Sam Downing

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.

Don’t pick up Mockingjay if you’re feeling down, because: sheesh. I don’t mind my books bleak, but this one punches through “bleak” and into the depths of some cold, hopeless void on the other side. (Spoilers ahead, for all three instalments of The Hunger Games trilogy.)

This is probably why, when I finished Mockingjay, I thought: “I did not like that.” A little later: “No, I did. Kind of. For a certain definition of ‘like’.” It’s a pretty brutal read, much more so than the previous two instalments – and that’s saying something, given they were about children forced into a sickening battle to the death.

So, as the book opens, life is pretty shitty for heroine Katniss Everdeen: her home in District 12 has been vaporised, she’s living with the rebels in the militarised District 13, and she must decide whether she actually wants to become the Mockingjay – the face of the revolution to overthrown the Capitol and the nefarious President Snow.

Katniss spends a lot of a time faffing over whether she really wants to be the Mockingjay. Boy, does she spend a lot of time faffing: when it’s not about the Mockingjay thing, it’s whether she prefers Gale or Peeta (who, by the way, has been tortured to insanity. Told you it was a cheery book). Much of the first two thirds of the book aren’t especially memorable, plot-wise, though the ever-increasing cynicism is sometimes shocking. Katniss, it transpires, is not a hero – no matter how much she’s told she’s vital to the revolution, she’s really just a pawn to be manipulated, by political leaders, by the media, and even by her nearest and dearest. Mockingjay is not a straight-up goodies vs. baddies book, because most of the characters fall square into “grey”; it’s a step beyond the black-and-white morality of Harry Potter, though not as complex as Chaos Rising.

The story builds to a climax as Katniss and her friends invade the heart of the Capitol (which is conveniently laden with traps reminiscent of the morbidly compelling horrors in the Hunger Games’ arenas), and honestly, it’s this part of the book that really brought Mockingjay down for me. I’m about to totally, explicitly spoil it, so quit reading this review now if you ever plan on reading the series.

Seriously, last chance to get out. (more…)

It’s cliche to say “X is a must-read for every fan of Y”, but: Simpsons Confidential is a must-read for every fan of The Simpsons, aka, The Greatest Show in the History of Television.

The book spawned from an oral history of the show published in Vanity Fair, and is more or less a super-expanded version of said article (which is itself highly recommended): in both, John Ortved unravels the story of the very early years of The Simpsons, in the words of the people who made the show.

Not all the people. Simpsons bigwigs apparently either refused to speak to Ortved or forbade their lessers from speaking to him. So the likes of Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon are conspiciously, unfortunately absent.

Surprisingly, that doesn’t really hurt the book – Ortved uncovers what happened, or some version of what happened, anyway. Groening, we’re told, shouldn’t get as much credit for The Simpsons as he does; Brooks comes off as somewhat avuncular but mostly megalomaniacal; and Simon is brilliant (he missed out on the kudos that instead goes to Groening) but unpleasant.

Hank Azaria, Conan O’Brien and even Rupert “Billionaire Tyrant” Murdoch talk on the record, so there’s really a lot of insight into the development of The Simpsons both on The Tracey Ullman Show and as it went to series, the back-and-forth between the producers and the Fox network (it’s amusing, and not very surprising, how many interviewees claim the show happened thanks to them), and the glorious, crazy anarchy in the writers’ room. Much of it is just trivia (for example: Springfield might have been called Lincoln, but Groening thought “Springfield” sounded funnier. He also wanted Marge to have rabbit ears under her hair. I know, right?!), but if you’re a super-fan, those details are fascinating.

I don’t have any real memory of television  pre-Simpsons – I have vague memories of the initial Bartmania, though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to watch it when it first premiered – so it’s engrossing to relive the early years of the show. I have a new appreciation of the first couple of seasons (the animation, though crappy in hindsight, is endearingly crappy), as well as a better understanding of why the show has been so overwhelmingly meh for the last couple of years more than a decade. (Ortved, clearly a devoted fan of the show’s consistently amazing first nine seasons, spends much of the final chapters offering his pretty-convincing theories.)

It is, as noted above, the greatest show in the history of television, and this is a pretty great tribute to it.

It’s not often that I label a book “repellant”, but Her Fearful Symmetry is a repellant book. (Mild spoilers ahead.)

Books don’t need to be likeable for readers to derive enjoyment from them – the characters don’t need appeal, and the plot doesn’t need to go in a satisfying direction, but there’s got to be something there for you to latch onto. And Symmetry does not have that something.

I liked Audrey Niffenegger’s previous novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife (though I enjoyed the time-travel knottiness of the plot more than the romance, and I can’t tell you the number of arguments I’ve had¹ with fans of the book who insist it’s not sci-fi, even though it totally is), and I thought I was going to like Symmetry a lot more than I did. It starts off well: middle-aged Elspeth dies, leaving her London flat to her American nieces Julia and Valentina, the twin daughters of her own identical twin sister, Edie, whom she’s been estranged from for 20 years following a mysterious falling out.

So Julia and Valentina leave the US for the UK, move into the flat and eventually meet their unusual neighbour Robert, Elpseth’s grieving lover, who’s writing a thesis on the next-door Highgate Cemetery. The opening chapters are slow but dreamy, promising a delicately unfolding plot… which never comes.

Halfway through the book steers off Whimsical and into Stupid, and it’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment this happens: it’s when Elspeth, who’s been reincarnated as a ghost but confined to her flat, gains the strength to communicate with Robert and the twins. None of these characters are especially flabbergasted by this, and it’s the first in a series of bung notes.

