R.S. Belcher - The Six Gun Tarot

Published: 2013

I remember, as a teenager, watching the ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ of Sergio Leone. Films like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Excellent movies, many of them, but, hence the nickname, they weren’t shot in the American West at all, but in Italy and Spain. There were times when it was difficult to suspend disbelief that we were seeing an American landscape. Whether it was the whitewashed, anciently Mediterranean-looking buildings or the occasional olive tree, the scenery didn’t quite cut it, didn’t feel ‘right’. So, if the occasional incongruous structure can mar the Old West setting, what happens if you introduce magic, mythology and monsters?

                This is exactly what former reporter and private investigator (could there be a cooler background for a novelist?) R.S. Belcher attempts in his recent debut novel, The Six Gun Tarot. Wild West adventure and apocalyptic fantasy are two very well worn and well established genres, and on the surface at least, make uneasy bedfellows. Any attempt to create a hybrid of the two risks diluting either or both. But The Six Gun Tarot manages it, and the end result is an original, well-paced, fun story that – refreshingly – doesn’t take itself too seriously.

                The story opens with a familiar Western trope:  Jim Negrey, a young man running away from his past, is heading for the Nevada town of Golgotha – if he can survive the inhospitable expanse of the 40-Mile desert. In his pocket he carries the only object that holds any real value to him: his dead father’s old, mysterious glass eye. Once in town, he is fortunate enough to befriend Sheriff Highfather and his deputy, Mutt – both of whom have a few secrets of their own. But Golgotha is no ordinary frontier town. Everyone seems to have their secrets and there are weird goings-on aplenty. Why is Sheriff Highfather so strangely impervious to bullet wounds? What’s the source of the strange poison that killed a local businessman? What’s the true identity of the shadowy saloon owner, Malachi Bick, and why is he so desperate to prevent the re-opening of the abandoned silver mine outside town?

                Jim’s coming-of-age story is only one of the perspectives followed in the novel, which frequently jumps to other characters’ points of view. This is handled well, and keeps the pace up as the tension boils away nicely and the story builds towards its apocalyptic, action-packed finale. The shift in perspective is just as well, as I doubt Jim’s character is strong enough to carry the entire novel. Other characters are as likeable as they are flawed, and it’s one of those books where you find yourself looking forward to the next section involving your favourite character. It’s the characters, as much as the enjoyably irreverent mixing-in of many flavours of myth and theology, which are the strong point of this novel.

                The monsters, when they eventually make an appearance, are a bit of a let-down though; essentially generic zombie-type things (although never referred to as such) heralding the impending doom of all existence. There are some other slightly predictable elements too: Malachi Bick’s true identity is easily guessed, for example. Or there’s Maude, the woman initiated as a child into a sisterhood which teaches her expert fighting skills – who’d have thought she’d have to put them to use?

                It’s possible to make other criticisms too; the writing is a little clunky on occasion, perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who is more used to writing non-fiction. For example, a scene in which Jim tearfully spills out the details of his past crime – the murder of a man who was abusing his mother – is both cringe-worthy and unnecessary. We already know Jim is basically a decent guy with a murky past; leaving the exact nature of the reason that he’s on the run more ambiguous would have been more satisfying.

                These minor nit-picks do not detract from what is, overall a thoroughly enjoyable adventure story. The story forges ahead so confidently that you barely notice. With so much fantasy writing decidedly po-faced, Belcher’s decision to not take this outlandish story too seriously is very welcome. And if you thought the merging of that most gritty and down-to-earth genre of the Western with myth and magic wouldn’t work, think again. In fact, with its philosophy grounded in absolute goods and evils, frontier spirit and survival, in many ways the Old West is the ideal environment to have some fun with these themes. This is what The Six Gun Tarot does best. Apparently, a sequel is already in the works and I know I, for one, will be keeping a look out for it.

P.S. I originally reviewed this book for Many A True Nerd - this website is a must-see for any sci-fi, movie or gaming fan.

Iain (M.) Banks - Consider Phlebas / The Quarry

Consider Phlebas: published 1987

The Quarry: published 2013

Scotland lost two of its best authors in June this year: Iain Banks and his sci-fi alter-ego, Iain ‘M’ Banks. I may have mentioned previously that I’m something of a fan of the Scotsman’s work, but on the whole I have largely, up until now, eschewed his sci-fi offerings - his ‘M’ work, so to speak. I’ve always been sure they’re very good; they come highly recommended by close friends; but sci-fi just isn’t really my cup of tea. This genre-prejudice was unexpectedly challenged, however, with the sudden news of Banks’ diagnosis with terminal cancer. He announced that the novel he was currently working on – The Quarry – looked like it would be his last. Before my pre-ordered copy even arrived, I’d made my decision: with no more ‘mainstream’ Banks novels on the way, if I wanted to continue to enjoy his work, it was time to try his considerable back catalogue of sci-fi novels – authored (at his publisher’s suggestion) by Iain ‘M’ Banks.

                1987’s Consider Phlebas was his first sci-fi offering; his reputation by this point already well established with the dark and compelling non-genre novels The Wasp Factory and The Bridge. The story takes place in a galaxy far, far away (I’m sorry, sci-fi terms really aren’t my strong suit) in the midst of a war between two powerful, ideologically opposed civilisations: the militaristic, religiously motivated Idirans and atheistic artificial-intelligence enthusiasts The Culture. But the main character is a member of neither: Bora Horza Gorbuchal is a ‘Changer’, a humanoid species that can (with a notice period of a day or two) take on the appearance of anyone they like. Currently engaged as a mercenary for the Idirans, he’s motivated by a dislike of the Culture’s godless ways and an assignment to capture a Culture ‘mind’ from a deserted (but still very dangerous) Planet of the Dead. Along the way, he insinuates himself into Kraiklyn’s Free Company, a bunch of space pirates led by a dislikeable egotist.

