer Meyer, so fond of funny stories, is at his most antipathetic.  I don't think I have ever before read him swear at and about a suspect.  There is little interaction between Steve Carella (the nominal "lead man" of the 87th Precinct) and his wife, while his children are present only by mention of their existence.  I wouldn't say that McBain was out of love with his characters, but I can't help that his characters were out of love with their lives.  And it would take a good few years before the general tone of the series lightened up, when McBain decided that the redemption of New Yorkers could be exemplified by that of Ollie Weeks, the hitherto unloved (and unloveable) unreconstructed bigot.


Enough of the  overall arc - what about this one book itself - how does it hang together after twenty years?  Well, it is great to read again stories where the solution doesn't lie in Internet searches, DNA tests and mobile phone records, but in relentless, plodding, fruitless footwork and interviewing.  McBain weaves together three separate storylines - the murder of a baby and baby-sitter, and double- and triple-crossing drug deal, and a soap-opera thread about a policewoman's fears of remaining in the job.  Separately, each thread is slight, but together make for a well-paced read, with each storyline being cut into and away from in order to achieve dramatic tension.    As a one-off read, it probably wouldn't make any new converts - too much depends on a familiarity with the cast, but a satisfying chapter in the 87th Precinct's story for any McBain fan.

Unputdownability : Lots of convenient chapter breaks make this a "cut-and-come-again" salad.

"HERE WE REMAIN"

They go out walking after midnight...

After the life-changing events in Volume 8, this one is a quieter affair, a time for Rick and his son to establish a new relationship.  Rick's crisis of confidence is not helped by his precarious hold on reality, but he still has the support and companionship of series stalwarts to help him as they meet freshh survivors and embark on a new mission - a trip to Washington in the company of someone who just might hold the key to resolving the whole zombie situation.

It would be easy to regard this as an extended breath-catcher between story arcs, but this is no bad thing.  We need time, as does Rick, to recover from the frenetic events of the previous two volumes, and to appreciate their effects on the travellers.


Unputdownability : A welcome, slower pace than of recent.

I said I was going on a John Christopher jag,
and with two down, I don't think that it was a bad decision at all. 

TDoG is a great British post-apocalypse novel.  Imagine "Day of the Triffids" but without a happy ending.  The speed with which Christopher's characters devolve from middle-class civility into a neo-feudalism is both astonishing and completely believable.  The premise is simple, and all to realistic - a virus attacks and destroys all forms of grass, including the members of the genus that provide our daily bread.  A middle class engineer sets out with his family to escape London and the coming civil disturbance, and join his brother on a farm in the North of England where they believe they will be safe.  He takes with him a small assortment of people - his friend and bridge opponent (funny how bridge is seen as a symbol of civilisation in the face of calamitous upheaval;  see Robert A. Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold" for another example), a semi-abaonded schoolboy, and an ageing gun-dealer and his loose-moraled wife.

One hundred and ninety four pages, and a few days later (Christopher is wonderfully economical with his prose and his timelines) everything in their lives has changed.  Don't go into this novel expecting "classic science fiction" - it is, instead, a novel which shows how ordinary people respond to extraordinary circumstances and you find yourself asking "Would I do the same things if I were in their position?"

Unputdownability :  You have to pause for breath regularly.

Classic crime, memorably portrayed.

 Stark is the pen-name crime writer Donald Westlake used for his darkest creation, the anti-hero Parker.  You might remember Parker from Lee Marvin's portrayal in the '60s classic Point Blank, based on The Hunter (or, perhaps, from Mel Gibson's 1990s Payback - if so, bad luck).

Darwyn Cooke has adapted the first Parker story into graphic novel format in  a lovely, loose, cartoony duo-chrome pen-and-wash style reminiscent of early 60's advertising.  But the world being sold here is no consumer dream, rather a tale of a falling out between thieves, betrayal, and implacable revenge.  Cooke maintains a  feeling of tension by regularly changing the rhythm of the story-telling - wordless action sequences alternating with crisp, noir-style dialogue, lengthy internal monologues, and single establishing shots.

To be sure, he has top-notch material to work with, but the skill he shows in creating the early sixties ambience, in keeping the reader turning the pag, and in conveying the emotional existences of the cast proves him a master of the sequntial-art story form.  I'm off to search out the next volume.

Unputdownability: I know what's going to happen, but I want to see it now!

Heaven knows - anything goes
A place where nothing is certain,  and rules change almost at random, the World House is set inside a giant house contained inside a small antique box, whence its inhabitants have been drawn from random places and times when at moments of physical peril.

We follow the adventures of a small number of groups of people - nightclub crooner, twenties flapper, Victorian adventurer/explorer, twentyfirst century small-time gambler, Spanish fisherman, and more, through a seemingly uinconnected set of story-strands which eventually intertwine plausibly to reach an effective and affecting climax.

