February Links Round-Up

Hello my freaky darlings.

Yes, I know, it's the middle of March. I have been neglecting this blog. I plead manuscript revisions and also a new job. I am currently trying to read through my new employer's entire frontlist, a terrible and arduous task that is causing me much pain.

I'm kidding. It's wonderful.

Anyway, here is the (short) list of the things I wrote in February.

For The Bookbag, I reviewed:

- The Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor. An excellent, very creepy and very different take on the American Revolution. If you like Taylor, you'll love this.

For Litro, I reviewed:

- Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer. Really truly awesome crime novel. One of the best things I've read all year.

- Fanny and Stella by Neil MacKenna. I've seen a lot of reviewers who've loved this, but it left me lukewarm and a bit annoyed. A wonderful true story that could be told a lot better.

So, there you have it! That was the month that was. Onwards!

February Reading

The manuscript revision, as Poirot would say, marches. It marches fairly well. And when it does not march so well, I am getting a wonderful opportunity to learn the art of absolute Zen-like acceptance and calm in the face of metaphorical lions and tigers and bears.

Nothing matters! It's all fine! In fact, it's GREAT. An entire subplot has to be cut? Great! The last third of the book does not make sense any more? Great! The title may have to be changed? GREAT! I cry. WONDERFUL! YES! BRILLIANT!

(No, really, it is all wonderful, and it will all be fine.)

Anyway, I have another very good piece of news to share with you all. Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I finally have a job! As of last week, I work in the magical emporium of words that is Orion Books. I now spend all day working on other people's books and then come home and write my own. Basically, my inner twelve-year-old thinks I am THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE.

I should, however, probably make some disclaimers before I carry on: despite what happens in my professional life, this is still very much my personal blog. Nothing in it has anything to do with the official opinion of Orion and the Hachette Group at large. Likewise, anything I may previously have said about an Orion or Hachette title is my own view of it, and springs from my crabbed soul alone.

Luckily the titles I'm reviewing today are nothing to do with Orion at all. So, with a clear conscience, I will now have at my February book list.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Alas. Rarely have I ever read a book that I appreciated so much in the abstract but which bored me so heavily in practice. The writing in Moon Tiger is hauntingly lovely, its premise clever (the whole stretch of history viewed as it relates relation to the life of one woman, the tempestuous Claudia) and that premise well-executed. And yet, it had all the emotional effect on me of a lukewarm glass of milk.

Have I gotten too used to books with punchy, linear plots? Probably. I kept longing for stuff to blow up already - and then realising that the whole book was about the horrors of World War II and feeling crass.

I don't know what happened. There's a dreamy underwater aspect to this book, and maybe I wasn't in the mood for dreaminess. Objectively, I have to say that this was a beautiful book. Subjectively, it took me two weeks to get through its 200 pages and I resent it utterly as a result.

3 stars.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

In terms of actual technical accomplishment, this is far inferior to Moon Tiger. Subjectively, though? I enjoyed it a whole lot more.

Also (oddly enough) about the horrors of World War II, Code Name Verity is written as the account of a British spy who has been captured by the Nazis during her very first mission to occupied France. Verity (not her real name) has been ordered to write down everything she knows about British intelligence in exchange for her comfort in prison, but what she actually writes is a sort of third-person love-letter to Maddie, the girl who piloted her into France.

This is being marketed as YA, mainly because the two main characters are quite young. I'm not sure it should be. I get the feeling that someone said to Elizabeth Wein, "This is great, but because this is now for teens you need to make it LIGHTER! We need to LAUGH!" This is the only explanation I can find for the frankly weird tone of parts of the novel. The bits where Verity is recounting the story of her friendship with Maddie is both sweet and perfectly convincing, but around those we get passages about Verity's treatment in prison which can best be described as 'I've been captured by the Gestapo! LOL!'

This is horribly offputting, not to mention extremely unlikely, and although in later parts its inclusion does begin to make more sense, Verity would have been a markedly better book without it. I think Wien became a bit of a victim of her own admittedly good plot idea (I don't want to give anything away, but if you've read it you'll know what I mean). I see why Verity's story is the shape it is, but all the same the editor in me sat up and said, I want to cut ALL OF THIS PART.

Basically, this was an intensely mixed bag of a text. I loved parts of it, I disliked other parts. But overall I enjoyed myself, and that counts for something.

4 stars.


Armadale by Wilkie Collins

I have nothing to say about this book other than YES. I've registered my love for Wilkie Collins on this blog before. For me he's Dickens sans draggy social conscience and plus a lot of extra murder and bigamy and pirates. Basically, he's Dickens BUT BETTER.

This highly ridiculous, hugely fun novel is entirely based on the premise that everyone in it is called Allan Armadale. OK, I'm slightly exaggerating, but not much. There were two men called Allan Armadale who hated each other and swore an eternal feud, and then they both had sons, and they both got called Allan Armadale, and now they're meant to carry on the eternal feud - EXCEPT - they meet unexpectedly and become Best Friends. Are Allan and Allan fated to do ill to each other? Can their loyalty to Allans peres overcome their loyalty to each other? And what will happen when they both fall in love with the same (evil) lady?

Cue idiocy and fabulously manufactured mayhem. In a Wilkie Collins novel, six impossible things happen before breakfast in every single chapter, but he's so good at creating plot twists that you don't even notice how brain-achingly stupid all of them really are. Yes, all his heroic characters are sappy fools. Yes, his villainous characters are so evil that they might as well come with fangs and a pointy tail attached. But his stories are AWESOME.

As a side-note, Armadale gave me additional joy when I realised that wicked quack make-up artist Mrs Oldershaw is a fantastic caricature of real-life quack make-up artist Madame Rachel, subject of a biography I read last year. I love it when books connect. Anyway, Armadale was daft but great, a rollicking souped-up sensational yarn where everyone runs about crying and screaming and having prophetic visions. My favourite.