                Unlike some of the (admittedly very few) other sci-fi novels I have read, Consider Phlebas is instantly enjoyable – to a non-sci-fi fan at least – because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. But there are some intriguing themes here nonetheless. I wasn’t quite sure who I should be rooting for in the war: the Idirans are fundamentally unsympathetic, yet the protagonist prefers them to the anarchistic Culture. The author’s politics are most evident in what we discover about the Culture – a post-scarcity, currency-free socialist utopia – but even they are not portrayed as perfect or even correct. They are just as war-mongering as the Idirans, and justify the expansion of their civilisation in a similar way – albeit without the religion. The Culture crops up, either centrally or peripherally, in a number of later novels, and Consider Phlebas leaves the reader wanting to discover more about them.

                On the downside, Consider Phlebas is a real slab of a book, which wouldn’t be a problem if the length was really necessary – but it isn’t. Horza and the Free Company stop off en-route at various places for reasons which, more often than not, don’t really progress the plot in any way. Presumably with such a fertile imagination it must be tempting to cram everything in to one’s first novel, but the fact that Banks has done so is obvious. There are some enjoyable distractions here – a high-stakes gambling session known as ‘Damage’ is a particular highlight. But much of it could doubtless have waited for future outings. It meanders around the galaxy fairly aimlessly at times, and is in no way as tight and structured as its much-superior follow-up, The Player of Games.

                Where Consider Phlebas is overlong, The Quarry is the opposite: you get the impression that, had the author not discovered he had a terminal illness, the final article would have been significantly more developed. Characters and concepts feel under-cooked and under-explored. As it is, we are presented with little more than the bare bones of a novel, which reads as something like an Iain Banks paint-by-numbers. All the tropes are there: the big reunion (in this instance, a group of former university friends), the big house, the political rants, the liberal sprinkling of drugs and booze. At its centre is the relationship between Kit, an intelligent but mildly autistic young man, and his father Guy. Guy was the ringleader of a bohemian group of creative types at university, but his glory days are well behind him and nowadays he is coughing his way through the final stages of lung cancer, his lifetime of indulgences evidently having caught up with him. The old mates, for their part, have become to varying degrees cynical, yuppified and / or generally unpleasant, with the exception of Kit’s ally, Holly. But, having been dragged back to the tumbledown house in Northumberland, Guy might just have one or two surprises left for them.

                The novel is written from Kit’s point of view, and this is probably the best aspect of the novel: the way that a fifty-something bloke can convincingly get into the head of an eighteen year old with Asperger’s, and sustain the voice for a whole novel. Other aspects, unfortunately, suffer from being underdeveloped. There’s the whole premise of the search for an incriminating videotape, for example, which seems very contrived (no doubt a further draft would have resolved this). There’s also the quarry of the title, a heavy-handed metaphor lurking beyond Guy and Kit’s garden wall and due for expansion once Guy shuffles off his mortal coil, taking his house with it.

                There isn’t much else to say about The Quarry really. It bears many of the hallmarks of what made Banks a great writer, but – for understandable reasons – it does not compare well with many previous works, not least 2012’s Stonemouth. Finally, in what seems like a fairly cruel slice of irony, Banks claims he didn’t find out about his own cancer until he was part way through The Quarry, and the storyline of Guy’s terminal illness well advanced. Makes you wonder if he wished he’d started a novel about winning the lottery, or bedding Miss World or something, instead.

                So, Consider Phlebas and The Quarry: they’re two very different books, with two and a half decades between them, and neither is perfect. Whereas one bears testament to an understandably rushed job, the other is arguably overlong; the product of an up-and-coming author brimming with imagination. Neither, perhaps, is the well-honed, polished piece of work that Banks produced at the high points in his career, like The Crow Road or The Player of Games. But both have their moments, at least, and are memorable in their own ways. With my bookshelves already weighed down with Banks’ back catalogue, shortly to be joined by the rest of his Culture series, I can’t help looking at the gaping hole his departure has left in the British literary world, and wondering when we are ever likely to see someone with the talent to match it.

P.S: check out our political-flavoured tribute to the late Iain Banks over at The Red Train (co-written with Alastair JR Ball)

Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Published: 2012

On first finishing this book, I decided initially that it wasn’t for me. Just not my sort of thing. It was only after a few weeks of reflection that it dawned on me: it’s much worse than that.

                I’ll get to my reasoning for that statement shortly. First, though, it seems only fair to mention some of the positive things people are saying about The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Joyce’s first novel. The inner jacket is packed with phrases reminiscent of the reception to David Nicholls’ (similarly insubstantial) One Day. Praise like “this touching and charming novel which made me laugh and sob” (The Express), or “almost unbearably moving” (Sunday Times). Many members of my book group reported similarly, even if not without criticism.

                Gentle, stiff-upper-lip retiree Harold Fry lives with his wife Maureen in rural South-West England. Their marriage is past its sell by date, they’ve forgotten how to talk to each other, and there’s the omnipresent gloomy shadow of their relationship with their estranged (or so you’re led to believe) son. But one morning, a letter arrives from Queenie, a former colleague of Harold’s. They haven’t spoken for years, and now she’s terminally ill in a hospice in far-away Berwick-on-Tweed. Unable to find the words to respond at first, Harold eventually pens a suitably uncomfortable response and tells his wife he is going down the road to post it. But when he reaches the post box, he just keeps walking. And walking. And walking. 627 miles, in fact, all the way to the hospice in Berwick, convinced that, by demonstrating such willpower, Queenie will live.

