Sam Downing

Helena Bonham Carter does "Psycho Bitch" so well

Some criminals are so bad that the only punishment for them is death. At least, this is the view seemingly endorsed by the Harry Potter universe – which is otherwise pretty liberal in its worldview.

Bellatrix Lestrange is locked up in Azkaban, the most fearsome of all wizard prisons, for her role in torturing Neville Longbottom’s parents Frank and Alice (presumably she committed a bunch of other crimes during Voldemort’s first reign of terror, too). Several years later, turncoat Dementors break Bellatrix out of Azkaban; when she escapes, she’s still loyal to Voldemort, and still determined to bring down the wizard/Muggle status quo.

So basically, her time in prison hasn’t rehabilited her even a bit. It hasn’t deterred her from committing future crimes. Nor has it ultimately deprived her of anything: she comes out of Azkaban and instantly resumes her magical power and position at Voldemort’s right hand. Bellatrix demonstrates the failure of incarceration as a means of punishment. The only way for society to deal with criminals of this nature, then, is to execute them, and Molly Weasley comes Bellatrix’s executioner during the Battle of Hogwarts.

And, of course, there’s Voldemort himself. Through the series Harry knows that at some point he’ll have to defeat Voldemort – and it’s made clear, first implicitly and later explicitly, that “defeat” actually means “kill”. It’s not like Voldemort can be locked up in a tower for the rest of his life, Grindelwald-style (though Deathly Hallows hints that Grindelwald eventually felt remorse for his crimes, suggesting rehabilitation does work in some circumstances). The only punishment suitable for the Dark Lord is death, and while Harry technically doesn’t kill Voldemort, Voldemort does end up dead.

Young adult meets fantasy meets noir in the captivating novel White Cat from Holly Black, the first entry in her new trilogy The Curse Workers. (Book two, Red Glove, is out in a couple of months. Hurrah!)

Our hero is Cassel Sharpe, though hero isn’t quite the right word: he’s a murderer, who accidentally killed his first love Lila several years ago. Now in his late teens, he’s still so traumatised, so wracked with guilt, that he’s sleepwalking – the very first scene has him waking up on the roof of his school, precariously close to the edge. (Fantastic opening, by the way.)

Cassel has a messed-up family: they’re curse workers, with powers to manipulate people’s emotions, hurt people, erase their memories, influence their luck. That sort of magic is illegal, driving curse-workers underground – making them gangsters, mobsters and con artists. Cassel is the only non-criminal in his family… if you overlook that whole “he killed someone” thing.

The complication: Lila, that someone he killed, was the daughter of a powerful curse-worker boss, forcing his family to cover up the crime.

After Cassel’s disturbing dreams about a white cat get him booted out of school, he starts to suspect his brothers are involved in another massive con – one he’s unknowingly tied up in too.

The noirish details are perfect: Cassel is an alluring antihero (without being a bad boy, that most overdone of YA creatures), clever and introspective without being whiny, and Black slowly draws her oh-so-intriguing story out of the shadows.

But the problem with White Cat is that it feels a lot like the first entry in a trilogy. That’s not to say the story isn’t satisfying, because it is, immensely so, but it feels very… linear. There isn’t a lot going on away from the main plot, and the twists in the story are pretty predictable (though to Black’s credit she reveals them about halfway through and builds on them for the climax; if she’d saved them for the end it would’ve felt pretty limp). I finished the book with a sense of… dissatisfaction, like I only ate half a plate of a mouth-watering meal.

That said, the set-up is so rich that if Red Glove can keep up the atmosphere and suspense of its predecessor, it’s pretty much a surefire winner.

So I haven’t updated my blog in like forever, but, I have a pretty good excuse: I’ve been off travelling around the States, the UK and Europe (mostly Europe) since December. (The trip was awesome, by the way. LONDON I MISS YOU.) It turns out one can get a lot of reading done when one is travelling, so here it is.

(Incidentally, I didn’t lug all these books around with me; I read them on my iPhone using Stanza, which is a brilliant app. And, since I get asked this a lot, reading on the iPhone screen is generally fine – as long as you spend a bit of time working out your preferred font face, size and spacing before you commence the actual reading.) (more…)

A book with the title Zombies vs Unicorns is pretty much guaranteed to be made of awesome, and this is indeed made of awesome: not only because of its subject matter, but also because it’s edited and written by some of the foremost members of the YA mafia.

So the premise is basically that Justine Larbalestier prefers zombies while Holly Black prefers unicorns (Team Zombie FTW, btw), and they’ve each gathered writers to their cause to prove, once and for all, that one supernatural beastie reigns supreme over the other.

I reckon Team Zombie has the edge here: there are some fantastic (in both senses of the word) stories by Cassandra Clare, Scott Westerfeld, Maureen Johnson, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Carrie Ryan and Libba Bray, who writes ‘Prom Night’, perhaps the best entry in the whole book (though it’s a tight race).

That said I have newfound respect for Team Unicorn thanks to the stories of Margo Lanagan, Naomi Novik and Meg Cabot.