4 stars.

Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

I cherish a deep and abiding love for the romance novels of Meg Cabot. Their protagonists are delightfully sweet, if very dim (I can't tell if Cabot does this ironically or not. I have the bad feeling that she does not, but I am not going to pry into it in case I confirm my suspicions), and they all fall in love with lawyer prince vineyard owners and live happily ever after. I cannot even tell you how many times I have read the Queen of Babble trilogy (hint: many). They are so soothing and lovely, like mental ice-cream, and sometimes we all just need some mental ice-cream in our reading. So me going on holiday last week was the perfect excuse to buy one of the Meg Cabots I hadn't already read, the first in her series of gentle-murder-mysteries-that-are-secretly-romance-novels.

Heather Wells is a washed-up teenybop sensation (with weight issues) who's been forced to take a job as deputy building manager for a New York University hall of residence. When a girl falls to her death down one of the elevator shafts, Heather is the only one who suspects that it might not actually be an accident. Can she find the murderer?

Can she heck. Heather does eventually solve the murder (it's pretty easy), but throughout the book she is waaay more interested in getting into the pants of her preternaturally attractive and super-rich (of course) private detective roommate Cooper. Sure, this is a romance-thinly-disguised-as-a-murder-mystery, but REALLY I think that someone investigating a murder would not spend 95% of her waking life wondering whether or not a boy liiiiikes her. Jeeze, Heather. He likes you. Now go work out who is pushing girls down lift shafts.

I think that maybe pairing a romance with a murder mystery is a less good idea than it seemed a first. I like Meg Cabot romance novels. I like murder mysteries. And yet I sensed many flaws in this particular marriage of the two genres.

2.5 stars.

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

I reviewed Belinda Bauer's latest crime novel, Rubbernecker, for Litro last week and LOVED it. If I had been handing out stars, it would have been a 4.5 grading to 5. So obviously I had to buy her first book to make sure she was that good all the way through.

And she is. Blacklands is the story of 11-year-old Stephen Lamb, whose uncle Billy was the victim of a high-profile white-van paedophile called Arnold Avery. Billy never came home, and never grew up, and his loss (his body has never been recovered, although Avery has admitted to his abduction) has devastated the lives of Stephen's mum and grandma. Neither of them have time for Stephen, and so Stephen hits on a plan to bring the family back together - he's going to go out on Exmoor and find Uncle Billy's body. When his search does not seem to be coming up with the hoped-for results, he tries a new tactic: contacting Avery in prison to ask where Billy can be found. But it turns out that Avery is more interested in Stephen himself...

This is an incredibly terrifying and ballsy premise, and it gets even more shocking from there. About a third of the book is written from Avery's perspective, a man who's Humbert Humbert crossed with one of Terry Pratchett's grinning psychopaths. Bauer writes a chillingly logical justification of his actions that feels disgustingly likely. He's a realistically evil character, just as Stephen (almost more impressively) is an absolutely realistic 11-year-old boy. It's rare to read a book not for children that bothers with getting its child characters right, but Bauer's really done it here. I loved Stephen and I was completely gripped and freaked out by his story. I think Belinda Bauer's my new crime writing hero.

4.5 stars.

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Last week, while I was reading this, I tried to explain it to my boyfriend by saying, "I'm reading a book about a serial killer."

"You're always reading a book about a serial killer," he replied, at which point I realised that he was completely right and felt terrible about it. The only vague justification of my reading habits I can give is that they're not all this gruesomely harrowing. I actually, er, prefer the funny ones. Or is that a worse admission?

Anyway, Kevin is all about a truly horrible high-school shooting. It's written from the perspective of the mother of the perpetrator, as she tries to come to terms with what her son has done and her own culpability for his actions. A lot of it is startlingly, unpleasantly realistic, and Shriver has done an excellent (maybe too excellent) job of bringing Eva's fear and distress and guilt to life. Likewise, Eva's marriage to the dopey but well-meaning Franklin is similarly well imagined - Shriver is a really good and very meticulous writer.

What I honestly just could not buy, though, was Kevin himself. We're meant to understand Eva as a flawed narrator, but even so I just could not believe for a second that even a version of her slit-eyed snakelike Son of Satan could ever possibly exist. In her mind, he literally is Rosemary's baby but without the little horns and cloven hooves. The rest of Shriver's world is so banal, so full of things that are just OK (and only if you squint) that Kevin the Evil Genius doesn't seem to fit into it.

I read about - and write about - murder because I don't understand why anyone could commit atrocities, and I think Shriver's asking the same questions here. I don't really agree with her answers, and I think that's because what interests (and terrifies me) is the idea of sliding scale between not-killer and killer, the connections between a good, moral, kind person and someone who eats babies. Yes, Shriver does try to show similarities between Eva and her son, but Kevin's so soaked through with cartoon villain evil that it doesn't really work.

That's not to say I wasn't heavily upset by Kevin. It's a harrowing read, and one that I don't want to go through again. If you want to attempt it yourself, make sure you have someone on hand to give you a hug at the end of each chapter.

3.5 stars.

January Links Round-Up

As you may have noticed, we are now deep into February. My last few weeks have been panic busy, like the world's most boring and work-related horror movie. Now, though, I am at rest, and catching up on all the things I should have done... last week, or possibly earlier.

So, here's my January in review.

For The Bookbag, I reviewed:

- Into That Forest by Louis Nowra. Astonishingly beautiful. Honestly, I think this is an instant children's classic.
- Shadows of the Silver Screen by Christopher Edge. Smart and fun historical silliness for the 10-12s.
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Utterly mindblowing domestic thriller about the secrets in every marriage.