                If all of this sounds a bit like a Radio Four afternoon play, that’s because it pretty much is: Joyce has written more than twenty of them, as well as other radio and TV work. Not to denigrate Radio Four’s plays; many of them are enjoyably original in concept, much as this novel is. Joyce’s astute understanding of the way people interact with each other in a variety of situations gives life to Harold’s journey.  Along the way, he meets some weird and wonderful characters. In a biting criticism of our celebrity-obsessed, 24-hour media culture, Harold eventually becomes a  cult figure himself, unwittingly collecting a group of hangers-on, other ‘pilgrims’ who want to be a part of his journey for their own reasons.

                In some respects, Joyce handles Harold’s journey well. The most rewarding parts are the first few days, when he is still travelling alone. The later hangers-on are suitably annoying, especially the loathsome Rich Lion, who wants to take over the pilgrimage in order to win back custody of his estranged children. But ultimately, I just couldn’t accept the premise. It may be technically possible for an old man to walk 627 miles in 87 days, but Harold is just about the last person in the world likely to do it.

                It’s possible to accept this whimsical notion – it is fiction, after all, and fiction of a decidedly fable-like quality at that. What I found less easy to accept was the way it dealt with generational issues. The author seems to write off young people (Harold’s son’s generation) as self-centred, self-indulgent drug addicts with no respect for their parents. If only they were more like the moderation-loving, gentle-natured Harold and Maureen! However, it isn’t just the generational politics per se that were the issue for me – although I’m not convinced that outward stoicism and an inability to frankly discuss your feelings are qualities that ought to be extolled. It’s also that, apart from anything else, these qualities seem misplaced in Harold and Maureen. They’re post-war baby boomers, the generation that grew up and came of age in a prolonged period of economic boom and the sexual and social revolutions of the ‘sixties. These are qualities I would associate far more strongly with the older, war-worn generation who would have been Harold and Maureen’s parents.

                The story is also overpoweringly cloying and sentimental in places – I can only imagine how infinitely worse this would have been had the author been American. Finally, the climax involves a distressingly visceral description of terminal cancer which, whilst far less shocking than what you can find elsewhere, jarred severely with the happy-go-lucky tone of the rest of the novel.  

                As I said, I was initially prepared to give this book the benefit of the doubt. But although Joyce thankfully keeps spiritual or religious mumbo-jumbo to a minimum, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry peddles some highly suspect morality lessons indeed. I accept, of course, that it may be that it really is a generational thing – this is an example of the baby-boomer generation growing old and confronting their own demons in a way I just can’t appreciate yet: stale marriages, damaged relationships with their children, and the looming spectre of the Big C. But, even if Joyce did intend Harold Fry to be in any way representative of his generation, I’m sure they can do better than this.

Stephen King - Joyland

Published: 2013

I love Stephen King books. There, I said it. Yes, the literary establishment may be a tad sniffy about mass-market ‘pulp’ genres like horror, but so what? With one or two exceptions, you don’t sell millions of books without being at least vaguely proficient.

                I’ve been reading King for years. At an age when many teenage boys give up reading fiction altogether, it was staying up late and terrifying myself stupid with The Shining and Pet Sematary that kept me going. Later, at university, members of the writers’ group I joined also had King novels sitting alongside more ‘worthy’ tomes on their bookshelves. It’s no different these days; I have a friend who proudly proclaims that she ‘owns everything Stephen King has ever written.’

                Stephen King novels fit into three broad categories: the good early ones (Carrie, It, The Shining etc), the dodgy, cocaine-fuelled ones (The Tommyknockers, Needful Things) and, er, the new ones. His recent record has been patchy yet sporadically brilliant. Attempts at straight horror compare poorly with the classics: Duma Key was boring and Cell idiotic. Yet 11.22.63 (a time travel adventure centred on the Kennedy assassination) demonstrated how he had matured as an author. So basically, his latest novel, Joyland, has a tossed coin’s chances of being a good ‘un.

                Joyland winds back the clock to 1973, which feels like King’s comfort zone; he always seems most comfortable writing about the old, industrial, blue collar America of his youth. Like the teenage King, the first-person narrator, Devin Jones, is an aspiring author and current student, taking various menial jobs to get himself through college. When an opportunity presents itself to spend the summer working at Joyland, a seaside amusement park, it appears preferable to canteen dishwashing as well as a good way to get over his obviously disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend. Devin arrives as a total outsider (‘greenie’) and must quickly integrate himself into the ways, lore and language of the ‘carnies’.

                Joyland is the kind of park which existed in the States before Disney et al managed to completely monopolise the amusement park business – a glorified travelling fairground with all the associated myth and folklore, complete with resident fortune teller. But King doesn’t play the ‘creepy, old fashioned fairground’ card to the extent you’d expect (or in the way he probably would have done earlier in his career). In fact, the only ghost is – unusually – not witnessed by the main character at all, and there are no nail-biting scenes of supernatural tension of the kind that got me hooked on King’s work as a teenager. So, if you’re expecting a horror yarn, this isn’t it.

                The mystery lurking beneath Joyland’s garish facade is the unsolved murder of a female guest in the darkness of the House of Horror ride. But I would argue that this, at least if you’re a seasoned crime fiction reader, won’t satisfy deep down either. Joyland may be published by pulp crime outfit Hard Case Crime, but no real clues are given to help the reader solve the mystery before the killer is revealed. It’s not just that the ability to do so is an integral part of the crime genre; it’s also that most murder mysteries don’t rely so heavily on a psychic child character to help solve the crime.

