Sam Downing

Gone Girl is one of those everyone-is-talking-about-this-so-I-guess-I’ll-check-it-out-too books. Happily, it’s not one of those crazy-popular books you read with one hand turning the pages and the other batting away the unholy stench of shit reeking from the pages. This is a bestselling thriller that is actually pretty thrilling! Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its problems.

Spoilers (of the utterly-plot-ruining-so-watch-out variety) follow.

This much you know from the blurb on the back of the book: Golden boy Nick Dunne meets golden girl Amy Elliott. They hit it off. They wed. Then everyone goes sour: Nick loses his sweet job as an entertainment writer for an Entertainment Weekly-type magazine*, Amy’s trust fund is wiped out by her flaky parents’ financial mismanagement, the two move back to Nick’s decaying-middle-American-shithole hometown, their marriage starts to break down. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears from their home. The crime scene suggests a violent struggle. The police immediately suspect Nick – the husband is always guilty, right? – except we know he didn’t do it. So what has happened to Amy?

(*Author Gillian Flynn was also formerly an entertainment writer for Entertainment Weekly. Which is probably just a crazy coincidence.)

Last chance to back out if you don’t want any spoilers. And this really is one of those stories you should experience spoiler free.

Halfway through her novel, Flynn completely upends it. Amy hasn’t been killed by some violent, mysterious man. She’s staged her disappearance as an Old Testament God-level revenge against Nick for cheating on her with a younger women. On the one hand, it’s fiendishly clever: Gone Girl immediately becomes something much more compelling, much fresher than the “missing woman” story we’ve been led to believe it is.

On the other hand… something about the twist flattens the story into two dimensions, and it’s less compelling. Suddenly, Nick’s increasingly misogynist feelings towards Amy (and our increasingly complicated feelings towards him) are brushed aside – hey, the reason he hates his wife is because she really is an actual literal psychopath. Hey, of course Nick is the good guy again, because even though he cheated on Amy, she really is lying, manipulative, hate-filled* and through-and-through horrible. Which is kind of a shame, because in its first half the book frequently cuts to the heart of what it is to be in a relationship with devastating clarity, the kind of clarity usually reserved for those times when you wake up at 3 a.m. and remember your death is coldly inevitable, only to turn Nick and Amy’s marriage into more conventional cat-and-mouse spy-versus-spy stuff.

(*Seriously, there is a lot of woman-on-woman use of the C-word in here.)

That said, Flynn mostly succeeds in keeping the momentum up in the second half of the book, as Nick starts plotting to get Amy back and Amy starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots and Nick starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Amy’s plots to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots… and so on and so on. It whips up and up and around itself until it all finally collapses in the last few ludicrous pages, as the plot fizzles out with a whimper – Amy (who’s also an actual literal murderer by this point in addition to being an actual literal psychopath) manipulates Nick into taking her back and falls pregnant with his artificially inseminated kid, and Nick accepts because he relishes her mindgames and wants to protect his unborn kid… or something.

I bet most people will finish Gone Girl with a “Seriously – WTF was that dumb ending” expression. But it’s a pretty entertaining ride getting to said dumb ending. Any writer who can get you to keep turning the page even as your scoffing eyebrow creeps ever higher up your forehead has pulled off a pretty good trick.

(Spoilers follow.)

Oh boy this is a stupid book.

I honestly don’t mean “stupid” as an entirely bad thing – I like plenty of things which are “stupid”, and there’s nothing guilty or ironic about my affection for them.  I mean “stupid” as in, Clockwork Princess is unashamedly romantic and melodramatic and hand-wringing and bosom-heaving. And if that’s what you’re reading this series for: fine. You’ll love this final instalment. Everyone’s paired off neatly, more or less, and everyone gets a tidy ending. Hurray.

