Sam Downing

Dear Rhiannon Hart: thank you for writing a brooding romantic interest who isn’t also a complete jerk. Too many young adult books have young women inexplicably falling for young men who are either monster-creeps or borderline-abusive psychos – Blood Song‘s hero Rodden has wit and smarts to match his tall dark handsomeness.

And ditto its heroine, Zeraphina: she’s a princess (not in the entitled spoiled way; in the literal lives-in-a-castle way) and a skilled archer and followed everywhere by her loyal animal companions. And yet she’s not annoyingly perfect, as so many of these heroines are. Sometimes she’s a stubborn, stupid brat – which isn’t necessarily a bad quality in a narrator, not when it’s balanced with her wit and smarts.

In addition to those archery skills and animal friends, Zeraphina has a secret: a mysterious, unquenchable, painful craving for human blood. She begins to uncover clues about her condition when her sister is married off to the prince of a country that borders Lharmell – a cruel land ruled by even crueller beasties which hunt humans for their blood.

Blood Song is an unpretentious, competently crafted fantasy that mixes familiar elements into an entertaining story. If I knew a young reader with a burgeoning fantasy obsession, I’d definitely recommend it.

Exit Through the Wound is about nothing, and I don’t mean that in the same sense that Keeping up with the Kardashians is about nothing¹. More like it’s about nothing in the same way Seinfeld was: something happens, and maybe it briefly seems important or meaningful, but ultimately the stakes are super-low compared against the scale of the entire world – and that’s the point.

But Seinfeld focused on the amusing quibbles of nihilism, and ignored its dark and depressing side. Exit Through the Wound is consumed by the dark and depressing. It’s a blackly, laugh-out-loud funny book, one of my favourites of the year, I think, but parts of it made me want to stand on the edge of a building and go completely limp in the hope that I’d fall to my death without having to go to the actual effort of jumping off. (This is a very appropriate suicidal response to this book.)

Our hero is Maine Hudson, which is not his real name. Maine was raised in Greece but abandoned his home country and culture for the bleak streets of London,where a business consultancy pays him to email his co-workers and reorganise his desk. On weekends – and most weeknights – he consumes heavy quantities of pharmaceuticals.

Maine is not a likeable character, at least not in the I’d-want-to-spend-much-time-around-him way (which is fine, because if he were real he probably wouldn’t care to hang around himself either): he’s entitled, surly, morose. But jeez, you feel for this guy. His grim resignation to the unfairness of life – not in the sense that it’s unfair people suffer and die, but more how unfair that it’s all so mundane and pointless and godless – is palpable.

If that’s not a feeling you relate to, then: 1) You’re blessed or ignorant or both, and 2) Wound is probably not a book you’ll enjoy much.

The novel unfolds in 40 short chapters – almost like a string of short stories, really, in which Maine blankly endures his existence. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or dumped by the love or your life is equally important, or minor, as having a stranger yell at you on the tube.  Like Seinfeld, Maine is obsessed by apparent trivialities, “apparent” because these unimportant moment fill the bulk of our lives, and his observations of society’s absurd characters – office gossips, creepy gym-goers, vapid acquantainces – are sharp and hilarious. (If you too have been forced to attend corporate-style training courses alongside suspiciously enthusiastic personality voids, you will laugh.) The story spans roughly a year, and the first chapter in the book is the last chronologically – so you know from the start Maine won’t ride into the sunset after discovering true happiness. There is no such thing, maybe.

If you’ve followed North Morgan’s blog London Preppy for a while you’ll recognise Wound‘s style (and, like me, you’ll probably hope  that for the sake of Morgan’s physical and mental health the adventures of his fictional alter egos aren’t too autobiographical). And maybe Morgan started out as a blogger who gained a following posting shirtless photos of himself – let’s none of us embarrass ourselves pretending that’s not why we started reading him – but he’s evolved into a powerful writer, one who gets that miserable sense of “So what?” that pervades adulthood, but also the strange detached amusement it can arouse. I am not a heavily sedated, depressive business consultant living in London, but some parts of Maine’s story felt true:

Going to the gym is part of my daily, obsessive routine that creates this wonderful sense of consistency, a consistency that I need to have because I’m so weak that I can’t deal with change. This is unfortunately offset by the parallel feeling that I’m trapped in a recurring nightmare, a lifestyle I never chose and can’t escape.