                OK, so Joyland doesn’t really make the mark as either a horror story or a crime thriller. But I would recommend it for other reasons. Characterisation is now honed to a fine point, a point which most of King’s contemporaries rarely achieve. Dialogue, too, is handled with King’s hallmark panache. Particularly enjoyable was the believable (although apparently mostly made-up) carnie patter and lore – you can immerse yourself in the details of the place. I usually find it difficult to give a damn about the characters in most horror or crime thrillers, but it’s an area in which King is adept at hitting the high notes. In that regard, I wouldn’t rate this as highly as deeply poignant previous works like Different Seasons, or the underrated Hearts In Atlantis, but King is at least keen to show us he still knows what he’s doing.

                Also to recommend it is its length, or lack of. It has to be said that King is prone on occasion to writing some hugely over-long novels (The Stand, anyone?) but this isn’t one of them. It’s straight and to the point, which books like this need to be. It’s a nice easy weekend read.

                As Garth Marenghi, the fictional horror author in the TV parody Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace boasts, ‘I’m one of the few authors who has written more books than most people have read.’ King has by now produced enough novels to fill the capacious trunk of a Plymouth Fury, and not all of them good. But at least Joyland, whilst not up there with the best, is a minor gem.

Zadie Smith - N-W

Published: 2012

THIS IS THE STORY OF A CITY, announces the blurb on the inner jacket of N-W. Right, before we get on to anything else, it isn’t, particularly. Yes, it makes a well-worn point about the interconnected yet isolated nature of life in a city. “Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.” N-W may be set in and around the eponymous north western area of London – Zadie Smith has, so far, refused to recognise the existence of life in Britain outside of the M25 – yet the story could be taking place virtually anywhere. For a novel named after its geographical setting, this seems odd.

                If this seems like a slightly petulant criticism, that’s because I’m still annoyed at what a disappointment this book turned out to be, from a writer who I (not to mention the Granta list people) hold in high regard. The first novel of hers I came across was the sharp-witted campus novel On Beauty (2008). But it was her debut that really impressed me. White Teeth (2000) is one of those novels that so vividly portrays the era in which it was written that it is almost representative of it. An uplifting, multi-faceted portrait of contemporary multicultural Britain at the turn of the 21^st Century. It also showcased how she was equally adept at getting into the head of a sixty-something white male character as she was with a young, black, female character – all the more impressive, in my eyes, that she only in her twenties when she wrote it.

                N-W is similar to White Teeth in some superficial ways, in the sense that, like that novel, it is made up of several, loosely interwoven stories following characters that have taken very different paths in life. But there the similarity ends. Where White Teeth was poignant and funny, N-W is just depressing. The blurb describes it as a tragi-comic novel, but I couldn’t find much amusement in it. The characters are all either poor and unhappy, rich and unhappy, or happy but doomed to be knifed to death in a pointless street attack (apologies for the spoiler, but like most things in this novel, it really doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on the story).

                So, we start off with Leah, whose husband wants children but she doesn’t, a conundrum she illicitly solves with the pill and abortions. She also gets taken advantage of by a door-to-door scam, and, it seems, in life generally. She seems like an interesting character, but after spending the first third of the book agonising about various issues and tempting us with a few interesting but un-followed-up storylines, her section is suddenly over and we join Felix: former alcoholic, jack-of-all-trades and current car mechanic.

                Felix grew up on the same estate as Leah (this is the common link throughout the book) and is a likeable, happy-go-lucky type. After some fairly aimless run-ins with his Rastafarian father and fallen aristrocratic mistress, time spent fucking in faded grandeur amid empty vodka bottles, he ends up getting on the wrong side of some local thugs and is knifed to death by some guys who say ‘blud’ a lot. Incidentally, this takes place on Leah’s street; this is the only other link between the two characters. It’s a pity, I was just starting to get to like Felix. It’s also a pity because he’s far more likeable than anyone else appearing in this book.

                Finally there’s Natalie, a black girl from the same estate who’s beaten the odds to become a rich, successful lawyer with a banker husband. Turns out she was childhood friends with Leah – they’re still in touch but now distant and resentful of each others’ existence. As an adult, she spends a lot of time agonising over her racial identity, as well as cheating on her husband with random strangers from an internet dating site for oblique reasons that are never really disclosed. In the end, of course, both Leah and Natalie’s dark secrets come to the attention of their respective partners, which is how Smith contrives to have both of them present at the book’s lukewarm climax, but by this point I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. Smith’s trademark, and usually enjoyable, unconventional literary devices  (not using speech marks, ending chapters mid sentence, etc) doesn’t help, either – here, it tips the balance from playfulness into pretentiousness.

                Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe N-W really is a profound, “quietly devastating novel “(that blurb again) that cuts to the core of the modern condition of city life. It’s an overwhelmingly bleak novel , I’ll give it that. But whilst White Teeth had, well, teeth, N-W is just toothless. Or maybe Zadie Smith novels adhere to the same pattern that sci-fi fans say Star Trek movies do: one good one followed by one bad one. Well, if that’s the case, as least things bode well for her next work.

George R R Martin - A Song of Ice & Fire

 

Reviewed by: Ian Richards

Unless you've spent the last two years patrolling a two hundred foot ice wall on the edge of a haunted forest, the chances are that you have at least heard of George R R Martin's fantasy magnum opus A Song of Ice & Fire, or its television adaptation Game of Thrones.  And I'll be honest: if you really do believe that you've spent the last two years patrolling a two hundred foot ice wall on the edge of a haunted forest, then it's only because you lost all grip on reality in those unforgettable opening moments of Martin's epic tale.