After that, they come thickly: Valentina hatches a profoundly boneheaded plan to escape the clutches of the gregarious Julia; Niffenegger takes disastrous shortcuts with her characterisations, dubbing Valentina “suicidal” and Elspeth discompassionate even though us readers hadn’t previously seen any traces of those things; and the plotting becomes laboured and detached.

And the finale – blech. Really. Blech. It’s  contrived, especially when it’s revealed why Elspeth and Edie fell out, and worse, the resolution of the main storyline is so horribly off-putting. Like I said in the first paragraph: repellant.

It’s not all bad. Julia and Valentina’s upstairs neighbour is Martin, an obsessed-compulsive crossword compiler whose disease has alienated his wife, Marijke, who’s fled to her native Amsterdam and left him alone in his flat which he refuses to leave. He’s an eccentric, genuinely appealing character.

The other appealing character is Highgate Cemetery and London itself. Niffenegger worked as a tour guide in the cemetery while researching the book (and her devotion to the place is evident), and she nails what it’s like to live in a historically, culturally rich place like London.

1. I must’ve had that argument… twice! [↩]

Alternate title: In Which I Write the Words “Will Grayson” over and over and over…

There’s a lot to like about Will Grayson, Will Grayson: it’s strong and honest and funny, its teen melodramas feel so authentic (when you’re a teenager everything is so! important! and! dramatic!), and some of its characters are truly likeable.

But… I’m not sure I liked this book.

That’s because, despite its title, Will Grayson, Will Grayson isn’t actually about someone called Will Grayson. The dominant character is Tiny Cooper, an ironically named high-schooler whose body is almost as big as his personality. Tiny is the long-time best friend of Will Grayson, a pessimistic introvert who’s determined to avoid any sort of emotional experience. By a strange quirk of fate he meets another Will Grayson: this one is starting to open up about his sexuality, and entranced when he meets the openly and extremely gay Tiny.

The book wavers between the viewpoints of Will Grayson and Will Grayson (Green wrote from one point-of-view, and Levithan from the other), and it’s cleverly written – it’s a book with gay characters, though it’s not a gay book. (Not that there’s anything wrong with gay books, as such; I mean it’s not a Problem Novel about being gay.)

(For the record, the gay Will Grayson was my favourite Will Grayson.)

I found Tiny annoying, and it annoyed me that the other characters fawned over him so much – the book literally ends (spoiler!) with scores of people declaring to Tiny how much they appreciate his sheer awesomeness. If you’re like me and don’t buy into Tiny’s awesomeness, this is a serious problem. I didn’t really get why Tiny, who’s so overbearing (not to mention gay to the point of stereotype; he reminded me of “too gay to function” Damian from Mean Girls), is so important to these characters.

That said, I did like that the straight Will and Tiny have a friendship where sexuality is not an issue. And a crucial part of the adolescent experience is having at least one friend who is kind of a dick. (Years later, you reflect on your teenage years and wonder why the hell you spent so much time with so obvious a jerk.) Perhaps this is what Green and Levitan are really writing about – major kudos to them if so, though such an analysis seems like a bit of a stretch.

You know when a book is so good, its scope so wide and so imaginative, that it leeches into pretty much every thought you have? World War Z, an epistolary novel documenting mankind’s battle against rising zombie hordes,  is one of those books.

For example: I read it while holidaying in the Cook Islands, on a tiny dot of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “I’d be pretty safe from a zombie invasion here,” I thought. Then: “… right? What if the zombies crossed the sea somehow? What if the island became crowded with refugees, who carried the zombie infection? Would my hotel room provide a safe place to hide from zombies?” (I decided it wouldn’t.) It’s an exciting book, in the literal sense of the word.

It’s told as a series of short stories documenting the experiences of people all over the world¹ before, during and after the zombie apocalypse, and though I’m not paticularly enamoured of the zombie genre (all those eviscerations and eyeballs hanging from stalks. Eeeeewwwww), World War Z is fascinating in its realism. Yes, realism. It’s an odd word given the subject matter, but this truly feels like what would really would happen if a mysterious virus started turning its victims into the flesh-hungry living dead. The human weaknesses that allow the zombie plague to spread and the (sometimes shockingly cynical) strategies that enable the survivors to win are convincing, propped up by Brooks’s incredible attention to detail – especially when he imagines scenarios that aren’t immediately obvious: what would happen aboard an international space station during a zombie invasion? How do you train dogs to detect and attack the living dead? What animal species would be ravaged by the zombie war (spoiler alert: the whales bite it. Sad face)?

What’s also surprising is that World War Z isn’t a gore-and-guns splatterfest that glorifies weapons and gung-ho violence. It’s hopeful, unexpectedly uplifting, partly because it’s set after humanity’s victory (mostly) over the zombies), so you know it has a happy ending (again, mostly); but also because it’s a celebration of humanity’s pluck and moxy. Many of the people respond to the zombie crisis as selfishly as you’d expect, but many more behave admirably. (And there’s a strong satirical undercurrent that keeps it all from ever becoming too mushy – win!)

If you’d rather listen than read, the audiobook sounds excellent, and the upcoming film adaptation is also promising.

The book almost makes me wish that the zombie apocalypse really will happen. Fingers crossed it won’t break out till after I track down a copy of Brooks’s companion book, The Zombie Survival Guide…

1. Unfortunately, Australia is hardly mentioned. Did we endure the zompocalypse or not?! [↩]