2012/20: Secret Harmonies -- Andrea Barrett

All of them cast as pyjama-clad primitives, setting fires in the woods and bound in a dark web; herself cast as dreamy and dim as Emma Bovary, her lost children trailing her like cats. That was her, humming Italian music while she chased a bubble of romance through the sordid farms. ... as she read she saw why Dory had questioned her so closely. He was an only child, with no children of his own and no sense of a family except what he'd been able to steal from her. He'd taken the fine, everyday web of history that linked her to everyone in her life, and he'd distorted it to make connections so obvious, she'd never thought to put them into words. (225)

Reba grows up in a complex web of family and friendship, in the grinding poverty of small-town America in the 1970s. Family and friends have depths that Reba doesn't acknowledge even to herself, but are clear to the careful reader (and to Dory, who steals her stories and puts them in his poems). Reba is a romantic born in the wrong time, a musically-gifted child who never has the chance to use her talents, a passionate woman who paradoxically craves a detached life of 'clear cool order... her family eating a roast chicken sprinkled with herbs while she played Bach in another room.' (p. 161)

Or perhaps that's simply the best that Reba can hope for, the best of the options open to her. She'll never have the privileged life enjoyed by her married lovers, or the cerebral pleasures of academia, or the freedom to be herself.

This is an almost excessively subtle novel. A lot of events -- pregnancies, marriages, separations, escapes -- are recounted: but what actually happens, the meat of the novel, happens within Reba herself, and pulses out through the strands of that 'fine everday web of history' binding her to the people she loves.

Secret Harmonies is not, for me, the best of Andrea Barrett's novels: it's certainly not the most cheerful or uplifting. Yet there is quiet joy and beauty folded inside the ugliness of the mundane, within the hopes and dreams of the characters.

2012/19: Osama -- Lavie Tidhar

‘Anything to declare?’ The girl was pretty in her uniform. Joe wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to declare he was here to investigate a global conspiracy of mass murder; or say, perhaps, that he was trying to understand a war no one seemed to understand, not even those who were fighting it the hardest; or to explain about the ghosts that kept flickering at the corner of his eyes when they thought he weren’t looking. He said, ‘No, nothing,’ and gave her an apologetic smile, and she waved him through. (location 2421)

Joe (no last name given, I believe) is a private detective, hired by a femme fatale to find one 'Mike Longshott', author of a series of pulp novels featuring Osama Bin Laden, Vigilante, who --

At which point it is obvious that this is not our world.

Longshott (an alibi, you say?) writes of terrorist attacks in a way that Joe dismisses as wildly improbable. The reader may recognise some of those attacks, some of those names. ("[Joe] stared at the paperbacks. Assignment: Africa. Sinai Bombings. World Trade Centre. What the hell was a world trade centre?" (location 287)). Joe is ignorant of them, of the world in which such atrocities can occur.

Joe's world, on the other hand, may seem familiar. ("He had never been there before, and yet it felt as if he had. The knowledge of a memory, rather than the memory itself, nagged at him." (786)) This is a world where de Gaulle died in 1944, where Saint-Exupery was president of France, resonant with echoes of Astrid Lindgren and Woody Allen and Rick's Bar in Casablanca. Where everyone smokes, everywhere. Whisky and cigarettes, unrumpled sheets, £100 notes. Osamaverse fan-fiction. Then Joe tracks Longshott to London, and realises that his world is slowly unravelling.

My sympathies are with Joe here, lost and disoriented, wanting more than anything to solve the case and close the book on all the atrocities in Longshott's novels. Osama is full of wit, allusion and layered realities. It doesn't glorify terrorism, nor demonise the terrorists. And while I'm not entirely convinced by the finale, the novel as a whole will remain with me.