Unusually for a short story collection, there aren’t any stinkers in Zombies vs Unicorns – though some entries waver on the lengthy side, the majority of the twisted tales are haunting or funny or both.

Not to be forgotten is the bold, brillmazing cover art by Josh Cochran: it depicts a gory, bloody, deliciously cartoony scene of zombies and unicorns locked in a battle to the death (or the afterdeath, or whatever it’s called when you kill the living dead). It kinda reminds me of a really violent Where’s Wally scene. I’d happily buy a print and put it up on my wall. (It turns out you can buy a print at Cochran’s website. Hmm. So tempting…)

There must be a sequel. Pirates vs Robots, perhaps?

Richard Harris, Michael Gambon: FIGHT!

I contend that, in the Harry Potter film adaptations, Michael Gambon is a superior Albus Dumbledore to Richard Harris. HOWEVER. This is a controversial matter. (more…)

So I’m not a huge fan of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series – it didn’t really grab my imagination. On the other hand, the Leviathan series reaches into my brain, rips my imagination right out of its imagination-tubes (that’s how brains work, right?), tears it into pieces, and eats them.

When I reviewed book one in the trilogy, Leviathan, I dubbed it “ace”. Book two, Behemoth, is therefore ace-er. The elements that made Leviathan such a great read – World War I alternate history setting, genetically altered beasties, clanking steam-powered machines, girls-disguised-as-boys, ripping adventure – are ramped up as we follow our heroes Deryn and Alek to Constantinople as they attempt to diffuse the tension between the Darwinists (the rough equivalent to our world’s Allies) and the Clankers (the Central powers).

I’ve noted before that Westerfeld excels at world-building, and his research trip to Turkey while prepping Behemoth definitely paid off with the richness of the settings.

(This next paragraph has some spoilers for the plot, so skip it if you’re yet to read the book.) So I suppose my criticisms of the book are really just frustrations with the fact that I have to wait a while for part three: though the relationship between Deryn-disguised-as-Dylan and Alek thickens nicely, it feels like he should’ve discovered her true gender by now – that the tension will be dragged out to the next instalment is a bit much.

(Actually, my biggest criticism with the book is nothing to do with Westerfeld: the cover of book two doesn’t match the cover of book one. I hate when publishers switch the covers mid-series!)

On the other hand, the mysterious eggs in Leviathan hatch into something chin-scratchingly intriguing (not to mention unbearably cute) in Behemoth, and Westerfeld (who must have been inspired by this video when he wrote in this character) drops tantalising hints that this subplot will have an awesome pay-off in book three, Goliath – which I have high hopes will be the ace-est in the trilogy.

World War Z is one of the all-time greatest books of all time, so of course I rushed out to read its forebear The Zombie Survival Guide with the frightening speed of a 28 Days Later-style zombie¹.

I was not disappointed: Brooks’s style is both weirdly realistic, darkly humorous, and incredibly detailed. The man has given a lot of thought to zombies and how one might escape them. And you have to respect that. (Though I disagree with his contention that remaining in a dense urban area following the zombie apocalypse is a bad idea. Once the majority of the population flees the zombies are sure to disperse after them, leaving you in safety, or relative safety at least, and surrounded by plentiful supplies. Right…?)

But if you’re not a huge zombie aficionado and one zombie book per lifetime is your upper limit, I’d recommend World War Z over Survival Guide.  The narrative thrust of World War Z is far more compelling and potent, whereas Survival Guide has literally no story (at least till the final chapters, which detail “suspected” zombie attacks throughout history. And even they don’t really form a true narrative). It is what it says it is – a survival guide – and though it’s superbly written some readers may find that the joke wears thin pretty quickly.

1. which, it’s made clear in Survival Guide, aren’t real zombies, who are lumbering idiots fixated only with feasting on the flesh of the living [↩]

If there’s one thing Scott Westerfeld is really, really good at, it’s world-building. The guy excels at coming up with these great ideas and then fleshing them out into fully-realised fictional worlds.

The great idea that underpins Uglies: in the not-too-distant future, children have an extreme surgical makeover when they turn 16 that transforms them into “pretties”. Pretties, obviously, are extremely beautiful – their features and proportions tailored to an evolutionary standard of perfection. Pretties also look, more or less, exactly alike: this future society has determined that it was the differences between people of our time (“Rusties”, as they’re dubbed) that made us fight so much. The operation rubs out those differences.

Tally Youngblood is the last of her friends to have the operation. They’ve all become pretties and moved to New Pretty Town – an adolescent utopia of constant fun and parties – leaving her alone in Uglyville.

Until she meets Shay, who’s also on the verge of going under the knife. Except Shay doesn’t want the operation. To Tally’s horror, Shay wants to stay ugly forever. Worse, Shay has a crazy plan: she wants to run away to join a society of dangerous rebels. Dangerous ugly rebels.