Since the premiere of the TV series in 2011, this saga of a brutal power struggle in the mythical land of Westeros has evolved from a cult hit to become a major cultural touchstone of the decade so far.  Until its popularity wanes, expect many a fancy dress party filled with Dothraki and Bloody Mummers, and maternity wards up and down the country to fill with little Tyrions, Aryas, Brans and Sansas.  But where has this sudden obsession sprung from?  Why are we investing such passion in the travails of fictional figures in a pseudo-medieval world?

Difficult to tell, really.  After all, the driving force of the plot is two irreconcilable forces vying for control of a kingdom.  On the one hand you have House Lannister: a bunch of obscenely wealthy arseholes, constantly hatching despicable plans to increase their own power, and indulging in all manner of sexual perversions behind closed doors.  Yes, that's right; the Lannisters are the Tory Party of Westeros.  In opposition to them are the quintessential Labour voters, House Stark: principally located in the North, clinging to outdated notions of honour and decency, and obsessed with the fact that winter is coming (after all, those fuel bills don't get any cheaper).  As if that wasn't enough, beyond the Wall in the cold northern wastes, hordes of people are determined to be independent from the rest of the kingdoms.

Yes, it's tremendously hard to see what relevance this story could possibly have for people in the UK in 2013.

Of course, there are other dimensions to the great game of thrones.  Up in the land beyond the Wall, the dead are coming back to life (those deep-fried Mars bars may put you in an early grave, but they evidently don't keep you there).  Meanwhile, across the sea, the last princess of the line that once ruled Westeros is making it her life's work to reclaim her family's crown from the Lannisters, the Starks, and the numerous other warring houses (and I for one dearly hope she stays well clear of fast cars and tunnels in Paris).  But though the multiple plot lines that snake through the novels may seem daunting, you experience them from the perspectives of a cast of characters whose own lives and fates are entwined in the wider events; crucially, they're characters you can't help but care about, whether it's because you want them safe or you want them dead.  Some of them are, quite literally, bastards.  Some are decent people trying to do what's right, and more often than not, they're the ones who are made to suffer in an absurdly cruel world.  A work of fantasy it may be, but under that veneer exists a very grim and timeless reality.

Of course, it won't be long before our politicians catch on to the phenomenon of A Song of Ice & Fire, and start making reference to it as part of their never-ending quest to appear cool and relevant to the rest of us.  To be honest, I'd welcome this; for instance, Ed Miliband's leadership of the Labour Party couldn't be any worse for taking some lessons from Eddard Stark, the noble lord of Winterfell.  In fact, the all-new Eddard Miliband may actually inspire some confidence in the nation, once he's grown a beard and started delivering all of his speeches in an irritable growl.  Plus, the policy of personally decapitating those who bring disgrace on the House will make for quite a sight outside party headquarters the next time Ed Balls accidentally tweets his own name.  (Of course, if Eddard Miliband should fail, we could always go to plan B and stick Sean Bean in charge of the Labour Party.  To be honest, I'm already struggling to work out why that isn't plan A.)

If you haven't already embarked on the visceral journey through Martin's world, either by way of the novels or the HBO adaptation, then I strongly urge you to give in to the hype and buckle yourself in for the ride.  As a nation, we have a long history of embracing tales of heroes and monsters, from Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins, and Ice & Fire continues that tradition in fine style.  Until our very own Daenerys Targaryen comes sweeping down from the sky to do something about the Starks and Lannisters in Parliament, have yourself an enjoyable month or two seeing it unfold a world away.

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

Published: 2005

The premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go poses a disturbing question to the reader: if you, or your partner or child, needed an organ transplant to live, to what extent would you be willing to turn a blind eye to where the replacement organ came from? In this alternative version of contemporary Britain, cloned humans have been raised for organ harvest for decades and – as we discover – most people choose to either remain wilfully ignorant of where the organs are coming from, or to deny humanity to cloned donors.

                The story follows Kathy, now thirty-one, from the age of about twelve. At first, Hailsham School, where the first part is set, appears to be an idyllic boarding school with a focus on creativity. Kathy develops friendships with volatile-tempered Tommy, and the manipulative Ruth. But from the outset, references to guardians, donors, and carers hint that something is not quite right. As the story progresses, the three central characters leave Hailsham and, in the wider world, discover more about their place in society and the grim fate of ‘completion’ that has always awaited them.

                The novel has two principal strengths. Firstly, the dystopian, sci-fi premise is intriguing. Unlike other dystopias, such as the ultra-conservative patriarchy in Margaret Atwood’s A Hand Maid’s Tale, it is not immediately obvious that anything is wrong in this reality; instead the awful truth is dripped in, little by little, and is made all the more shocking by the way that society is otherwise the same as the real world. But by the end of the novel I was left with too many unanswered questions about the details of how the underpinning concept works. For example, the clones seem to go willingly to their fate as donors, after spending a period acting as carers for those already donating. They are provided with cars and allowed to move around the country to perform their duties as carers, giving them a foretaste of their own destiny. So why wouldn’t they just run away? If they were indoctrinated against this, when and how was this achieved? That’s not all, but I’ll refrain from delving into more (as these would constitute spoilers). The premise felt frustratingly incomplete.