For Litro:

- I discussed my conversion to the Kindle.
- I interviewed Hanna Jameson, distressingly young and brilliant author of Something You Are.
- I reviewed the fantastic historical mystery A Treacherous Likeness by Lynn Shepherd (I know, this was published in February, but I did write it in January).

For this blog:

- I made my 2013 writing resolutions,
- I turned twenty-five, and
- I got an agent (yes! A real one!).

Not bad, all things considered.

Something's Gotta Give: Slimline Reviews

My edits have now arrived, proving once and for all that this agent thing is really real and not something I made up in an overexcited moment.

I am preparing myself for the great task ahead of me: wantonly destroying all the characters and scenes in the book that are lovely but completely pointless to my plot. This will obviously take some time, and time is something that seems to be in short supply in my life already.

Therefore, I am proposing a change to this blog's reviewing rules. I just can't do a full blog post on every novel I read any more (and was anyone reading them anyway, my grandmother excepted?), so from now on I'm going to be doing lists of snap reviews.

Like this!

Before the Fact by Francis Iles

Alas, this was a good idea, lamely executed. Iles (pen name of Anthony Berkeley, a slightly less ingenious contemporary of Agatha Christie) was interested in making up new ways to write crime novels. This one is set before the crime actually happens. You'd think that this would be a promising concept. A woman wakes up one day convinced that her husband wants to murder her. But is she right?

Well... yes. As is painfully evident from the first page, her husband is going to murder her. We have to trail painfully through years of their life together, until we get to the day when he actually kills her. Believe me, by that point you will be begging him to go ahead and do it.

There's a very interesting question buried in Iles's premise, about whether we can ever really know what kind of person we're spending our life with, but he does absolutely nothing interesting with it. Frankly, this is one of the most boring thrillers I've ever read.

 If you want a book that does run with that idea in an awesomely clever way, try Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (which I just happened to read for The Bookbag the week after I read this). It's amazing. This isn't.

2 stars.

The American Boy by Andrew Taylor

Now this one was good. A creepy historical murder mystery (it's Taylor, what else would you expect?) that's based on events during the childhood of Edgar Allen Poe, it's well imagined and satisfyingly well executed. It's got a nice, big, engrossing plot, full of mistaken identities, big chilly houses and lots of gloomy weather.

Taylor's novels aren't just mysteries, they're stories, and often quite involved ones - novels that happen to have murders in them, rather than novels about murder. The star of the show is always the setting, the (very accurately rendered) historical moment, and I thought that the world of The American Boy (Regency England) was particularly well imagined.

This is a book that you can get your teeth into, a blockbuster production that's good down to its smallest details. It's delightfully dark and twisty with just the right level of nastiness - basically, this is vintage Taylor. The sequel (prequel?) is out next month. Let me tell you, internet, I am excited.

4 stars.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Let me sell you this book in a single sentence: it's about a magical Victorian circus. A MAGICAL. VICTORIAN. CIRCUS. And not just any magical Victorian circus, either. It's pretty much the slickest, the most sideways and in all ways the best vision of the best possible circus you could ever imagine. Only it's better.

Morgenstern's cirque des reves assaults all your senses at once. Her writing makes you slaver over the burnt-caramel smell of popcorn, taste cinnamon pastries and light up your mind's eye with fire and fluttering ribbons. There's a circus tent that's a garden made entirely of ice, a tent where you climb up into a labyrinth in the clouds and one where you can smell stories.

The circus itself is the setting for an absolutely beautiful love story. The two main characters of The Night Circus are a boy and girl who have been brought up knowing that they have to fight a mysterious and fatal magical duel - except that when they actually meet, they realise that all they want to do is spend the rest of their lives together. Can they manage it? Or will the power of the circus, the setting for their great game, send events spinning out of their control? Morgenstern plays with time and place masterfully, messing with the lives of her wonderful characters in a way that's like watching an illusionist carry out a virtuoso magic trick.

When I finished this book, I physically missed it. I wandered tragically around my house hugging it to me and whispering, what do I do with my life? I loved The Night Circus heartbreakingly much. I can do nothing else but give it

5 stars.

Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher

I have been itching to get my hands on this one for a long time. A teenage girl writes a series letters to a convicted murderer on Death Row, confessing to a terrible crime that she's kept secret from everyone she knows.

I loved this idea from the moment I first heard about it (you know how I love terrible secret crimes), but, more importantly, on closer acquaintance the story stands up to its premise.

I think what Pitcher has done with her hook is exceptional. She doles out the suspense - what did Zoe do, and who did she do it to? - in perfectly pitched little sips. I was going completely mental trying to work out which of the two possible victims Zoe has actually killed, so much so that I read half of the book on the train to work, and the other half on the train on the way home. Was the actual moment of the crime a let-down? Slightly, but that's just because I was keyed up to such a pitch that I would have been disappointed with anything that wasn't as insane as what I had been picturing in my head.

Zoe is a wonderful narrator, though, so realistic and funny that the book's success doesn't rest on the reveal of her crime alone. She's a real presence, and her words bring her world to life. Cleverly on Pitcher's part, one of the book's most engaging and present characters never actually appears in the text or says a single word. Zoe's murderer, Stuart Harris, never replies to her letters (he can't, since Zoe writes from 'Fiction Drive' to keep her story secret), but nevertheless he becomes an incredibly important person in her life. Zoe has made up a totally romanticised concept of him, the magical persona she needs to listen to her and understand the awful things that she's done. Like the rest of Ketchup Clouds, it's a perfectly pitched little detail that will break your heart and make you feel absolutely complicit in even the worst of Zoe's actions.

4.5 stars.