2012/18: The End Specialist -- Drew Magary

At the Church of Man we believe that God and Man are one and the same. We believe that we can become better people if we recognise that the forces of good in this world -- kindness, forgiveness, generosity, love -- are inherently within us, within our control. The old religious dogmas have outlived their usefulness in a world where people can now live hundreds and thousands of years ... We do not believe in preparing for an afterlife. We believe this life is the afterlife. (p. 148)

America, the near future: a cure for death (well, for natural ageing) has been developed. At the outset of The End Specialist, the cure isn't legal, but that doesn't stop lawyer John Farrell paying his $7,000 and getting his three injections. His 'digital journal' supplies a narrative viewpoint over the next sixty years, interspersed with news reports and anecdata. Farrell develops the cycle marriage, a forty-year contract designed to fix the problem of "no one told me forever would be this long!" (p. 39). He attends 'cure parties' at the Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino ("Do all the things Ponce de Leon always dreamed of doing!" (p. 98). And he records the social changes brought about by the cure: the excommunication of those who've taken fate into their own hands; the legislation preventing anyone who's Cured from claiming social security or Medicare benefits; the Thai trade in underage girls who'll be underage forever; the mothers who won't let their perfect babies grow up; the forty-year-olds who are sick of acting the age they look; and the Church of Man, which believes that God and Man are one and the same.

Not everyone wants the cure. Farrell's father is 'at peace with the idea' of death: "I've had a good life" (171). Farrell's sister is doubtful, a late adopter: "I'm guessing there'll be a point where everyone has it and I feel obligated to get it too. I was like that with cell phones." (68). At first Farrell can't understand why anyone would turn down what might as well be immortality (if you're careful, if you're rich). As the novel progresses, he starts to understand the difference between life and mere existence. And it's death that prompts his change of career, from lawyer to End Specialist -- "half angel of death, half event planner" (207).

There's a lot in this novel (which was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award) but it doesn't quite come together. A messianic figure, an epiphany, a saboteur; love, death, the prospect of endless tedium; a soft apocalypse of overpopulation and exciting new diseases. And yet -- perhaps because Farrell's really not a very likeable character? -- it falls flat somehow.

2012/17: Servant of the Underworld -- Aliette de Bodard

This wasn't, had never been about me. This was about the dead Jaguar warriors and the dying Emperor; about the peasants in their flooded fields; about the myriad small priests who didn't engage in politics, but sought the well-being of their flock. "You have seen the rain," I said softly. "There is a child in Tenochtitlan: a child who is no more a child, but the living embodiment of Tlaloc's will. He seeks to remake the Fifth World in His image." (p. 308)

Year One-Knife, in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Acatl, High Priest of Mictlantecuhtli (the God of Death), is asked to investigate the disappearance (and presumed murder) of an aristocratic priestess. The prime suspect is his own brother, the Jaguar Knight Neutemoc, with whom he has a complicated relationship. And, to aid his investigations, he is given an apprentice: the arrogant young warrior Teomitl, of whom Acatl knows nothing.

Servant of the Underworld immerses the reader from the first page in a culture that is rich, strange and cruel. Magic -- well, religion -- is real, and it is powered by blood. We first encounter Acatl casting a spell: when interrupted by a summons from Ceyaxochitl, the Guardian of the Sacred Precinct, his first thought is to 'quench the flow of blood from my earlobes before the atmosphere of Mictlan [the kingdom of the dead] could overwhelm the shrine. With the disappearance of the living blood, the spell was broken' (p.2).

Acatl is a powerful magician, but rather less adept at the political games that his role demands. He has been promoted suddenly from a minor provincial role to the High Priest of the God of Death, and he's neither comfortable nor happy with the temporal power bestowed upon him. Part of Teomitl's role in the novel is to make Acatl more aware of the walls he's built around himself. Some of the stones in those walls are his drowned father; his warrior brother and his brother's family; his former apprentice, who died attempting a rite beyond his power; the gods who draw him into their machinations and conflicts, old gods against new; his sense of inadequacy, as a man and as a priest.

Servant of the Underworld is the first in a trilogy featuring Acatl, and I'm intrigued to see where the series takes him. There's nothing in the novel that places it in a historical timeline: the author's afterword indicates that it's set around 1480, forty years before the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadors. Yet the world that de Bodard describes has a definite history of its own, with failed harvests, flooding, war; with flower-garlands, feather cloaks, and the constant sacrifices (human and animal) without which the world would end.