                This criticism may well be addressed by the author arguing that this isn’t a horror or sci-fi novel at all – it’s a coming of age story, and therefore the ins and outs of the system in which they live are incidental. This brings me to the book’s second, and most significant, strength. As a coming-of-age story it is crafted expertly, and it is particularly impressive how Ishiguro, a middle-aged man, is able to write convincingly in the first person as a young woman, and about the way teenage girls interact with each other. The manipulative, emotional bitchiness of Kathy’s best friend Ruth must be recognisable to anyone who remembers high school. Similarly Tommy is also treated cruelly by his peers, but in an inversion of what most people experience, he is great at sports but is tormented for not being ‘creative’. These interactions play out against the disquieting background of the characters discovering more about their futures, and is all the more poignant for it.

                I found the conclusion a bit of a let-down however, essentially because I always knew where the story was headed and how it would end – Ishiguro makes it evident almost from the outset that, whatever happens, things aren’t going to end well for his main characters. In the latter part of the book, there is a contrived ‘reveal’ about Hailsham and where the school fits in to the donation system, but this felt unsatisfying, in part because it was difficult to believe Kathy couldn’t have found this out through others, earlier in the story.

                I would recommend this novel for its interesting weaving together of drama, sci-fi, horror and coming-of-age elements, and for tackling troubling moral questions about ethics and medicine. Even if I can’t help the nagging feeling that Ishiguro (who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Never Let Me Go) could have fleshed it out a little better.

                As a final side note, Never Let Me Go was made into a film in 2010, with a screenplay by Alex Garland (best known for his novel The Beach, and the screenplay for 28 Days Later). I’ve not seen it yet, but the novel reminded me, in concept at least, of the (admittedly not very good) 2005 film The Island. It’s sort of like Never Let Me Go with more car crashes and explosions, but I can recommend it over this book in one plot aspect: the clones actually try to escape their fate, rather than just blundering towards the operating table as they inexplicably do in Ishiguro’s world.

Mark Steel - Mark Steel's In Town

Published: 2011

One Man’s Tour of Modern Britain

One of the things I remember from the beery haze of university fresher’s week was the one question we all asked each other in common. The three Ws: what’s your name, what course are you doing, and where do you come from? The memorable thing about this was, when directed at one of the American oversees students, they would happily tell you about their hometown with such genuine pride and affection that you wondered why they ever left. In contrast, almost everyone from elsewhere in the UK would respond: “Yeah, I’m from (wherever). What a shithole.”

                There’s a bit of this attitude in Mark Steel’s collection of essays based around visits to a diverse range of towns and cities across the UK, but it is easily trumped by the local pride and affinity amongst the people he meets, even when that pride is directed towards a concrete hippo in a shopping centre in Walsall. It’s based on his Radio Four show of the same name, which is recorded in venues such as church halls in the town in question, with an interactive audience of locals (hearing him goad West Cumbrians about ‘jam eaters’ was particularly amusing, for example). Obviously without the audience involvement, the format of the essays is slightly different, with more time for Steel to explore and reflect on different points.

                The towns he visits are suitably diverse: from the relatively touristy (Norwich, Edinburgh) to the formerly industrial (Wigan, Gateshead) to the extremely remote (Orkney, Portland) with a bit of suburbia thrown in too (Surrey, Kent). How much I enjoyed each essay seemed to correlate with the extent to which Steel enjoyed visiting the place, even if the enjoyment is gained less from the location and more from the ennui of the locals (‘there’s nothing to do except kick the seagulls’ as one resident said of Dumfries). Elsewhere, any wit seems to be tempered by the fact that he clearly wasn’t comfortable there. In Andersonstown, the ‘troubles’ are still too close to the surface for comfort; whilst he finds Yorkshire, with its famously tactless and straight-talking inhabitants, “complex and contradictory.”

                Some places which I have lived close to and spent time in appear, such as Birmingham. “I’m not sure why Birmingham is so disliked, but it is” he begins. I could certainly identify with its impenetrably confusing road network – I’m not the only one, apparently, who has attempted to navigate my way around it and experienced the disturbing, unique to Birmingham experience of seeing the building I’m aiming for from the car, with no idea how to actually get to it from the elevated motorway. From above, Birmingham looks something like “a Scalectrix course after the dog’s sat on it”, and I’m sure he must be right. This – along with the mish-mash of half-baked planning fads that have given the city a dislocating, disjointed feel – may seem fairly self-evident. But unlike many other commentators, he also finds time to praise its sense of community and identity, which others insist don’t exist.

                At the other end of the scale, I still haven’t got any desire to actually visit the depressed former steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, but Steel’s take on it is more uplifting that you would imagine. Amid the derelict industries and endemic unemployment, Steel notes that the town “can’t just be a shithole, else everyone would have left.” He discovers a dominant attitude of determination to pull through bad times together, a kind of hardened jolliness, that is both affecting and uplifting.

                Despite the obvious similarities, In Town isn’t really some kind of Notes From A Small Island for the 21^st Century. This has more of an agenda about what’s wrong with – and right with – our country.  I particularly identify with the theme that unifies most of the essays: that despite corporate uniformity and the trend towards ‘clone towns’ with identikit high streets and chain pubs, these places still retain their own sense of identity, customs and quirks, almost in defiance to the onslaught of Tesco Metros and out of town shopping centres. But equally importantly, he argues, this IS a problem. Steel may be approaching this from an unashamedly left wing perspective, but you don’t have to be of this persuasion to agree that the increasing tendency of our town centres to look exactly alike is a bit depressing. After all, why would anyone (least of all the likes of Bill Bryson, or Lonely Planet et al) want to spend their time travelling around a country in which every town is almost exactly the same as the last one?

China Mieville - King Rat

Published: 1998

Remember the old folk legend, the Pied Piper of Hamelin? The ‘piper’ of the story has the ability to hypnotise and control the plague of rats infesting the town, impelling the rodents to drown themselves en masse. He doesn’t remain a benign, helpful figure for long though - when the ungrateful townspeople refuse to cough up the agreed fee, it isn’t long before its Hamelin’s children he is leading away to their fate, as transfixed by his music as the unfortunate rodents before them.