I guess I’m more about plot than romance, though, and the plot is disappointing. For starters, it’s thin, so thin the novel’s sharp-clavicled cover model would look at it and be like “Seriously, eat a sandwich, plot”. But it seems weightier than it is because half of every page is devoted to characters ruminating on the exact same problems they were ruminating on a chapter ago. (“I love Tessa but Jem loves Tessa, woe!” “I love Sophie but Sophie is a mere servant girl, woe!” “Gideon tricked me into wasting scones, woe!”) There are whole pointless chapters you can just glance over without losing the thread of the story – which is a hallmark of Clare’s work, and not a great one.

It’s the resolution to the plot that’s most disappointing. (Book, I am disappoint.) Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince told us that Tessa, our immortal heroine, has mysterious powers unknown even to her, which make her vitally important to the cunning plans of Mortmain, our villain. Well, Mortmain seems to do a pretty good job building an unstoppable army of robots without relying on Tessa, and even after finishing this book I’m still not clear on exactly why he needed her so badly. (Something to do with using Tessa’s shapeshifting ability to make her transform herself into Mortmain’s dead father, so Mortmain can access dear old dad’s memories and make his automatons even more powerful. Or something. Like, is that all.)

And the ending just feels so… easy. Tessa is torn between her love for two best friends, Will (who’s beautiful and arrogant and less of a dick than he seems) and Jem (who’s beautiful and kind and suffering from a fatal illness that will kill him any day now). She ends up with Will, but not because she has to make any sort of sacrifice or choice: Jem – impossibly, implausibly nice Jem- goes and joins an order of immortal monks (… kind of), despite saying early on that he’d never do that, freeing her up to marry Will. Easy. But then, after a century or so, when Will’s long dead, Jem leaves the order and hooks up with Tessa anyway. Even easier! So she ends up with both of them. The cake is both had and eaten.

And Mortmain is defeated pretty easily, because Mortmain is a dull villain who’s evil mostly just because he’s evil (another Clare hallmark), much as Clare tries to flesh him out with a backstory. He exists because someone needs to be working to destroy Tessa and Jem and Will and the rest of their demon-fighting Shadowhunter friends, right?

I kind of feel bad coming down harshly on Clockwork Princess. It is what it is. It’s not terrible. (And it’s a lot better and more inventive than the increasingly over-the-top Mortal Instruments series, which this Infernal Devices series precedes). Other people will read this book for much different reasons than I did. And those people will probably like it a lot better.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare; Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

I read The Ruby in the Smoke at Christmas – and immediately regretted not having the rest of the Sally Lockhart Mysteries at hand. (Apparently they’re only available as ebooks in Spanish, and no habla espanol or whatever)  They’re those kinds of books: Once you’re in the universe, you want to stay in it.

The second instalment in the series, The Shadow in the North, picks up Sally’s story several years after the end of Ruby. She’s a successful financial consultant with a taste for mystery, which flares up  when a client of hers loses all of her money to a ruined company whose misfortunes seem to have been predicted by a spiritualist. Dun dun!

Pullman built a sinister, grubby Victorian London in Ruby, and it’s an even darker place in Shadow. There are deaths – of major characters, who you’d expect to survive in any other series because most writers wouldn’t have to balls to kill off them off. The only “safe” character is Sally, and even she’s only safe from death. She’s a plucky, smart, ballsy, admirable heroine, so the risk of her falling victim to some worse-than-death fate that would crush her spirit is a big one.

The third book, The Tiger in the Well, is about such a fate. While the first two books are about Sally rising above the sexist goons of the time, in Tiger those goons are actively seeking to crush her. A powerful and mysterious force conspires to take from Sally everything that she’s built up – her business, her home, her family – but not by killing her. Her shadowy enemy is taking away everything by twisting the law, which didn’t give much of  shit about women back then, especially unmarried ones with children.

There’s an explicit theme of men hoarding power over women and using it to oppress them. “The real Big Bad is institutionalised sexism,” etc etc” Of course not all the penis-havers are nefarious tosspots. The male heroes – Jim, Sally’s closest friend; Fred, her on-off paramour; Daniel, a political journalist she encounters – revel in her strength and the opportunity to share power with her. Shadow and especially Tiger are explicitly feminist books. Their plots are deliberately pulpy, riffing on penny dreadfuls, but the themes of social justice – not just for women, but for immigrants, Jews, the poor – lend their storylines a real heft.