It is all too easy for this kind of novel to leave a sense of dissatisfaction - when everything can change with the turn of a page, it is tempting to feel no real sense of peril or, indeed, satisfaction when the heroes temporarily escape a plight, simply to be thrown into another dangerous situation.  However, Adams manages to keep a tight grip on everything so that the episodic nature recalls (at least to a long memoried reader like me) the lost "Celestial Toymaker" story arc from William Hartnell's incarnation as The Doctor without at any time seeming to have borrowed in any way from it. 

I await, with interest, subsequent books in the series.

Unputdownability : It's the end of a chapter - a good time to put the book down (or maybe read just one more...)

Don't come to this expecting the see all the characters that you know and love from the TV series:  this is a different "Walking Dead" universe (see "Dexter") where just a few of the characters are the same, and some TV chums are no longer with us.

He's keeping an eye on you

Our heroes are ensconsed in their comfortable camp within a deserted prison.  However, their interaction with the Commander and his followers is about to have violent repercussions.  His description of their actions to his own community inflames them and sets them on a path of vengeance which has terrible repercussions.

I'm not going to say any more.  If you have been reading this series, you'll have this one lined up waiting to go.  If you have only watched the TV show, then start with Volume One (it will seem comfortable familiar) and then go on from there into a complex story less about zombies and more about how people cope and interact under extreme duress.

Unputdownability : Yes, I know my dinner's getting cold, but...

Nothing like this happens in the book.

The cover looks... ermm... unpreposessing to say the least.  But I am about to go on a bit of a John Christopher jag, with three more of his novels waiting to be read, so I thought I would start with one of his Young Adult novels.

Christopher is one of the unremembered greats of the British SF scene, although if you are in your Forties, or thereabouts, "The Tripods" maybe a children's TV series that lingers in the recesses of your memory.  He sits slightly uncomfortably alongside John Wyndham in the "post-apocalypse" sub-genre but, unlike Wyndham's optimistic view of humanities chance of surviving and restoring "civilisation", his visions are often much bleaker.

"The Guardians" is a prophetic work, set in a britain where class distinctions are much more sharply drawn than they were at the time of writing (around 1970), with the proletariat confinded to the Urban areas, where they are kept employed in blue collar and manual jobs, and entertained by 3-D TV, tribalised sports, and sporadic rioting. The upper classes live in the fenced-off County, enjoying their wealth and engaging in the pastimes of the archetypal aristocracy (hunting, shooting, fishing and meaningless hobbies).

The story tells of a prole boy who escapes into the country, only to meet up with a public schoolboy intent on bringing down society.

Economically told (less than 200 pages long), simple in style, this reads like it should have been an instant classic; perhaps its open ending proved too uncomfortable for its intended audience.

Unputdownability:  Have I reached the end alread?

45 years later and it all comes back like it was yesterday 
OK, stop sniggering, it has the word "Gay" in the title.   Autre temps, and all that.

This is the third of the "Lone Pine" adventures, a series that started in 1943 and was wound up in about 1978.  Frightfully middle-class, frightfully polite, and yet something that working class children soaked up in their millions in the days when to be aspirational was not seen as some sort of betrayal of your roots.   Nowadays it would be condemned out-of-hand as irrelevant, and racist-by-omission - everybody is very white and very English, although the second-string villain does have a foreign sort of lilt to his voice (a dead giveaway when combined with his greased back hair).

Plucky kids attempt to save a faltering family business by searching for buried treasure (as you do), while enjoying midnight excursions, secret passages, ice-creams, and picnics.  But it still, somehow, works - and it isn't just nostalgia on my part, I have seen my own children pick these books up and become ansorbed by the other-worldliness of Britain in the nineteen forties and fifties.

The whole thing is set in a beautifully captured Rye and its immediate environs, and you can still  walk round the area today and recognise many of the locations.

Unputdownability - ten minutes 'til I have have to do something more pressing.

DEXTER IS BACK...
in the sixth volume of the series.  Now, for anyone who watches the TV series (and it is excellent in its own way) don't expect to be able to pick up the books in random order and make any sense of them.  After Season One (which followed the first Dexter novel faithfully) the two media split in completely separate universes (see "Walking Dead" for another example).   So don't expect to see all the same characters, in the same relationships, or even in the same state of corporeal existence.

In this print universe, Dex is married, a recently-made father and uncle, and still enjoying his nights out with his Dark Passenger.  Until, that is, someone witnesses him at work and, deciding that he is a fit person to rid the world of a monster, sets out on a mission to Do Dex Down, while Dexter himself struggles to find a way to locate his new adversary and put him out of the picture.  At the same time, Dex's old nemesis, the severely abbreviated Sgt Doakes finds a new ally in his campaign to uncover out our hero's secret life.

Lindsay manages to ring the changes with each new Dexter novel.  There is never a feeling of repetition, of re-using the same plots, or of having the character re-voice pet anecdotes, but instead new scenarios are imagined, and characters grow and change, as people (and even monsters) do.   Already looking forward to book seven.

Unputdownability : Not now!  Can't you see I'm reading?