Review battle: ladies of the night edition

The two books I'm reviewing today complimented each other in ways I didn't even fully realise they would until after I'd finished the second. The connection I was originally going for, ignorant of all but their blurbs, was prostitutes. The protagonist of the first, after all, is a very successful one, and the action of the second centres around a home for (supposedly) reformed ones. But while the wholly expected pleasure of the first is its unrepentant, unlikely, idiotic naughtiness, its absolute commitment to the propagation of the myth of the happy and gloriously rapacious prostitute, the unexpected joy of the second is how it takes that expectation and kicks it straight in the face.

So, step into the ring Fanny Hill and The Unpierced Heart.

Fanny Hill by John Cleland

This is a novel on my 1001 Books list, and one with a history as eventful as its contents. First published in 1748 while its author languished in debtor's prison, it's been in trouble with the censors ever since. It's got a long and proud tradition of being only available in underground, bootleg editions, and it wasn't until the 1970s that it was available to purchase in legal and unexpurgated form. Essentially, the courts decided that while it was obscene, they'd seen obscener, and that it's also a pretty well-written book whatever its content. And I'd have to agree.

Rest assured: this book is erotica. Of course it is. Approximately half of the words in it are descriptions of genitals, and most of the rest are lavish descriptions of how those genitals are used. But it's also a lot of really charming fun. Fanny herself is a lively, lovely heroine. She's sharp and determined, with a sexuality that's shown in a basically positive light, and her story is an engaging Bildungsroman with naughty bits. You want her to triumph over adversity and masculine wiles, and she does. Cleland's female protagonist isn't just languishing about like Clarissa (a character I hate so much that I swear to god I would set her on fire if I ever came across her in real life), she's getting up and taking control of her own fortunes. Yes, she's doing it by, er, having graphic sex with a lot of men, but this is a woman with ambitions and intelligence, who knows what she wants and gets it.

It's much clearer to me than it usually is why this book deserves a place on the 1001 list.  It's not just a good novel in and of itself, it's a foundational text for a genre which could be broadly defined as Books About Saucy Ladies of the Night, and which still sells today. The Crimson Petal and the White, Memoirs of a Geisha, Tipping the Velvet - they're all Fanny's progeny in one way or another.

Which brings me on to my next point. Yes, I enjoyed Fanny Hill. Yes, some bits of it are sexy. But others are much more problematic. A lot of episodes that are presented as happy fun sex times are, to put it baldly, rapes. Waking a woman up by having sex with her? That would be called rape. Grabbing a woman and forcing her to have sex with you? Yes, that's rape too. Sadly, many people in 2012 still struggle to understand what is rape and what is not (clue: rape is when you have sex with someone without their consent), so it's difficult not to conclude that Cleland, writing 250 years ago, was part of an anti-female culture so horrendous that he should get at least something of a pass. But acknowledging that doesn't make my discomfort with parts of Fanny Hill go away. A lot of this novel is sexploitation. Fanny and her female friends may be engaged in conning their johns out of some serious money, but they do it by allowing themselves to be abused and belittled in ways that are described for the express titillation of the reader.

So while reading Fanny Hill made me realise where a lot of the novels I love have come from, it also made me understand exactly what those more modern books are subverting. Tipping the Velvet, in particular, suddenly made about 100% more sense to me - while it essentially follows Fanny's main plot points (even down to some of the orgies), Waters makes her 'Fanny' a lesbian and gives her and the other characters back actual human emotions - like shame at being publically abused, or anger at being forced into prostitution. It was a huge aha! moment for me - I finally discovered what book Sarah Waters is mad at, and why she's justified in so being.

Actually, since Waters wrote an entire book pastiching Fanny Hill, I suspect she loves it even while she's being mad at it, which is pretty much how I feel myself. There's so much wrong with Fanny Hill's morality, and so many dumb contrivances in its plot, but all the same I also thought it was pretty great. And I'm not going to apologise for either emotion.

3.5 stars

The Unpierced Heart by Katy Darby

Katy, as well as being an author, happens to be my fellow Story Sunday editor over at Litro. When I first joined the team during my MA last year I told our boss Eric that I was writing an essay about Victorian women in public places and he said, "You should meet Katy. She's writing a book. It's about WHORES." "Horses?" I asked, bewildered. "WHORES!" said Eric. "WHOOOOORES."  And that was how I found out about Katy Darby.

Katy and I obviously have a lot of the same mind-furnishings. A pastiche sensation novel set in Victorian Oxford and written as a series of 'discovered' documents by linked narrators? It's like someone wrote the book I didn't know I wanted to read. After all, I grew up in the nerdy, donnish world of Oxford colleges (where the nineteenth century is still playing on repeat), and Wilkie Collins and friends were one of the best discoveries of my teenage years.

Sensation novels are so wonderfully plotted, so exciting (stuff happens! All the time!) and so much fun - but I've got to admit that most of their female characters are horrible. The blonde haired angel with the heart of a devil beating in her bosom, the mimsy little heroine so stupid she can barely spell her name and the smart lady too mannish to be loved are all tropes on constant repeat, and none of them (except maybe the smart woman) even vaguely resemble any real person I have ever met. But while there's nothing to be done with the output of long-dead authors, I'm damn sure (see above) that I want any modern takes on their genre to correct those errors. And Katy, I discovered to my joy about three quarters of the way through The Unpierced Heart, has answered my prayers.

Her anti-heroine Diana seems, at first meeting, to be a vapid, pornographic femme fatale through and through. She makes evil decisions for totally random reasons and ruins the lives of worthy men with callous abandon. First encountered by priggish frame narrator Edward Fraser when he is a Theology undergrad at Cambridge in the early 1880s, Diana's unfaithfulness has already destroyed two of her lovers. So when Fraser meets her again at Oxford, under a new name and with yet another one of his friends within her grasp, he determines to unmask her for the fiend she really is. Can he save his innocent friend, the pathologist Stephen Chapman, from falling prey to Diana's charms? Or will she triumph again?