The Tin Princess departs from the first three books (if the differently arranged title didn’t clue you in). For starters, Sally hardly features at all. The focus is on Jim; Adelaide, a street urchin last seen in Ruby; and Becky, who’s recruited as Adelaide’s maid after she suddenly marries the prince of the tiny European kingdom Razkavia and becomes its princess.

The trio sets out for Razkavia, wedged between Germany and what would become the Czech Republic. Political intrigue follows. Scandal follows. Regicide follows. Razkavia is just an important a character as London was in the first three books, and it’s beautifully realised: Pullman’s descriptions of it are so vivid, his history of it so rich, that a couple times I almost looked up “Razkavia” on Wikipedia to double-check it never actually existed. Too bad, then, that this is one of those books let down by its ending: The story is exciting and thrilling until the last couple of chapters, where it all kind of just peters out.

Previously: The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

iPhones screens are fine for reading Agatha Christies and Dan Browns and Stieg Larssons – page turners. They’re no good very bad for reading anything that demands actual attention. Anything that has long, dialogue-free paragraphs. Anything that has lots of charts and tables and diagrams. A book like, say, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

I tried reading this for the first time a couple of years ago, when I was travelling around Europe and reading books on my iPhone while stuck at airports and in trains and on tour groups. I got maybe a quarter of the way through before discovering that, no matter how high you jack up the font size or the line spacing, some books just aren’t made for reading on a 2.5 by 4.5-inch* screen.

(* I know those aren’t the exact technical specification dimensions of an iPhone screen. I don’t care.)

I vowed at the time I’d get back this (Pulitzer Prize-winning!) book. And you know when you want to look back and congratulate your past self for making a sensible decision? Like, “Nice work going to bed at a reasonable hour last night, past self, so I’m not inhumanly exhausted today!” “Nice work not binging on pizza and chocolate biscuits, past self, because I am looking super skinny right now!” This is also one of those times. Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most ambitious, convincing and accessible non-fiction books I ever read. Nice work buying it to read later, past self!

Diamond’s work focuses on resolving a simple question: Why do some humans from some parts of the world have so much more than other humans from other parts of the world? To put it less politely: Why did mostly white societies end up conquering non-white societies, and not the other way around? Diamond removes the racial element from the answer. White people dominated other races because they developed “guns, germs and steel”, and they developed those things because of (spoiler alert!) lucky geographical accidents – not because some races or societies are inherently more sophisticated. The course of human history boils down to chance. No shit, right?

I know academic-types who’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel, and enjoyed it, but objected to the flaws in the reasoning. You don’t have to be a genius to see Diamond’s thesis is packed with generalisations, and glosses over the exceptions. That’s kind of unavoidable when you’re a 500-page book examining tens of thousands of years of history. Read something else if you want careful detail and not broad brush strokes. If you’re a regular person seeking an entry point into anthropology, linguistics, biology, and a bunch of other scientific disciplines – read this book.

What a captivating, enthralling, terrific book!  The Ruby in the Smoke is the kind of adventure I’d tentatively describe as “ripping”. (But not if it makes me sound like a dick?) As I read this I crossly thought: “Why wasn’t a book like this around when I was a child?! What a rip!” Later on I discovered it was published in 1986, when I was a (very small, still-several-years-from-learning-to-read) child: “… oh.” At least I got to enjoy it as a manchild an adult.

Here are some things that make Ruby a great book. One: Its heroine, Sally Lockhart, who is clever and resourceful but not easily reducible to adjectives like “plucky” or “feisty”. Two: Its dirty and sinister Victorian London-setting, which is crawling with crims (…? Is that era-appropriate slang? Is “crims” the sort of thing a late-1800s London resident would say?) and opium dealers and other grubby reprobates. Three: Its complicated and cunningly told mystery, which scuttles from the eponymous stolen gem to Indian mutinies to Sally’s dead father to frightening crime matriarch Mrs Holland.

