#26: Incendiary -- Chris Cleave

London's like me it's too piss poor and ignorant to know when it's finished. I am London Osama I am the whole world. Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of herself.

If you've heard of Incendiary it's probably for the wrong reasons. Incendiary, a novel about a terrorist attack on London, was published on 7th July 2005 -- the day that suicide bombers targetted public transport in London. I remember seeing the poster for this book on the Circle Line platform at Victoria, just before the station was evacuated.

The posters disappeared pretty quickly.

I'm glad I didn't read this when the bombings were fresh in my mind, because the scenes of violence and panic, and the shivery-vivid depiction of London under a kind of siege, would have been nightmarishly upsetting. Cleave's terrorist attack is the bombing of a football stadium, and his death toll is over a thousand: his London reacts by raising a Shield of Hope, a thousand barrage balloons each bearing the image of one of the victims. His London reacts by trying to heal over as quickly as possible, never mind the cracks underneath. I find this horribly credible.

Incendiary is phrased as a letter to Osama bin Laden from a nameless woman whose husband and child were killed in the bombing. The narrator, who could be read as the personification of London, suffers internal injuries when she forces her way into the disaster area to look for their bodies. The physical damage eventually heals, but that's only half -- not even half -- the story. She's prone to hallucination, to taking risks, to drinking too much and sleeping with (a) her neighbour, yuppie scum and Torygraph journalist Jasper (and implicitly also with Jasper's girlfriend Petra) and (b) Terence Butcher of Scotland Yard, who confides a terrible truth.

The narrator's voice is distinctive working-class East End, bit of a chav, slightly -- defensively -- stroppy, wrenchingly sad: Cleave's transcription of idiom and rhythm is pretty much flawless, and the idiosyncratic punctuation works surprisingly well. You can hear her. And because of this comfortably common-place voice, the moments of poetry and anguish hit harder. Wandering the streets, she sees her dead son in every little boy: I don't know how you did it Osama but you didn't just blow my boy to bits you put him back together a million times. There are some truly gruesome passages that remind me of eye-witness accounts of the Blitz more than anything more recent. And there are wry asides that made me laugh out loud (at least partly for light relief):
She stood there [after a Lady Di haircut] trembling and looking like the things you want to forget about the 1980s. Actually I suppose what I mean Osama is the things we want to forget like Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins not the things you want to forget like the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Our narrator's a survivor, flexible and driven and capable of the most astonishing moral, physical, emotional extremes. She carries on when everything else is falling apart. You could do worse as a personification of London's Blitz spirit.

I'm fascinated to see that nearly all the Amazon reviews are one star or five stars: it's apparently a book that readers love or hate. I loved it: found it disturbingly fascinating, not a little unsettling and distinctively written.

#25: Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City -- Kim Lakin-Smith

Renegade City. So morbidly exotic: like the dark side of Eden. But what is it really? Nottingham reincarnate. A fairy-tale of flawed ideals?

Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City is Kim Lakin-Smith's first novel, published by Storm Constantine's Immanion Press. It's reminiscent of a Gothic Bold as Love, an alternate present or near future where rock music (in this case, gothic rock, with smatterings of punk) is really as important as it's always thought it should be.

The 'renegade city' is recognisably Nottingham, and it's been pretty much colonised by the fans and followers of Origin, a goth supergroup who left behind the trappings of fame and retired to the city to (a) subvert local government (b) drive out decent, Mail-reading folk (c) rule as vampyric demi-gods over an enthralled populace (d) all of the above.

The Renegade City is not quite the happy hippie utopia that Origin might have hoped for. Years before the opening of the novel, Origin's lead singer, Roses, died in a fire that may not have been as accidental as was reported. The inhabitants of the Renegade City have fractured into tribes: Skinwalkers, Trawlers, Castclan, Fae ... The city's as riddled with what one character terms 'apartheid' as any playground, and the murky, shiny city streets -- this is cybergoth territory, not some pretty glittering faerie realm -- are dangerous for anyone who doesn't belong.

Tourniquet revolves around two quests: Origin's drummer, Druid, is trying to solve the murder of his brother Roses, and a young Fae woman, Jezebel, is in search of her lost brother Harish, last seen mid-mob pursuing Jezebel. Together, and with the help of various colourful supporting characters (including witch-eyed street-kid IQ and his redoubtably Boadicean grandmother Queenie) the two embark on an epic quest, or pub-crawl, or both.