                Mieville’s King Rat re-imagines this old tale, relocating it to contemporary London. The sinister Piper, suitably updated, already provides an excellent supernatural villain, with his flute-playing ability to command and control not only rats, but other animals and people as well. Mieville is by far from the first to take a folk legend or fairy tale and use it as base material for contemporary fiction – the likes of Terry Pratchett and Jasper Forde spring to mind, albeit using the tales for comedic purposes in their cases. More recently, in film and television, ‘dark’ adaptions of the Grimms’ fairy tales and so on are very much in vogue. But far from being a simple re-telling, there are many other forces at work in King Rat.

                Returning home to his dad’s flat in Willesden after a camping trip, protagonist Saul Garamond’s problems do not seem that remarkable: disaffection with life in general; emotional distance from his father. Until the next morning, when he is woken up by the police, accused of the murder of his father, who has been thrown unceremoniously from the flat window during the night. On his first night in the police cell, Saul is broken out by a strange benefactor – a rubbish-stinking, cockney-talking man calling himself King Rat. He may look like a man, but King Rat is just that – a rat. The disgraced King of the Rats, snubbed and detested by his rodent subjects ever since unwittingly leading them to mass murder in Hamelin, hundreds of years before. Saul, King Rat explains, is actually half rat himself, and King Rat wants to take him under his wing and teach him how to live like one, for his own suspiciously oblique reasons. Initially, as he learns to live out of dustbins and run about in the sewers, we are as disgusted as Saul himself. But he can’t deny his true animal nature for long.

                Meanwhile, Saul’s friend Natasha is distracted from worrying about Saul’s recent arrest and subsequent disappearance by her music. She’s a Drum and Bass DJ who has recently added an unlikely new element to her music – a flute, played by the weird yet oddly beguiling Pete, who appeared outside of her flat as if from nowhere. It doesn’t take long for the reader to put two and two together, and work out the true identity of the mysterious flautist. Together, Natasha and Pete begin to prepare a special track for the club night that provides the setting for the novel’s climax: Junglist Massive.

                King Rat contains a number of elements, then: part supernatural thriller, part police procedural, part fable. Mieville handles all of them with imagination and panache, weaving elements of gothic horror and youth subculture into the mix (even if the latter does date it slightly; ‘Junglist Massive’ sounds very ‘nineties now). It’s difficult to say what genre this best fits into, although it has been described in some reviews as ‘Urban Fantasy’.

                I have previously enjoyed some of Mieville’s later works - the fantasy steampunk novels Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Both of these were highly engaging and demonstrated the fertility of the author’s imagination, with their fantastic imagined realms and characters, proving right those reviewers who said of King Rat that it marked out Mieville as an author to be watched. However, in some aspects King Rat is a very different, well, animal. For all its dark confidence, the characters in King Rat, being essentially archetypes in a fable, do not have anything like the depth of the characters in his subsequent novels. Saul is the only one we get any significant insight into, and even that consists largely of the aforementioned teenage existential ennui and difficulty in relating to his father. On the other hand, it certainly avoids the tendency for over-writing that sometimes bogs down Perdido Street Station, for example – that isn’t a luxury that a debut author gets. That isn’t to say the description used here is lacking, though: it is just tighter, more disciplined. His conceptualisation of that other, parallel London, lurking in the back-alleys and dead spaces behind the city's peopled facade is a strong point.

                I would recommend King Rat if you’re looking for a contemporary fantasy novel that brings a bit of gothic fantasy into a familiar setting. I suppose a novel which involves sentient animals can never be taken that seriously, but I guess ‘urban fantasy’ is still fantasy at the end of the day. Jungle music provides the sound track to the story but, thankfully, you aren’t required to understand or even like drum and bass to enjoy it (I know I sure don’t). This recommendation does come with a minor, final note of caution however: if you are in any way squeamish about rats, this one is probably best left alone.

David Mark - Dark Winter

Published: 2012

You expect a cliché or two when reading a detective novel. The blurb for David Mark’s debut, Dark Winter, tells us that the main character, Detective Sergeant McAvoy, is “a man with a troubled past... his unwavering belief in truth and justice has made him an outsider in the police force he serves” (seriously, it really does). So, turning back to a genre I haven’t indulged in for years, I was expecting some inevitable, yet comfortingly familiar clichés. And yes, there are a few of them in this book, but in some ways the character of DS McAvoy isn’t one of them. Entering an already crowded marketplace, Mark has at least brought a few new elements to the table.

                There’s an established archetype for the protagonist in a modern-day detective story these days: the grizzled, bitter maverick. Morally complex, he puts all his energy and time into being a workaholic to distract from a troubled past or non-existent private life. In DS McAvoy, then, David Mark provides us with a new breed of detective. He has a loving, happy marriage and a young child; he doesn’t drink, smoke or have any other vices (apart from the occasional guilt-wracked pop and chocolate binge on a park bench); he may work for the Serious and Organised Crime division, but is apparently happier designing new computer matrixes than doing the dirty work catching criminals. Keeping his head down. Or so it seems at first.

                Hull - Mark’s adopted hometown – is the setting for this crime thriller. It isn’t the first place I’d expect a story like this to be set, but it is every bit as gritty as Rebus’s Edinburgh. Hull is “a people in decline, a city on its arse”, a place where our current economic woes are merely the latest bad news in thirty years of misery. Images of decline pervade the novel: down-at-heel drinking holes on otherwise boarded up streets; council estates abandoned save for a few final residents. The sense of place Mark creates is one of its strengths.