And: It is written by Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy. And basically everyone who’s read those books thinks they’re awesome. (Well unless they’re Catholics or religious-types or whatever I guess.) He cleverly keeps readers guessing about whether the puzzle will have a supernatural resolution or not. Finding out is a lot of fun.

One strike against the series: It isn’t available as e-books. (Well – they’re available as e-books in Spanish. And my Spanish is, how you say, muy inelegante.) Isn’t that annoying.

Afterwards I watched the BBC adaptation which stars Billie Piper as Sally (and Matt Smith as her friend and ally Jim. It was his first TV role! And it’s kind of weird seeing him in this because Jim is only about 13 in the books and Smith was like in his early twenties when this thing was filmed). It’s pretty good! And well cheap on iTunes.

I was near the end City of Lost Souls while I waiting for a coffee at my local place and one of the waitresses asked me what I was reading. I told her it was trashy teen fantasy. “Oh,” she said, “like Twilight?” “Well… kind of,” I replied, “but it has a better plot.” But then I thought about it and added: “It’s still the kind of thing I should be ashamed of reading, though.”

Which sums up how I feel about all the books in Cassandra Clare’s series The Mortal Instruments. I’m not embarrassed about reading young adult books in general, because then I’d be embarrassed about half the stuff I read. But something about this series… It is not great. It is kind of embarrassing. Yet I keep reading it.

(FYI: there are spoilers ahead for the end of this book.)

Anyway, you’ve read the rest of this series so you know the formula for City of Lost Souls: a team of angsty teenagers, all either Shadowhunters (humans descended from angels, empowered with strength and stamina they use to fight demons, etc etc), vampires or werewolves, over-analyse their romantic feelings for each other while battling some rising evil.

And oh man do the characters in this book looooove to overanalyse their romantic feelings for each other. I don’t mind talky books, but some of the chapters here are less plot drivers and more recaps of the characters’ previous conversations about their problems. Our heroine Clary our endlessly wonders whether she still can still love her perfect boyfriend Jace even though he’s possessed by her evil brother Sebastian (… yeah). Simon, Clary’s best friend, endlessly thinks about how loyal he is to her. Isobelle, Jace’s adopted sister, endlessly frets about her blossoming feels for Simon, while her brother, Alec, endlessly frets 0ver his boyfriend Magnus (an immortal warlock whose magic power is apparently tolerating all these moody adolescents).

All that repetition (Clary and Sebastian’s resemblance to their parents is mentioned every other page – I’m barely exaggerating for comic effect about this) (Oh! And in case you forgot what everyone is wearing at any particular moment, that’s also repeated on actually every page) sticks in the plot’s wheels. There’s no suspense. And too much of the story’s thrust relies on someone doing something stupid or unlikely (“Let’s rush recklessly into danger! Let’s summon a demon! Let’s summon an angel which apparently isn’t difficult!”). That’s a big problem, coupled with the book’s general sense of “middle instalment in a trilogy” syndrome: you know Sebastian’s devious plot will be foiled, paving the way for the really devious plot to unfold in the final act, and you know complications will arise just as everyone comes thisclose to finding true love.

Clare, when she’s not detailing what everyone is wearing at any given moment, can be a beautifully descriptive writer. And she is obviously deeply, admirably invested in the world she’s writing here. But that investment just doesn’t leap off the page. I guess the prime exhibit of this flatness is Clary. We’re told a bunch of stuff about her without really feeling it: she’s an artist (she doesn’t make any art), she’s interested in anime (she never watches any), she’s a Strong Female Character battling her inner darkness (not really).

Ditto her brother Sebastian. He comes so close to being a complicated villain (like maybe he really does believe he’s the hero forced to do bad things for some greater good), till it’s ultimately revealed that, nope, he’s just as two-dimensionally evil-because-he-likes-being-evil as you suspected the whole time. Probably his sadism is meant to make him wildly sinister, but it ends up having the opposite effect. He’s boring: whatever he’s got cooked up for the next book, City of Heavenly Fire, will just wind up being the most predictably evil thing. Snooze.

And yet I will totally still read that instalment too. I suck.