Right?

1. Like I once watched three minutes of that show and was later diagnosed with bruising on my brain. [↩]

Best thing about reading the second instalment in a series: the origin-story stuff in part one is over and done. Not that origin stories aren’t a fun time, but there’s a formula to setting up characters and plots and tone, and once a series is freed from that formula it can start to shine.

Moon Over Soho, the follow-up to Rivers of London, offers a pretty good indicator that Ben Aaronovitch’s wizard-police-in-London series – I think we’re calling it the Peter Grant series? Which isn’t that catchy  – is starting to shine.

So the story picks up pretty much where Rivers left off: budding policeman/wizard Peter Grant has closed his first supernatural case, and continues his magical education under the tutelage of his Stephen Fry-ish inspector, Nightgale.

Working out of the Folly, the nickname for the posh old building that is the headquarters of London’s magical police, the twosome discover a new mystery: the city’s jazz musicians are dying, the life force sucked right out of them, sparking theories there’s a “jazz vampire” afoot. It’s all as messy and ridiculous and fun as it sounds.

That sense of fun is down to Peter, who’s a fresh, likeable hero: Aaronovitch has created a leading man who doesn’t take his unlikely adventures too seriously, is streetsmart but not wisecracky, capable without being annoyingly perfect, and who actually gets to have some actual sex this time around. (Seriously, this series is ripe for a magicked-up, oversexed True Blood-ish television adaptation. Get on with that, British TV bosses!)

The history of London is woven into the plot of Moon Over Soho more smoothly than in Rivers of London, as Peter dashes around the city meeting new characters, reacquainting himself with old ones, probing the tragic history of English wizardry, and stumbling on to the fringes of a cabal of evil wizards. It’s this kind of world-building that leaves me double-keen to see what magic Aaronovitch will work in the forthcoming third instalment, London Under Ground.

You know, sometimes literary fiction can be brilliant and tedious all at once: there’s only so many lyrically wrought metaphors you can admire per page before they start dragging down the story.

Luckily! This is not a problem in Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, which strikes the right balance between beautiful writing and compelling plotting that exposes an unfamiliar (to me, anyway) aspect of history in a fresh and unexpected way.

Said plot centres on Natalia, a twentysomething doctor who grew up during the wars that plagued the former Yugoslavia. As she sets out across the new border on a mission to vaccinate orphans, she learns her beloved grandfather has died in a tiny village far from his home. So what was he doing there?

As Natalia attempts to find out, she reflects on her memories of her grandfather, probing the events of his life that shaped his taciturn-yet-warm personality. Two of his relationships were especially key: one with a deaf-mute woman from the isolated village who grew up in, dubbed “the tiger’s wife” after a real tiger inexplicably appeared in the surrounding forests; the other with “the deathless man”, a seemingly immortal traveller who Natalia’s grandfather met many times.

What a story, huh?

There’s a fairytale quality to Wife, and not only because of its folksy touches. Obreht’s story is deliberately vague: the country it’s set in is never named, and Natalia herself is barely even a character – so much so that I had to go back to the blurb to confirm her name. This isn’t a bad thing. Natalia is defined by the other, stronger characters: her grandfather, the tiger’s wife, and the deathless man, of course, but also by her strong-willed friend Zora, the superstitious gypsies they encounter while performing their vaccinations, and the other inhabitants of her grandfather’s village. Like a real fairytale, the precise details are almost irrelevant. It’s the sense they arouse that stays with you.

Meanwhile, Obreht was born in 1985, making her just 25 when this book was published, and is by all accounts a lovely person. Awful!

Disclaimer: My copy of The Tiger’s Wife was given to me for free. But I would’ve given it a good review even if I’d paid for it! (Or would I…?) (Yeah, I would.)

There isn’t really a definitive gay experience of life, any more than there’s a definitive heterosexual experience of life: stereotypes aside, homos come in so many colours (a whole rainbow, as it were! Ha ha ha) that you can’t really sum us all up in one uniting story.

Boys and Girls is a collection of short stories by gay and lesbian authors that touches on some of those many facets of homosexuality. Split by gender, these tales are sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes sad. (But not always brilliant – after all, no short-story collection is completely without one or two less-than-stellar entries.)