It's a culture as alien and unfathomable as anything in SF: an excellent setting for a complex murder mystery, because most readers will be unable to map the characters or their motives -- religious, social, political -- to more familiar tropes. Acatl may be a priest, but he is not comparable to Cadfael or John the Eunuch or Matthew Shardlake (or, haha, Father Brown). The missing priestess had an agenda that would be inconceivable (pun intended) in most historical settings. And the gods are at once unknowable and strangely human -- or, perhaps, so familiar to Acatl that his perception humanises their strangenesses.

2012/16: Rule 34 -- Charles Stross

Because if you turn it on its head and start looking at the net.porn, sooner or later you have to ask, Is whatever is depicted here happening on my beat? ICIU isn’t about porn (the war on porn is long since lost, though none dare admit it) so much as it’s about Internet memes— random clumps of bad headmeat that have climbed out of their skulls to go walkabout on the web. Often they’re harmless—a craze for silly captions on cute cat photographs—but sometimes they’re horrendous (p. 44)

Rule 34 is set in near-future Edinburgh: it's a loose sequel to Halting State, and is told, like the earlier novel, in three distinct second-person narrative streams. Inspector Liz Kavanaugh is investigating the latest in a series of improbable deaths which involve domestic appliances; Anwar Hussein is an identity thief (retired) who finds part-time legitimate work as the honorary Scottish consul for the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan; The Toymaker is an enforcer for the Operation, much given to reveries concerning rape machines and lizards in designer suits. Together they fight crime. Together, the three narratives converge on the identity of a serial killer and the nature of the organisation(s) trying to prevent further murders.

As usual with Stross's novels, there's a hell of a lot crammed in: meditations on identity theft, virtuoso riffs on the theme of 'if this goes on', sharp images of a very credible future, sly asides. Stross gives us 'the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local'; suburban cannibalism made possible by medical tissue incubator tanks (cannibalism's not illegal in Scotland: gosh, I never knew that); mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast. The second-person narratives offer ample opportunity for infodumps, opinion and polemic, without these feeling too much like authorial intrusion.

One aspect of this novel that I particularly admired is that, while nobody's defined by their gender or sexuality, the usual tropes are turned around. There are few heterosexual characters -- Dorothy Straight, Liz Kavanaugh's on-again-off-again ex, is not an example of nominative determinism -- and at least one of those is completely batshit. (Technical term.)

Very readable, pacy and funny: also thought-provoking, dark and packed with well-reasoned speculation.

2012/15: Pirate King -- Laurie R King

'...I will not feed my men off the suffering of women.’ Good God: The subversive sentiments of W.S. Gilbert had converted this hereditary Moroccan cut-throat into a Frederic of morality. I had never before thought of the Savoy operas as a tool of Anarchic philosophy. (p. 290)

The eleventh novel featuring the redoubtable Mary Russell (and her husband Sherlock Holmes), Pirate King doesn't live up to previous novels in the sequence. The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive [my review here] were almost mythic in their scope and resonance: Pirate King is a light-hearted romp, set in the nascent film industry of England in the 1920s. Randolph Fflytte is making a movie version of Gilbert and Sullivan's opera The Pirates of Penzance -- with thirteen blonde, blue-eyed, romantically-inclined English actresses, and a supporting cast of real pirates. (Arrrr!) Fflytte's film company has been at the centre of some criminal activity, so Mary Russell attaches herself to the project and heads first to Lisbon, and then to Morocco. The criminal intentions she uncovers are not exactly what she expected ...

There are a lot of things to like in Pirate King. Mary Russell is intelligent, quick-witted and free from sentimentality. Some of the 'actresses' are acting more than their roles as the Major-General's daughters. There is swashbuckling, crossdressing, and Fernando Pessoa, a poet who finds pirates enormously (and erotically) exciting. (Pessoa is not a fiction.) Also a parrot given to proclaiming Anarchist slogans.