The rules and hierarchies of this society are brilliantly complicated (be prepared for some major infodumps dotted throughout the book, though Westerfeld is skilled at weaving them into the plot in a manner that’s rarely heavy-handed), and some of the future technology is just genius – seriously, I need a hoverboard, like, yesterday.

I started reading Uglies for the first time before I read Westerfeld’s more recent book, Leviathan. I stopped reading after a couple of chapters (and didn’t pick it up again till a year later). Similarly, I started to read Pretties, the sequel to Uglies, but I’ve since put that d0wn too. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the books – but there is a certain plodding quality to their pace. Particularly in the early chapters of Uglies, where I felt like Westerfeld deftly set up the first act then draaaaagged it out, then deftly set up the second act then draaaaagged it out.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I bet there’s plenty of readers who will revel (and have revelled, judging by the book’s apparent fanbase) in exploring Westerfeld’s world and getting to know his heroine, Tally. But I have to confess that, on more than one occasion, I skipped to the end of the chapter because I wanted the story to just hurry up.

I’ve been a reader of Cassandra Clare for a while: in the early ’00s I enjoyed her Harry Potter Draco trilogy (pretty much the only fanfic I’ve ever read, I swear!), I lapped up the Very Secret Diaries like everyone else on the internet, and last year I consumed her The Mortal Instruments trilogy in about a week.

Thus I am qualified to say that Clockwork Angel, the first instalment in The Infernal Devices trilogy, is her best work yet.

So Devices is basically a prequel to Instruments (it’s not necessary to have read Instruments to get Devices, though I’d recommend it), set in a late-19th century London infested with demons and “Downworlders” – Clare’s term for vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beasties. Fortunately regular humans, or “mundanes”, are protected by the Shadowhunters: an elite band of warriors descended from angels (more or less).

Tessa Gray comes to this world from New York City, searching for her missing brother Nate, and soon encounters two teenage Shadowhunters and best friends: the beautiful, arrogant Will (who’s basically the same character as Jace from Mortal Instruments, at least at this stage in the trilogy), and the sensitive, sickly Jem¹ . Naturally a love triangle begins to blossom, as Tessa is pulled into a dangerous mystery building in the Shadowhunter world.

The individual elements of Clare’s works are rarely that original, and that goes for Clockwork Angel – there’s the usual steampunk tropes, familiar demon-hunting tropes, the character-types you’ll find in most YA novels, all wrapped in customary snark – but that isn’t an insult. Clare has a knack for combining stuff we’ve seen into an enjoyable, compelling story.

Clare’s writing adopts a Victorian style which suits her well, but be warned that Angel is very heavily geared towards setting up the next two parts, Clockwork Prince and Clockwork Princess – don’t pick it up yet if you’re the type of reader who interprets “tantalysing clues” as “frustrating loose-ends”.

Fortunately I am not that type of reader. Clockwork Angel is entertaining, dare I say ripping stuff, crammed with invitingly detailed world-building – I even read it during my lunchbreak at work, and let me tell you, I don’t do that for just any book.

1. for the record: Team Jem! Will is the Bad Boy, and I’m not into the Bad Boy. [↩]

The City and the City pretty much boils down to “the old versus the new”. First, the old: this is, at heart, a detective novel of the hardbitten classic variety, wherein world-weary investigator probes violent death of seemingly mundane woman and stumbles into much larger mystery which shadowy forces conspire to stop him solving.

China Mieville’s detective here is Inspector Tyador Borlu – a rather affable chap, especially by the hard-drinking, hardboiled standards of the genre – a life-long resident of Beszel, a history-rich Eastern-European city that’s falling to pieces as it absorbs bits of the modern world. Borlu speaks on his mobile phone while dodging trams and street vendors, struggles to fire up the internet in his crumbling apartment block. (Mieville’s descriptions of Beszel are marvellous, evoking dark blues and concrete greys; the place feels so vivid.)

The old in The City and the City would, on its own, add up to a great-if-not-especially-memorable read. But it’s the new that is so dazzlingly clever and effortlessly complex: Borlu occupies the same physical space as another city, Ul Qoma. One location, two cities. They overlap, blurring into one another while maintaining separate identities: Ul Qoma’s culture is different, its economy wealthier, its skyline punctured with shiny skyscrapers.

Here’s where it gets interesting (well, more interesting): the respective citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma can see each other, but they’ve learned to “unsee” each other. Acknowledging the other city, or crossing between the two, is a srious crime that invokes Breach – the shady agency that comes down hard on rule-breakers.

This makes Borlu’s investigation tricky. It’s unclear which city the victim was actually murdered in. He believes the whole case should be handed to Breach – though someone is refusing to move it up the chain, forcing Berlu to stick with an increasingly perilous investigation. In the hands of a less capable writer the unfolding plot of The City and the City would have become hopelessly byzantine, but Mieville keeps the details nailed to the page. I admire his creativity – the book has one hell of a premise – but his plotting and style are just as admirable.

Now I gotta go read The Windup Girl, which tied with The City and the City for best novel at the recent Hugo Awards. If it’s as absorbing and impressive as City it’s a must-read.