Previously: Book review: City of Fallen Angels, Cassandra Clare

Buried in the acknowledgements in the back of Black Heart is what might be the key to Holly Black‘s success. She writes (slight paraphrasing): “I have to thank my husband, who once again let me read the whole book to him out loud.”

That’s right: having a husband is the key to a woman’s success. Just kidding! I mean the bit about reading the whole book out loud. That’s kind of neat, right? The only people who read whole books out loud are the people who get paid to narrate audiobooks. But I think it explains why The Curse Workers trilogy, which concludes with Black Heart (at least I assume it’s a trilogy – trilogies are how YA series are mostly pitched and sold. So maybe there’ll be a fourth book. I have no idea), has such a distinctive, polished, convincing voice. Because Black read the whole book aloud, to someone else. It really pays off.

So. In this series magic is real, and most people with magic powers are criminals – mobsters, con men, killers. Cassel Sharpe is the youngest member of a family of “worker” lowlifes (worker is Black’s term for anyone magic) who’s been roped into using his rare magic ability, the power to transform anything into basically anything else, for the FBI. And of course it turns out the feds are as ruthless and untrustworthy as the worker mafia Cassel is also tied up with. “Between a rock and a hard place” comes somewhere close to describing this kid’s dilemma.

Cassel, bless his melodramatic moody teenage heart, is dealing with some heavy stuff. But The Curse Workers books are not hard hitters. That is not meant as a bad thing! This series is a noir thriller dressed up as young-adult fantasy: it’s sexy. It’s gritty. It’s readable. Please, television executives who are totally likely to pay attention to all the things I say: make a TV series about these books. It’d be Veronica Mars with magic. And I have to wrap this up now because I’m having heart palpitations at how awesome that would be.

Previously: White Cat, Holly Black/Red Glove, Holly Black

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, and only partly because I’m a lazy hack: Jasper Fforde is one of my all-time favourite writers of all time. In my fantasy he wakes up in the morning and spends his sun-dappled days filling a tattered notebook with weird and brilliant ideas, which he’s comes up with because of possible mild insanity.

Fforde’s newest weird and brilliant and mildly insane outing is The Woman Who Died a Lot, which picks up the story of Thursday Next. It’s been a while since Fforde ffans saw his kicking-ass-and-taking-names heroine (she was MIA in the previous instalment. Which was narrated instead by her “fictional” counterpart. Which makes perfect sense if you’ve read the whole series. Honest), but she’s back, badly injured by past misadventures – hobbling around on a walking stick, addicted to painkillers, and forced into semiretirement.

Some of Fforde’s mad-scientist inventions for this book: God is real, and determined to wipe out Thursday’s hometown Swindon by the end of the week unless her genius daughter Tuesday perfects an Anti-Smote Shield; Thursday’s son Friday is destined to commit a murder that will earn him a lifetime prison sentence, unless Thursday can find a way to avert the future; the all-powerful, all-jerks Goliath Corporation is attempting to switch out the real Thursday with synthetic robot clones. Oh, and one of Thursday’s powerful former nemeses (there’s a lot of them) has seemingly returned.

Fforde’s endings are sometimes hastily, unsatisfyingly tied together. But that’s not a problem here! Despite all of Died a Lot‘s spinning storylines the climax is beautifully balanced – especially the resolution of the troubling mindworm Thursday’s been carrying around for the last couple books, which makes her believe she has a third child who doesn’t really exist. (Again: makes perfect sense if you’ve read the whole series.)

Thursday is a great leading lady. Tough and smart and loving and awesome. And the set-up for her next adventure smells terrific. Hurry up and write that, Fforde.

Previously: Book review: One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde

Alternate title: Vimes Takes a Holiday, in which Terry Pratchett’s uber-cop Sam Vimes (who by this point has become the Discworld’s Jack Bauer) retreats to his wife Sybil’s country estate on an enforced vacation. Naturally, the countryside proves less idyllic than it seems.

