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.
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.
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.
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| Nothing like this happens in the book. |
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.
Lewis made few concessions to the fact that his audience was growing older (although the dark "Last Battle" requires, perhaps, a more sophisticated reader than the earlier books) but the escape from a forced marriage which sets the story in motion is a little stronger than the readers of "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" might have expected.
Not altogether essential to the history of Narnia, but it does serve to foreground the followers of the great god Tash, the religion that brings about the conflict in the final book in the series.
Michael Chabon's first "Children's" novel. A knowledge of baseball helps, but is not essential.
It seems like only weeks ago that "The Lovers", Connolly's most recent addition to the Charlie Parker series, was keeping me awake. And now Connolly is back with another hero who finds himself in conflict with something not entirely of this world.
See my review on bookersatz http://bookersatz.blogspot.com/
Could you have more of a contrast with James Ellroy?
A contender for most people's favourite Narnia book, and probably the least "Christian" (if you can just ignore the "lion and the lamb" section at the end), 
but so heavily anti-"progressive education" that it is more firmly rooted in the 1950s than most of the tothers (if memory serves me - it is twenty-odd years since I last read them, and then it was to my children rather than for myself).
Still has some nice fantasy concepts, and the plot packs in a remarkable diversity of action in a slim volume.