Lakin-Smith's language is rich and spiky as wrought iron, and occasionally teeters on the brink of purpleness. There are some tremendously evocative passages and some vivid imagery -- I'm reminded of both Tanith Lee and Steve Aylett.

The novel seems to lack conclusion and resolution, to dissolve in a smoky haze rather than provide closure for reader or characters. I imagine there is more of this tale to come. I'd like to see more of the rest of England, beyond the city limits; I'd like to learn more about the other tribes, the infrastructure, the economy (there are definitely tourists, and more live music than you could shake a stick at).

Read for review, for Vector: VECTOR REVIEW HERE

#24: The Ninth Circle -- Alex Bell

The Ninth Circle brings together angels, assassins and amnesia: it's part thriller and part dark fantasy and the two don't always blend well together. Protagonist Gabriel Antaeus wakes in a Budapest apartment one hot summer day, not knowing his own name or recognising his reflection. There's a huge sum of money on the kitchen table and a complete but unpublished manuscript, apparently by Gabriel himself, purporting to be a theological study of Dante's Hell.

Trying to reconstruct his lost life, Gabriel befriends pregnant teenaged neighbour Casey and cosmopolitan ex-theologian Stephomi. Both have something to offer him in terms of self-knowledge; both have parts to play in the larger tale that's playing out around them. Two tales, in fact: a grandly Miltonian epic of good and evil, and a more mundane story of international skulduggery. Gabriel is the axis round which both pivot, but they don't mesh as well as they might.

I read The Ninth Circle for review (which I'll link from this post when it appears), and doubt I'd have picked it up otherwise -- though it's apparently the focus of a major marketing campaign, perhaps because the author is 'frighteningly young and talented'. She has potential, but I didn't find this an especially good read. My advance review copy contained multiple errors and typoes that should have been picked up by a competent proof-reader: 'pouring' over manuscripts, for example. The characterisation feels flat: Gabriel's amnesia explains his current lack of depth but there's a sense that there was never much more there. Casey only comes to life when she's a mouthpiece for Gothic and alternative teens everywhere. Stephomi, with his games and secrets and his coruscating humour, is probably the most interesting of the three major characters. There are some imaginative twists and the pacing is good, but the prose is lacklustre, and sometimes tries too hard to be poetic.

(I've been reading quite a bit of fanfiction lately, cherry-picking the best: most of that was better-written than this novel.)

I hate to slam a young writer's first book, but it is possible to publish too soon in one's career. I'm very glad I didn't manage to get my first completed novel into print!

EDIT, 01 AUG 08 my review at Strange Horizons

Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City -- Kim Lakin-Smith

This review originally appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, Autumn 2008

---

Tourniquet, the debut novel from Kim Lakin-Smith, takes us to an alternative Nottingham; whether by 'alternative' you infer a variant history, or a dance to a different beat, the epithet rings true. Nottingham's transformation began some years before the action of Tourniquet, when 'the most revered band in the history of rock', ubergoths Origin, decided to turn their back on the mainstream and retire to the city, provoking an influx of adoring fans and followers, and an outflux of ordinary, decent Daily Mail-reading folk. Gradually Nottingham, its municipal bodies suborned by the wages of Gothic rock, has been transmuted into the darkly magical Renegade City, its familiar landmarks and thoroughfares -- Sneinton Market, St Mary's Church, Maid Marion Way, the legendary venue Rock City -- overseen by the Drathcar (the four neo-vampyric members of Origin) and overrun by the tribes that have evolved.

Tourniquet opens with a Fae girl, Jezebel, fleeing an army of Skinwalkers, one of whom turns out to be her estranged brother Harish. Next, we encounter Druid, Origin's drummer, vowing to avenge the reluctant martyrdom of lead singer Roses, who burnt to death in a fire that may have been no accident. Roses, it turns out, was Druid's brother, which may explain why Druid's so keen to discover the truth behind his death when the other members of Origin, slinky bassist Sophia and lilac-eyed lead guitarist Adeudas, seem fashionably unconcerned.