That's the story that Darby is apparently telling. But, as the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that there's a whole lot more going on here. Without giving the (very satisfactory) twist away, it emerges that Diana has (gasp!) reasons for the things she does. She is actually... a human being! Thoughts go through her brain and emerge as ideas! It's a modern miracle.

Her settings and set-ups may be wholly sensation-novel conventional, but Darby has actually thought about what she's writing and the result is a very intelligent reimagining of all those thoughtless, worn-out sensation tropes. Fanny Hill temporarily seduced me into buying the myth of the willing prostitute, but The Unpierced Heart reminded me that, in reality, they inhabit a grim, dangerous and thankless world where a woman won't magically fall in love with the life she's been forced to lead. Diana comes to Oxford to run a halfway house for Jericho prostitutes (hence the title of the hardback edition of this book, The Whores' Asylum), and although most of said prostitutes are unrepentant, they are also wholly human. They're no better and no worse than the novel's men (and actually much better than its male villain), and that's as it should be. There are misunderstandings and stupid decisions on all sides, and the tricky plot rattles along under the steam of those confusions to produce a fast-paced and intriguing sensation narrative that's nevertheless a lot more emotionally real than the genre it's working from.

I honestly really liked this book. It's very clever, it's well written (with a good ear for the turns of phrase used by novelists from Darby's chosen period), it's set in one of my favourite eras and it's about one of my favourite places. Spot on, essentially. I may have liked Fanny Hill, but this descendant of hers is one that I both like and fully approve of.

4 stars.

New Year's Excitements and Writing Resolutions: 2013

Dear readers, welcome to 2013! In the words of my friend Alice, I've got a good feeling about this one.

Because it is January 1, I thought I'd ring in the new year by mentioning a few of the amazing new books that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on in the months ahead. Not mentioned, of course, are all the books I don't know that I'm going to fall in love with yet. I especially can't wait for those.

- In just TWO DAYS the whole world will finally have the chance to read Jack Wolf's debut The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones. I reviewed it for The Bookbag last year and was absolutely blown away by it. Get out there and buy this book! Unless you don't like the Gothic. In which case, there is no hope for you.

- In February, there's a new Andrew Taylor novel, The Scent of Death. It's Andrew Taylor. It's historical murder. What else do I even need to say?

- In March there's a new Fred Vargas, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. I am DANCING IN MY SEAT about this one. I am so excited. Her books are creepy and quirky and totally charming. And weird. Her last crime novel was about real vampires, for heavens' sake.

- In May the second in Stephen Gallagher's (that link is to his Q&A for Litro, he's great) series about Detective Sebastian Becker, The Bedlam Detective, comes out in the UK. I read the first one for The Bookbag (again) and loved it, so I can't wait for the next installment. I want it now.

- In June there's (finally!) a new Neil Gaiman novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I saw Gaiman speak last year, and he signed my copy of Stardust and I said thanks and cried a little bit out of sheer love. Basically, whatever this is about, I will read it.

I must be missing loads. What else is coming up? Please chip in.

And now, for something a bit more personal: my own literary resolutions for the year ahead. This year, I will achieve! Probably. Unless I don't. We shall see. Anyway...

- I will finish the book I am writing, edit it, edit it again and begin to query it. I will be rejected, and emerge refreshed.

- I will continue querying my crime novel like grim death until I get an agent for it.

- I will get at least 25% of the 1001 Books list read before the year is out. (I am currently at 20.78%, so this has to be achievable. It has to be.)

- I will not be a snob about the literary merit of any book unless I have actually read at least a part of it.

- I will write, something, every day. I will try to write fiction every day, but reviews also count.

- I will actually plan my books before I write them.

- When a scene gets boring, I will listen to Raymond Chandler and send a person bursting through the door with a gun. Indeed, I will remember that when I am bored by a scene my readers will be too.

- I will remember that I am not under a contractual obligation to put a dog into everything I write.

- Along the same lines, I will at least try to write something that does not in any way feature a murder. That said, when I do feature death...

- I shall not murder any prostitutes in anything I write. Those poor ladies of the night! What easy victims they make. But enough already. I will only kill rich people, preferably men.

- I will write more short stories. They are good for me and good to do.

- Sort of continuing on from that, I will enter more (also known as: any) literary competitions. Because it is no good writing things if I don't let anyone else see them.

- I will get a pet lion. No, wait. That one was a joke. I hear those things are expensive.


So, onwards! To 2013 proper. We can do this.

December links round-up

Dear readers, December has been a month to erase from the records. Let us acknowledge that it happened and move on to better things.


Reviews for The Bookbag:

Something You Are by Hanna Jameson. A really stunning crime debut by a writer who is only 22 (she's amazing, I hate her a bit). This is a great book, if firmly in my boyfriend's mother's 'stabby' category.

The Flowers of War by Geling Yan (trans. Nicky Harman). Heard of the Rape of Nanking? Yeah. This is about that. This book will significantly depress you, but you should read it anyway. Extremely subtle and elegant take on an unimaginably horrible event.


Articles for Litro:

I collated Litro's 2012 Books of the Year list. My pick, of course, was Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child.

Other than that, I have mainly been choosing other people's stories for our #StorySunday feature. Therefore I feel uniquely qualified to say that there are some really cracking ones and I absolutely recommend that you read through the whole backlist of them.


Possibly because of this influence, and also because it is Christmas, I also wrote my very own short(ish) story, 'The Worser Part', a creepy ghosty thing set in Edwardian Oxford. Yes, it is on this blog already, but here is another link to it anyway.


So, onwards! To 2013. I am hoping for great things from it. See you all then.

Review: Twelve Minutes to Midnight

I don't know if I mentioned this (maybe I did, once or twice. Or ten times. Or twenty. Are you sick of it yet?) but I interviewed Philip Pullman for Litro last week. I talked to him about fairy tales and storytelling and it was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me. I am still not over it. I may never be over it.