But it takes forever to get the less-idyllic-than-it-seems point. A ruthless editor could cut Snuff down to a novella and still have time to leave work early. Pratchett takes his time letting you know what kind of game he’s playing here, and the build-up is more infuriating than intriguing. Yes, Snuff is ripe with Pratchett’s usual narrative cleverness, but the longer the plot took to materialise the more I wanted to rattle the book to force it to fall out.

Eventually, a story emerges: Vimes’s nasty upper-crust peers are exploiting goblins, one of the last Discworld species still considered beneath humanity. This – “lower race promoted to equal footing as Discworld society is dragged into something resembling the modern day” – is well-trodden Pratchett territory. His long-time readers will be entertained by the plot-turns, but they won’t be surprised by any of them.

Same goes for Snuff‘s black-and-white characters. Vimes, for all his concern about the darkness inside him that threatens to erupt any moment, is a straight-up good guy. There’s never any real worry he’ll slip into darkness. And his opponents are straight-up bad guys, cardboard villains with little motivation beyond Being Evil. (Notably, the goodies are mostly drawn from or associated with the grubby lower classes; the upperclassmen are generally rotten to the core.) “The Sociopath” has become a stock Pratchett character, and there’s not a lot separating Snuff‘s Stratford with someone like Hogfather‘s Teatime.

Previously: Book review: Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

Last year I was pretty impressed by V.G. Lee’s short story “Knitting for Beginners, 1960,” a tale which featured in Paul Burston’s anthology Boys and Girls. That story centred on a 10-year-old schoolgirl Bonnie’s crush on the most popular girl in her class – nice, innocent, “aren’t kids adorably naive” stuff. Well! Turns out “Knitting” was just a sliver of the grander story that unfolds in Lee’s novel Always You, Edina. Which is a bit like eating a slice of cake then finding out you can stuff your face with the whole thing.

In Edina we first meet Bonnie as an adult, on one of her regular visits to a nursing home to see her (terrifically sharp-tongued) Gran. Bonnie seems reluctant to talk too much to Gran about her personal life, and her partner “Jay” (note that gender-ambiguous name), so instead their conversations tend to fall back on their family’s difficult history.

Flashback to Bonnie’s childhood in 1960s Birmingham (the same era “Knitting” is set): It’s working class, but seems pleasantly average. Emphasis on “seems”, because there’s more going on in the background that Bonnie realises. Her much-adored father is suspiciously close to his vivacious, bottle-blond sister-in-law – the eponymous Edina, who Bonnie idolises. Their relationship will have twisted consequences, even if Bonnie – who’s obsessed with her crush on popular girl Joanna and her rivalry with her cousin, Edina’s daughter – doesn’t comprehend what they’ll be.

Lee has a knack for gluing a child’s voice on to the page: Bonnie is both precocious and charmingly idiotic, insufferably convinced of her own importance. In other words, she’s exactly like every other 10 year old; there’s shades of Adrian Mole about her. She senses there’s bigger things going on than the ones that directly affect her daily life – the love triangle, her own unusual sexuality – but she’s too careless to be bothered by it. Which all contrasts nicely with the parts of the book set in the modern day (or at least, a day more modern than the 1960s). Grown-up Bonnie’s life has turned out okay, but her relationship with her family seems strained, and she’s not quite open about her sexuality.

Elements towards the end of the book are slapdash - notably when Gran awkwardly takes over the point of view to reveal some key plot points to Bonnie, and a soap opera twist when the identity of Bonnie’s long-time partner is finally revealed.

But any of Always You, Edina‘s flaws are overcome by its warm, funny tone, and the way it throws a spotlight on often-overshadowed subjects. For starters, “mainstream” culture generally pays a lot less attention to lesbians than it does to gay men. And it tells very few stories of gay children (or, to split hairs a little, children who grow up into gay adults) that aren’t weirdly sexualised.

(Also, I should mention: Lee very kindly sent me a free copy of Always You, Edina after she read my review of “Knitting for Beginners.” I mention this partly as a disclaimer but mostly because I want to boast about how an author personally requested that I review her book.)

Previously: Book review: Boys and Girls, edited by Paul Burston