Fame can be its own punishment, as many a rockstar's found to their cost: but in this case Druid's famous face is his salvation, for he can pass as no more than one of the Drathy, obsessive fans who emulate the clothes, the physiology and the lives of their idols. It's the mysterious "D", then, who mingles with the lowlives of the Renegade City; who encounters the sassy and streetwise IQ (Irvine Quirk), his battleaxe grandmother Queenie, and a host of other colourful characters who seem drawn as much from legend and ballad as from the counterculture.

Lakin-Smith's prose is extravagant almost to excess, glowing as a stained glass window and spiky as baroque barbed wire. The Nottingham she paints is not one of soft-focus spires limned with dark fire, but a convincingly gritty cybergoth city, dangerous and dirty. There are motorbike tourneys, Fae wings patched with duct-tape, wireless pirates plying the canals. It's visually arresting, and often rather frantic as D and Jez progress on what's either a quest or an extended pub-crawl through the underside of the city.

Like Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love sequence, Tourniquet posits a world where rock'n'roll is really as important as it thinks it should be. Unlike Jones' amiable dystopia, the Renegade City is an isolated (and likely barricaded) polder in a land of normality. Very little is said of the rest of England, the rest of the world, save as something to be fled. Whatever the goths and hippies and punks hope to find in the Renegade City, it's not peace. The different tribes -- Trawlers, Castclan, Skinwalkers, Fae -- are engaged in constant internecine conflict, as exclusive and elitist as playground cliques: 'apartheid', Jez terms it, and Druid is increasingly aware that Roses' libertarian notions haven't translated well to reality.

Tourniquet's so tightly and intricately knotted a novel that it's sometimes hard to see through the gloss of poetic prose to the shape of the story. There's an unresolved feel to it, a haziness to the last few chapters, that makes me wonder if the stories herein are to be continued. I'll certainly look forward to more of Lakin-Smith's work.

PERSONAL REVIEW HERE

#23: The Cleft -- Doris Lessing

The Cleft, Doris Lessing's latest novel, is a primeval fable about the origins of the sexes. The introduction gives an idea of what to expect: I had been wondering if men were not a younger type, a junior variation. They lack the solidity of women, who seem to have been endowed with a natural harmony with the ways of the world. I think most people would agree with this ...

Originally there were only women, the Old Shes, lolling around like mermaids (or like something from Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Women) half in, half out of the water. All babies were girls, until the frightful day when one woman -- impregnated as usual by 'a fertlising wind, or a wave' -- produced a Monstrosity. It (he) was not the first. Eventually it became common practice for the Monsters, or Squirts, to be exiled (with the help of some convenient giant eagles) to an inland valley. And all might have remained thus if not for an enterprising female who visited the valley and began the process of sexual reproduction. (I simplify, a bit.)

The story of the Old Shes, the very first sexual revolution, and the invention of housework (no, really) is wrapped in the story of a nameless Roman historian (male, of course) who's inherited a sheaf of documents purporting to be the oldest history of all. He provides context, and a certain perspective, though he's not without his own bias. Women, in his opinion, are prone to nagging and talking down to men, and he writes of the furtherance of the human race and the greater value of a pregnant female slave in the same sentence. The historian provides commentary as he recounts the adventures of one Horsa, first male leader -- whose expansionist tendencies indicate that he was, in spirit, a Roman -- and his female counterpart Maronna, who is either indignant or hysterical depending on which history you believe. There's plenty of revisionism going on here, in the historian's assumptions as well as in his account of the original tale.

All well and good. There's plenty of nice rich symbolism -- eagles! a rock with a huge, eponymous Cleft! an island that may be a peninsula! -- and some sense of character, even with the most ancient of archetypes. But this novel could have been so much more: there are passages which seem poorly edited, and loose threads that surely could have been tied off. The climax of the book is, well, anticlimactic. And The Cleft only escapes being labelled (by me at least) as misogynist because it's negative about everyone. True, the 'Old Shes' are barely human, rolling in layers of blubber, slow-witted, semi-aquatic and prone to murdering baby Monsters: but the Monsters are no better, being murderous, sex-crazed, unable to plan ahead, reckless and messy. (Their rude shelters are full of debris: luckily, when the women visit the valley, they "[tear] branches from the trees and used them as brooms," thus inventing housework and the battle of the sexes in one fell swoop. Oh, for ... no.)