Before he got onto fairy tales, though, Pullman used to write pastiche Victorian teen fiction (possibly my favourite thing he's done - Sally Lockheart is my hero). And, in a total coincidence, pastiche Victorian children's fiction is the topic of my review for today.

I hope you all appreciated that segue.

Now, I like children's fiction. I would say that one day I want to write it, except that I already do. So I'll go with: one day I want to publish what I've written, and be poor and happy and probably live in a garret. Ambitions, eh?

Anyway, Christopher Edge's Twelve Minutes to Midnight is swag I picked up from a past internship at the lovely Nosy Crow. I chose it because its blurb promised Victorian penny dreadful magazines, and if there is one thing I love in this world, is it Victorian pulp fiction. I cannot tell you how happy I am that this seems to be a very popular topic at the moment - I've actually just reviewed what is probably Twelve Minutes to Midnight's grown-up brother, Stephen Gallagher's The Kingdom of Bones, and very good it was too. So I came to Twelve Minutes to Midnight with high expectations and a lot of prior form. Happily, the book did not disappoint.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight's plot (or rather, the basics of its plot, I could be here all day) is as follows: it's London, 1899, and at twelve minutes to midnight each night all of the inhabitants of Bedlam madhouse get up and start scribbling frantically on whatever surface they can find. What they write seems crazy to the Victorians who read it, but to anyone from 2012 it's immediately recognisable as events from the twentieth century - our past, but their future. What can it mean? How can it be stopped? And what does the MYSTERIOUS SPIDER LADY OF SOUTH KENSINGTON (yes, really) have to do with it all?

Promising premise, right?

Although much lighter on graphic sex, murder and mutilation than The Kingdom of Bones (for reasons that should be obvious), Twelve Minutes to Midnight goes big where it matters. Christopher Edge does not stint on his sensational plot twists. In 250 short pages he gives us insanity, mysterious death, crazy science, evil women in black capes, hallucinations, toothless crones, madhouses, H. G. Wells, terrifying futures and deadly African spiders. You know a book is going to go to good places when the villain's past history is described thusly:

Sir William died on the eve of her wedding to Lord Cambridge. Some say it was the shock of his passing that sent Lady Cambridge's mother into the arms of madness. But of course, Lady Cambridge has had her own tragedy to bear since then. The death of her husband, Lord Cambridge, on expedition to Africa - poisoned by the very spiders they had both gone there to study.

Now THAT is how to have a good time with a story.

The heroine of this marvellous piece of excess, Penny Treadwell, is, of course, totally ridiculous herself. She is a twelve year old Wunderkind who is secretly the UK's foremost writer of fiction, a crack detective, and a dab hand with scientific implements. Seriously. At one point an adult character remarks on her handiness with a pipette and Penelope (aged twelve) responds, "I've always been interested in science." I love this.

Penny (although at times her over-described beauty gets a bit dull) is a great children's heroine. She's the perfect mixture of exotic wish-fulfilment and tiresome reality. Every kid knows that they could be as effective as the adults around them given half the chance, and Penny is the embodiment of this. She uses the adults in her life like convenient glove-puppets to further her own amazingly cool and ruthless agenda. But despite all that, she's still a kid, and that means that she's still continuously being brought up short by officious grown-ups who tell her she can't go in there and she can't do that.

She circumvents them, of course, in ways that are intrepid and incredibly unlikely, and the plot gets insanely and delightfully daft, with one sensational twist every two pages. I did take slight issue with the fact that so many of said twists have something to do with spiders (for about two days after I finished Twelve Minutes to Midnight I kept imagining that there were things crawling all over me, which was not pleasant), but nevertheless I read the whole book in a state of great delight, shouting "YAY!" and making my poor boyfriend listen to long and exciting extracts from it.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight may not be as slick and super-sophisticated as the Sally Lockheart books, but it nevertheless holds its end up well. It's a hammer-punch of fun, and it comes from a writer who obviously knows his late-Victorian fiction. There are some especially fab cameos from Real Victorian Writers. So many books are doing this at the moment, and I am a sucker for it EVERY TIME, but I think in this case they work particularly well.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight is a mad, silly, wild ride. I enjoyed it greatly, and that's the mark of a good children's book: that it should delight anyone who reads it, no matter how much older they are than its apparent target audience.

A very satisfactory read.

3.5 stars.

November links round-up

Good evening, dear readers! Against all the odds, November has turned out to be a most excellent and most busy month. I have been unfaithful to this blog numerous times, and I feel I should probably do a big links roundup of my recent activities.

So here one is.

First, for Litro Magazine, I've written:

- about the present (and past) of British crime writing,

- about Russell Tovey, the Penny Dreadfuls and how writers are secretly mad scientists,

- and about Pat the Bunny, and why children's apps can be a very good thing.


And for The Bookbag, I've reviewed:

- Stranger Magic by Marina Warner (read this if you are an academic and also a geek).

- Wits and Wives by Kate Chisholm (read this if you are an academic and also a feminist).

- The Kingdom of Bones by Stephen Gallagher (read this if you like Victorian penny dreadfuls and also DEATH).

- The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf (read this if you like the eighteenth century, the Gothic and people cutting other people up).

Phew.

See you in December.

Dickenstown review: Girl in a Blue Dress

I don't know if you've heard, but I moved recently. I now live in Rochester, a town whose greatest claim to fame is that it was once touched by the heavenly hand of Charles Dickens. Our greengrocer's is called Pip's, the clothes shop opposite is Estella, there's an Indian restaurant called Two Cities and the real Satis House (aka Restoration House) is just off the High Street. Also, if you're on the way to the library you can stop off at Charles Dickens' writing shed, which for some reason is stitting in the garden of Eastgate House with bits of paint peeling off it.