But Russell and Holmes are apart for more than half the book, which means we miss out on the interplay between them. There's plenty of farce, and a lot of stupid pirates, but Pirate King lacks the meat and complexity of previous Russell novels. It also lacks context: after reading the previous two novels back-to-back, I wrote "The story told in The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive ends on something of a minor key. Things will never be the same -- in good ways and bad. I want to see how Holmes and Russell work through that situation." But we don't see that. The events of the previous books are barely mentioned.

I wonder if the change of key is intentional on King's part? Apparently she's keen to write 'a non-Russell book' but her fans and publishers keep pushing for more Russell. After The God of the Hive, this is completely understandable. Perhaps Pirate King will turn down the heat a bit.

2012/14: Last Movement -- Joan Aiken

Imagine you thought you were living in a house ... doing your normal job, pursuing your ordinary life, peaceful and unobserved -- and suddenly you found that all the time you had really been a kind of exhibit at a zoo, with people studying everything you had done through a glass wall, laughing at you and everything connected with you, because it was so grotesque and peculiar. (p.182)

Priscilla Meiklejohn -- known as Mike -- has never really connected with her mother, even after the deaths of her father and elder sister thirteen years ago. When she's summoned to an emergency ward where her mother lies gravely injured, she has little to say. But in her mother's desk there's a letter addressed to Mike, to be opened only in the event of her mother's death.

Of course she opens it.

Turns out her father's not dead after all: 'the way in which he is still alive may be a terrible shock to you'. (p. 43). And while Mike is still coming to terms with this news, her mother makes enough of a recovery to contemplate a convalescent journey to warmer climes: to Greece, where Mike spent her formative adolescent years while her sister (as she's lately discovered from her mother's friend) committed suicide and her mother locked everything away.

Mike's narrative is first-person: the story of the other protagonist, Julia, is told in the third person. Julia, a well-known playwright, has been through an acrimonious and very public divorce (she was formerly Lady Julia) and is honeymooning with her new husband, the mysterious Dikran, on the Greek isle of Dendros. When Dikran suffers an amnesiac episode and begins to behave strangely, a local doctor invites the couple to spend some time at Helikon, the music centre and clinic which he runs.

Mike and her mother also find themselves at Helikon, under the care of Dr Adnan, who Mike recalls fondly from her teenage years. Other visitors include an aged composer who's set on producing his opera, Les Mysteres d'Elsinore despite the apparent 'curse' that blights any singer who takes the role of Hamlet; a sociology professor from Baton Rouge who insists on photographing everybody; and Kerry Farrell, a mezzo-soprano who's soared to stardom in the last few years.

Then there's a murder, and a revelation, and a high-speed chase on precipitous mountain roads ...

While it's pretty straightforward to identify the villain of this novel, it's never that simple with Joan Aiken. Dr Adnan is given to plain speaking, and refuses to collude in his patients' pretences. The smallest details -- sunflower seeds, a masseur who recognises the signs of plastic surgery, letters as plot devices in the novels of Jane Austen, a pianist improvising behind a closed door -- are weighted with significance. Mike is a likeable character, as is Julia (though because of that third-person narrative we don't get as close to Julia as to Mike). And the twist, the discovery that Mike makes about her father, came as a complete surprise to me -- though, with hindsight, the whole novel leads up to it. After that revelation, the romantic denouement felt trivial (and, to be honest, rather less convincing).

Several of the characters in Last Movement are deliberately, authentically bigotted; the novel was written and is set in the late 1970s, when prejudice and bigotry were more acceptable than they are now. One of the characters, in particular, holds views I find extraordinarily repugnant: just as though I'd encountered her in real life, I couldn't think of her the same way after she'd made those views known.

Despite the cover -- mine has good-looking people in evening dress, a Greek temple, a dead body and a full moon -- this is not a 'novel of romantic suspense' [sic], though those elements are present. It focusses more on Mike and the changes that bring her true maturity. And perhaps it's a novel about deceit, about the lie in plain view, about what we let ourselves see and recognise.