There are issues with editing, too: with phrasing, with imagery, and in the absence of any prose that leapt from the page. I'm also suspicious of the distinction that's made -- by the historian -- between Diana and Artemis (the latter being the Greek original of the former, I believe) and wonder if there's some confusion between Artemis and Aphrodite. The Roman statue of 'Artemis' calls sea breezes and the seashore to the historian's mind, and she's smiling: it's Diana who gets the bow of gilded wood and the 'frisking skirt'.

I'm puzzled by the ecstatic reviews this novel has garnered. It is certainly not the height of Lessing's literary achievement: if it had been written by an unknown writer, I'd have been surprised if it saw print. And I'd hate to think that readers unfamiliar with Lessing's work would take this as representative.

#22: The Book Thief -- Marcus Zusak

They watched the Jews come down the road like a catalogue of colours. That wasn't how the book thief described them, but I can tell you that that's exactly what they were, for many of them would die. They would each greet me like their last true friend, with bones like smoke, and their souls trailing behind.

I started reading The Book Thief just as my March slump (evident in previous years) hit: I lost interest in reading anything, and it took me a while to finish the novel. Though it has some gorgeous prose, this is not a cheerful book. Unsurprising, given that it's set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death: there are moments of peace, love, beauty in this novel, but they're like slanted sunshine through black clouds. Liesel Meminger is the eponymous book thief: almost certainly an orphan, she watched her brother die en route to the small town where they're to be fostered. (This is her first encounter with Death, and her first book theft: a handbook for gravediggers). Arriving at the house on Himmel Street (in a small town just outside Munich: I'm not sure it's ever named), Liesel finds herself in the care of Rosa and Hans Hubermann. Rosa verbally abuses Liesel, though it's just her way of showing she cares: Hans teaches her to roll cigarettes for him, and to read.

Liesel plays football, steals food and has adventures with the boy next door, Rudy Steiner. (Rudy is the character I liked most: possibly because we see him through the filter of Liesel's affection, and possibly because he doesn't have time to go bad.) She can't share the biggest adventure with him, though: the arrival of Max, a young Jewish man whose father saved Hans Hubermann's life in World War I. Max has an accordion; Max lives in the basement; Max, in one of the episodes that makes this book more than just another novel of Nazi oppression, paints over the pages of Mein Kampf to write and illustrate a story for Liesel.

Life goes on. This is life in wartime: bad things happen, though not exclusively bad things. There are bombs, deaths, books that Liesel is given, air raid shelters, Liesel reading to the neighbours, Liesel writing her own story -- which is the book that Death carries everywhere with him.

There's a great deal of glorious poignant prose in this novel: nearly all of it is in Death's framing narrative:
I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men.
They are not.
They're running at me.
(The typography of Death's narrative is also innovative and arresting.)

I'm torn by Death. I'm not sure his narrative is necessary to the story. We learn that God is absent or doesn't listen: that souls have colours: that Death is haunted by humans. That Death loves the souls he takes, Jews and Nazis alike. That he comes as comfort to those in extremity. That he is moved by Liesel's account of her life. But the story would stand without him, though the book would be a lesser thing without the vivid novelty of Death's metaphors.

#21: Everworld 1: The Search for Senna -- K. A, Applegate

This is the first in Applegate's 12-book 'Everworld' series, and I might not have read it if I'd realised that it ends on a cliffhanger and that the second book (previewed at the end of The Search for Senna) picks up the plot without a break.

Everworld is a world created by a coalition of gods: a world populated not only by those gods (mostly at war with one another) but by their followers and believers. A group of teenagers from contemporary America -- David, April, Jalil, Christopher -- are pulled into Everworld in search of Senna, April's half-sister, whose powers of witchery are blossoming. David has a crush on Senna, and wants to believe well of her. Which is why he and his friends end up on a Viking longship, off to battle the Aztecs and their bloodthirsty deities.

The social dynamic of the group rings true: gossip, friendship, awkwardness, humour. And the prose is sharp and snappy, with short chapters, excellent pacing and an impressive immediacy. Very readable, and I can see how it'd hook reluctant YA readers. I'm not hooked enough, myself, to read the other books immediately -- but I'll certainly read them.