Here, look I took a bad picture of it on my phone just for you. Sorry about the quality. Just imagine that Dickens is just about to emerge from it in a blaze of heavenly light and disclose the real ending of Edwin Drood. Also, please note that whereas for most writers a writing shed would mean just that, Dickens required a two-story writing chalet with applique lion on the front (you can't see the lion, but it is there). This seems like unneccessary literary bling to me. After all, how do you write on two floors at once?

Basically, around here, Dickens is the man. We even have Dickens World in the next town over, where I hear they have mechanical Miss Havishams bursting into flames every half hour. (I might have made that up).

I am not sure I am entirely comfortable with all this jazz. Yes, I once wept openly in the car over the ending of A Tale of Two Cities, but I have a funny feeling that in person the Great Man may not have been that great. Not only do I suspect that spending more than half an hour in his hyperactive, egotistical presence would have sent me crazy, but there's that whole leaving-his-wife-of-forty-years-for-a-teenage-actress thing, and also his weird penchant for hot dead teenage girls.

Kate Beaton's excellent take on the situation

No, I do not exaggerate. I have explained the hot dead girls here in an article I wrote for Litro a few months ago. Suffice it to say: think about how many hot teenage girls there are in Dickens novels. Think of how many of them subsequently die. Now think about how much hotter they are presented as being once they are dead angels in heaven. See what I mean?

Essentially, Dickens liked his women daft as brushes, dead as doornails and fifteen forever, and so his real, not-dead, not-teenaged wife seems to have had a fairly awful time of it. I stress seems. Since she never actually wrote anything about her life, we don't actually know, and this leaves a lot of room for people to speculate.

That's exactly what Gaynor Arnold has done in her Girl in a Blue Dress, a book about the neglected wife of a very thinly disguised Great Victorian Writer who, yes, kicked her out years ago to make way for his youthful actress broad. The novel opens on the day of Charles Dickens' Alfred Gibson's funeral, as his wife Catherine Dorothea reflects on her past life and tries to decide once and for all whether her husband was an out-and-out heel or whether he just behaved like one sometimes.

At first, all the evidence is on the former side. Arnold's Great Writer Gibson was a man with a manic need to be SUPER FUNNY AND INTERESTING 100% OF THE TIME, something presented as superficially charming but secretly extremely exhausting and annoying. But, of course, it's not all that simple. Over the next few weeks, as Dorothea reunites with her estranged children, meets the queen (note: this part was stupid) and hangs with her husband's mistress we hear the whole story of their life together, which turns out to have been somewhat good and somewhat bad - essentially, as standard and non-surprising as this book.

What I liked about Girl in a Blue Dress was that it didn't really try to turn Catherine/Dorothea into a lurking feminist superwoman. I recently read Lilian Nayder's biography of Catherine Dickens, and it was basically just Nayder desperately trying to reclaim her for the feminist cause on really tenuous (read: absolutely no) evidence. There were many, many women from history who lived fantastically interesting lives, and who deserve recognition, but just as most rich white men (despite all those advantages from running the world) still managed to be normal and boring, most women just existed, being nice and thoughtful and good but not necessarily doing anything that needs to be written about now.

In another time, those women might have been able to accomplish something awesome. If she had been alive today, Catherine Dickens might have been one of the world's great human beings. I don't know what she was capable of. But what she actually did with her life was pretty much a) stare at the wall and b) have babies. The strength of Arnold's novel is that she doesn't try to add random suffragist canvassing or a passionate fling with a sympathetic gentleman. She goes with the ordinary material she has, and in the process shows that small domestic activities can still make up a valid life, if not a totally satisfying one for the person living it.

Girl in a Blue Dress was never going to be a rip-roaring adventure book. This is partly because its subject matter's pretty staid, but more because Arnold's not a fine enough writer to make chatting about not doing anything seem gripping. But it's mumsily enjoyable, and probably fairly close to the emotional truth of what went on in the Dickens household. Yes, everyone in the novel has an irritating tendency to talk in dramatic capslock and quotation marks, and yes, it's all a bit cute at times, but on the whole this was both pleasant and admirably ideologically restrained.

2.5 stars.

Review - Constance

The wives of great men are boring.

At least, that's the opinion of Gertrude Stein in her book The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Allegedly by her wife-in-all-but-name Alice and apparently the story of  'the wives of geniuses I have sat with', it's actually a biography written by Stein, and what it's really about is the geniuses themselves, because those are the people readers actually find interesting. So says Stein, anyway.

Stein's enormous ego aside, she does actually have something of a point. While she's in one room, hanging out with Picasso and Matisse and working out Cubism and Modernism (as you do), Alice is next door with Fernande Picasso, talking about... hats. Unfortunately, I know where I'd rather be a fly on the wall.

But at the same time, it's not only the geniuses who deserve to have their stories told. History isn't just big men in little rooms, and as both a historically-interested person and a woman I like hearing about women who took the bad historical hand they were dealt and made something of themselves despite the restrictions they had to operate under. So while, sometimes, I think the feminist reclamation initiative is reaching slightly (as in the case of Catherine Dickens - I've written about her in my blog for Litro), I do think it's an incredibly important project, and one that can yield some awesome results. And so it is for Constance Wilde, wife of the more famous Oscar.

The lady un-vanishes

The more I read of Constance, the new biography by Franny Moyle, the more I felt like I not only approved of Constance, but actually liked her. Constance, as a person, was great. She was smart (she put herself down on the 1871 and 1881 censuses as a 'scholar'), she was funny (her letters are masterpieces of sass), she committed herself to everything she could (including the 'healthy' dress movement, several cults and the beginning of women's lib) and all in all she was supremely uninterested in sitting on her behind and doing nothing.