I picked up the book for the short story ‘Exit Through the Wound’ by North Morgan – aka London Preppy – who’s a terrific writer. ‘Exit’ follows a Londoner’s drug-assisted return to a home country and a culture he no longer connects with, and the sense of disaffection and alienation is powerfully articulated. (If there’s one thing Morgan is great at, it’s disaffection and alienation.) But it’s funny, too! I’m super-keen to read Morgan’s debut novel, also titled Exit Through the Wound.

Other standouts in the boys’ half include Kristian Johns’ ‘Dying and Other Superpowers’ about an 18-year-old who develops superpowers after he’s diagnosed with HIV. It’s a shame this is just a short story, because it’s a great concept that’s constrained by its teensy word length. ‘The Unbearable Bear’, written by the collection’s editor Paul Burston, is also neat, about the mild-mannered narrator’s (inexplicable) acquaintance with a narcissitic, shallow, approaching-middle-age homosexual; it’ll resonate if you’re acquainted with a narcissitic, shallow homosexual of any age.

My favourite story is in the girls’ section: it’s V.G. Lee’s ‘Knitting for Beginners, 1960′, the tale of a 10-year-old English schoolgirl and her crush on the most popular girl in her class. Talk about a nostalgia hit to the adorable naive innocence of my own prepubescent infatuations – that raw urge merely to be liked by the object of one’s affections. It’s just lovely.

WOW OMG WTF. A Storm of Swords, the third entry in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire, is amazing. It’s taut. It’s brilliantly suspenseful. Especially… that scene! That one scene! And the ending! That cliffhanger!

You know what I’m talking about if you’ve read it, but if you haven’t – go read it! (That is, read the first two books and then read this one, or watch the first season of the TV series Game of Thrones and then read the second book and then read this one. Obviously, don’t read it standalone. That’s stupid.) But don’t spoil yourself! Because the shock and surprise of this thing is like whoa. I stayed up till 2am – on a school night! – reading the approach to and aftermath of that one scene, because how could you read that one scene then just go to sleep, and the following day at work I was torturously tired but kept sneaking extra pages when no one was looking. It’s that kind of book.

Spoilers ahead for Sword Storm, Crow Feast and Dragon Dance. (Aren’t those clever nicknames?!) (more…)

Confession: I never heard of George R.R. Martin nor his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire till HBO adapted the first instalment, A Game of Thrones, into the article-less TV series Game of Thrones. Which is amazing! I was hooked the moment [spoiler] pushed [spoiler] out the [spoiler], and officially loved it after [spoiler] had his [spoiler] [spoiler], then upgraded to love-it-like-a-crack-addict-whore-loves-crack when the season ended with [spoiler] [spoiler] [spoiler]!

Craving more, as junkie addict whores often do, I turned to Martin’s books. By the way, you probably don’t need to read A Game of Thrones if you’ve watched Game of Thrones and feel like you have a pretty good understanding of it. (HBO’s official site is a big help here.) The TV show is super-faithful to the novel, so (assuming you’re not one of these sissy-nutso-pansies who refuses to read the books for fear of spoiling the TV show) you ought to be able to leap into book two, A Clash of Kings, without much difficulty.

But reading A Game of Thrones is recommended if you plan to become a hardcore Westeros nut. (more…)

You know how Leonardo DiCaprio is a pretty great actor, but when you watch him onscreen you can see him Acting? And it’s kind of detaching, like a constant reminder you’re watching someone play a character and not watching a real person (who happens to look kinda like Leo DiCaprio)?

Reading Swamplandia! is the same. Karen Russell is a lovely, evocative writer – her turns of phrase so lovely and evocative that on pretty much every page I’d stop and think, “Wow, that is lovely, evocative writing”, and thus be reminded that I am reading writing.

So there’s a sense of detachment reading Swamplandia!. But I did really enjoy reading it!

Russell – who is only, like, 29, and already a critically beloved writer. That bitch! – has, in addition to that writing style, a superb imagination. Swamplandia!‘s premise: it’s the story of Ava Bigtree, a 13-year-old living on an alligator theme park in Florida with her father, Chief Bigtree; her older brother Kiwi, who’s desperate to escape the swamp; and her sister Ossie, who communes with ghosts. Their mother Hilola, a champion alligator wrestler, has recently died of cancer, and the park is failing, well beyond the verge of total financial collapse. (You never read any book like that before. I guess.)