                The depressing locale is the least of DS McAvoy’s problems. He has made some enemies in the police force in recent years, having exposed the wrongdoings of a corrupt but popular senior officer, and now the force is deeply divided. Then, in the run-up to Christmas, a teenage girl is brutally stabbed to death in a church in a manner strangely reminiscent of a death she escaped years earlier, as a child in war-torn Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, a retired trawlerman is found dead in a lifeboat, apparently having pitched himself over the side of a container ship, in the same stretch of water where, back in the ‘sixties, he was the sole survivor of a sunken fishing boat. McAvoy is the only one who can see a connection between the two: someone is doing away with people who appear to have cheated death – and, with the rest of the force dithering around hopelessly, there are going to be more murders before Christmas Eve rolls around.

                It must be said there are some evident flaws in this book – some readers (not me, I have to admit) solved the question of the killer’s identity from his first incongruous appearance. There’s a few dubious plot elements as well: a scene in which the killer escapes from a freight container on a ship, having shut himself in with a cutting torch prior to the voyage seems a little farfetched, I’d imagine those things are so tightly packed in that this would be practically impossible (not to mention subsequently returning unnoticed from Iceland, dressed entirely in black). For me, another downside (perhaps thanks to the likes of Mr Rankin) was that McAvoy is just too nice, too goody-goody and pious, to be that engaging a character. Despite these criticisms, I have to say it was a real page turner – I burned through it in about a day. And it is his first book, too – it will be interesting to see how his style matures in future works (he has already announced that Dark Winter is the first in a series).

                The detective / murder mystery genre remains popular for any number of reasons. David Mark, a former crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post, probably understands these better than most: amid the mindless horror of real crime reports, fiction gives a reassuring sense of purpose and motive of the killer – i.e. if we can understand the perpetrator’s motivation, their philosophy, they can be stopped. As a journalist, you can imagine that he must at some point have wished real life fitted together that neatly.

Iain Banks - Stonemouth

Published: 2012

Let’s get one thing out of the way straight off the bat – I’m a massive fan of this guy. And by massive, I mean annoyingly-evangelical-whilst-drunk, I-wish-I-could-be-just-like-him massive. If I ever actually meet him, there’s a fair chance that I would swoon and pass out, in much the way that women are once popularly supposed to have done in stressful situations. That said, the hugest fans can often be the harshest critics, exacting unreasonable levels of expectation on the objects of their admiration. As Shakespeare’s play-writing career matured, he was in all probability dogged by a cynical portion of his fan base, muttering things like ‘hmm, this Othello thing, it’s alright I suppose, but it’s no Titus Andronicus’.

                Anyway, the eagerness with which I first sat down with Banks’s latest novel, Stonemouth, was tempered by the knowledge that he hasn’t always been up to the mark of late, with the warmed over Crow Road re-hash, The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), and the deeply disappointing Transition (2009). With thirteen 'literary' novels under his belt (as well as his sci-fi works, published as Iain M. Banks) I was beginning to worry that the star of the man once described as the most imaginative author of his generation was on the wane. Ominously, Stonemouth was also supposed to cover some familiar themes (young male protagonist, family-based intrigue, provincial Scottish life) which invites comparisons with his best loved works such as The Crow Road. I needn’t have worried: this time, the prolific Scotsman has produced an energetic, tightly-written, engaging story that plays on his strengths without being derivative of what has gone before.

                Twenty-something Stewart Gilmour is returning to his hometown, the remote and parochial Scottish port of Stonemouth, with well-warranted reluctance. The book opens with his arrival into town, in typically grim weather on a landmark suspension bridge. The bridge is notorious locally for its irresistibility to suicides, possibly helped on their way by the forces of Stonemouth’s crime barons, the Murston family. For Stewart, this is his first time back home in five years, and it’s clear that Stonemouth holds little for him other than perpetual mist (‘haar’), inexpensive recreational drugs and one or two old friends. And enemies – it’s the Murston family who were responsible for his exile in the first place. It is for the funeral of the Murston patriarch, Joe, that Stewart is home – and that is only under special and temporary dispensation from the powers that be.

                The novel is set over the course of one weekend, during which we discover the events leading up to Stewart having to skip town in the first place via a series of reunions with old friends, as well as encounters of the less friendly variety. It turns out he was formerly engaged to the daughter of the Murston family – evidently not the best people to get on the wrong side of, which he has managed via an ill-advised indiscretion (yes, that sort). Along the way we encounter a selection of endearing, amusing, and threatening characters (a confrontation in a pool hall is particularly tense and plausible).

                Banks’s politics are less evident here than in some of his other novels, but this is not necessarily a bad thing (using his main character to channel his opinions on American foreign policy in The Steep Approach, much as I may agree with them, was a distraction for example). And there is at least a genuinely satisfying aphorism offered up by the late Joe Murston on the nature of left and right wing folk towards the end.

                Speaking of which, a mostly rewarding conclusion is reached, even if some loose ends are left frustratingly untied, like the untimely (and deeply suspicious) death of Callum, one of the younger of the Murston clan, as well as some details regarding the events of Stewart’s own downfall.

                Whilst neither as expansive or as imaginative as the multifaceted rambling family saga of Banks’ most enduring novel, The Crow Road, Stonemouth does bear many of the most enjoyable hallmarks of this author, from genuinely traumatic teenage memories, to humour, intrigue and pathos, as well as a genuine feeling that the central character has changed along the way. With all of this going for it, Stonemouth is, to coin a phrase,  the most, well, ‘Banksian’ of recent Banks novels.