The Chief leaves Swamplandia! to raise funds to overcome a rival park, the World of Darkness. Then Kiwi runs away from Swamplandia! to pursue his self-declared genius (he is, shockingly, ill-equipped for the real world). So when Ossie elopes with a ghost she reckons has romanced her, only Ava is left to go off to the rescue. The resulting plot, set mostly in the gator-ridden Florida Everglades, is unpredictable, sinister, and compelling.

The novel switches between Ava’s first-person and Kiwi’s third-person perspectives, its tone mixing whimsy with gothic. Sometimes it seems like it’ll tip into twee  (and less often, into pretentiousness), but Russell holds it back with a everpresent sense of darkness, like something even more horrible is about to befall the Bigtrees, the feeling the book will end tragically – which makes for a great climax.

Swamplandia! has lots of things like Theme and Symbolism and Character. It would make a good book club book. It’s also plain good reading.

This is going to sound like an insult, but it isn’t: Rivers of London is a mix of the magical and the mundane. But “mundane” here isn’t a bad thing. Think Harry Potter meets The Bill. The end result, with characters throwing spells in one scene then grappling with the modern bureaucratic nightmare of the London police force in the next, is pretty hilarious.

The set-up is pretty standard stuff: Peter Grant is a regular cop who stumbles into a previously undiscovered magical underworld. He’s apprenticed to the mysterious and charming Inspector Nightingale, one of the last of the wizards, who’s formed a complicated working relationship with London’s Bobbys (that’s what English people call police officers, right? Right?).

In between dropping one-liners, Peter gets to work on his first cases: solving a string of deaths caused by a malevolent trickster spirit; and working out a dispute between London’s river spirits. London is, obviously, a big part of the novel, and while it never really achieves “another character” status, the London details threaded through the story add to its charm – Aaronovitch has a clear affection for the city. (Also, kudos to Aaronovitch for attempting to work out the physics behind magic, something many fantasy authors ignore, cough J.K. Rowling cough.)

I do most of my reading on my commute to and from work, and Rivers of London is one of those “Aww, I’m at the office already? I wanna keep reading nooooow“-style books. It’s also the first entry in a series (followed by Moon Over Soho, which I want to read nooooow, and the forthcoming London Under Ground), and it shows. While the A-plot is resolved, most of the lesser-lettered plots are left hanging. Which is a little frustrating, but standard operating procedure nowadays.

PS: In the US this book is called Midnight Riot, and has a cover that cuts back on the whimsy and ramps up the action-packed-ness. Oh, America.

Is Sir Terry really suffering from a debilitating cognitive disease? Really? Him? Is probably what you’ll ask yourself after finishing I Shall Wear Midnight – the man’s still got it, where “it” stands in for “a sharp wit”, “great characters”, and “straight-up top-shelf writing know-how”.

So this most recent instalment of the super-long-running Discworld series (“saga” is a better word) returns us to witch-in-training Tiffany Aching, who’s now 15. The Nac Mac Feegle still assist (obstruct?) her in her witchly duties, though said duties are darker and tougher than before: there’s violent dilemmas happening on the chalk downlands where Tiffany lives; she must travel to Ankh-Morpork to inform the Baron’s son Roland – who’s engaged to be married to a girl who isn’t Tiffany, dun dun – that the Baron has died; and, oh yeah, there’s a malevolent witch-hating spirit known as the Cunning Man out to destroy her.

The plot is a bit slapdash, its climax not holding together as well other Discworld instalments, though the final scenes are pretty much perfect. Midnight gives Tiffany a satisfying send-off, though fingers crossed Pratchett is up to writing another adventure for her – she’s one of his best creations. The powerful witch Granny Weatherwax – who has a role here, alongside many other familiar faces (and Esk!) – has long ranked among my favourite Discworld characters, and what’s interesting about Tiffany, I think, is that her stories are basically a chronicle of how these powerful witches are made.

PS, I saw Sir Terry at the Sydney Opera House when he dropped by Australia in April. Perhaps the wisest thing he said was that the world would be a better place if we all allowed for the possibility that even our most strongly held beliefs  might be wrong. True dat.