In her own time, she was actually almost as famous (or notorious) as Oscar himself. If Hello! magazine had been around, she would have featured in it every week in a new and completely mad outfit. A slightly reluctant but very visible public figure, she was also - which I did not know - a fairly well-known children's writer. She published quite a few fairy-tale-style short stories, and there's even new speculation that she might be the real author of 'The Selfish Giant'.

Constance was maybe a little whacky (witness the cults and her obsession with Spiritualism), and somewhat obtuse when it came to her husband's extramarital relationships, but I can imagine meeting her and finding that we genuinely had a lot to say to each other. (Contrast this to my imaginary meeting with Catherine Dickens, which would involve me saying "My, what a lot of children you have! Your husband is an awful man," and then the two of us staring at each other awkwardly until it was time to leave.)

A few months ago I read Richard Ellmann's tome of a Wilde biography (aptly entitled Wilde), and, exhaustive as it was, I couldn't help but feel that it missed something crucial. Wilde was an outrageous exhibitionist, mad, bad and fond of turning up places looking like a cello or a sunflower. Ellmann's book, though, manages to make him, and the life he led, seem boring. After Ellmann, I wanted a book that'd tell me the story of Oscar Wilde with as much shock and gossip as possible, and that's exactly what Constance does. Moyle's got a chatty, scandalous style that'll drive you mad if you want serious scholarship, but if you're looking to have fun with history you'll be delighted by it.

I think Moyle gets a good balance between showing Constance as an individual and talking about the experiences she shared with her husband. Constance, in Constance, isn't just a presence in the background, but neither is Oscar - and neither, interestingly, are their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. If Ellmann largely forgot the wife, he most certainly forgot the children - Cyril and Vyvyan are just walk-on blobs in Wilde. In Constance, though, we get to hear more of how they felt, and what, as children of such weird, brilliant parents, their lives were like, and the result is fascinating.

Not that Moyle doesn't have her faults. At times she's a fairly lazy writer - you get infuriating sentences like

It would be a cause that in the fullness of time Constance would espouse more fully and formally.

Where was her editor? Never mind that, where was her brain?

She certainly isn't a rigorous academic. I suspect that Constance herself could school her biographer on study skills. Moyle has a habit of randomly generalising for the sake of her plot, and even though it didn't bother me unduly I had occasional raised-eyebrow moments. But, as I said, this book is meant to be fun, a razzle-dazzle joyride through an interesting woman's interesting (and ultimately very sad) life, and it succeeds in being exactly that.

Moyle's close to being the perfect biographer for the Wildes. Naughty, funny and irreverent, she conveys their scandalous lives in delicious (if not exacting) style, and ultimately managed to convince me that Oscar and Constance really did, in their own strange ways, love each other. I know! I was surprised too. But that's the nice thing about Constance. It's telling you a story you know, but in an entirely different way, one that, as I've said before, definitely deserves to be told.

Wives of geniuses, despite what Gertrude Stein may think, can be very interesting indeed.

3 stars.

Review - The Man on Devil's Island

HOUSEKEEPING:

- The kind people at Writersdock have struck again, and this time they've done an interview with me. I'm immensely flattered, although I still think they may have gotten a little confused and actually meant me to interview them. Regardless, it's up on their site and you can read it here.

- I've done a review of the new NT production of She Stoops to Conquer over at Litro, and also blogged about why you ought to be able to bring up Terry Pratchett in a university seminar.

REVIEW:

I've been on a historical non-fiction kick recently, possibly because I want to read books that my English-lit-crit brain won't automatically start analysing for theme and word choice and Deeper Meaning, but also because I do love history. I once almost read History at university, before I realised that I was being influenced by my father coming into my room several times a day and saying YOU SHOULD READ HISTORY AT UNIVERSITY, whereas what I really enjoyed about history was that it was like literature, except with real people.

I've always loved stories, and the real stories that history spits out not only tend to be madder than most fiction but also give you opportunity to get fascinatingly intricate with the detail of what happened on the night of August the 7th. Obviously, my favourite sort of history is crime, but really, there's not much that doesn't interest me.

Certain bits of history, though, seem to come up again and again in my reading. One of those is the Dreyfus Affair. It just keeps on being mentioned in passing, as something very important, but not important enough to explain - there's a tiresome assumption with these sorts of things that the reader knows all about them already. So when I saw Ruth Harris's book, The Man on Devil's Island, I decided to lay my ignorance to rest and find out who Dreyfus was and what the hell happened to him.

Now, before we go any further, I'm going to explain as briefly as I can what did actually happen, not only because it's very interesting, but because even the Wikipedia article is horribly obtuse.

In 1894, the French government was about as paranoid as the American government is today. They'd begun their terrible run of losing every war they fought (one of the worst results of this was having to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans in 1871), and they saw enemies lurking about everywhere, ready to take more of their land. So when they discovered a letter in the German embassy proving that someone was spying for Germany, they went slightly insane. They needed a culprit, and after an extremely short and completely rubbish investigation they more or less settled on a random man, artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, because he was a bit stuck up and odd, and also (probably) because he was Jewish.

Dreyfus was swiftly convicted in military court on completely trumped-up and falsified evidence and packed off to a prison island, but while he was languishing people back home in France started noticing that he had been falsely charged, and a movement began to get him exonerated. About half of France (including Zola) were violently for Dreyfus, and the other half (including most of the military, who had been the big movers behind the original conviction) were violently against him. The whole thing brought up a lot of buried issues, like anti-semitism and national identity, and by the time the Dreyfusards managed to get a re-trial in 1899 it wasn't really about Alfred Dreyfus at all, but what he mystically represented.

Alfred was finally pardoned - although never actually exonerated, even though the actual culprit (a man called Esterhazy) was fairly open about having done it - in 1900. It was a fairly sad and inconclusive end, and no one (apart from Alfred) came out of it looking impressive at all.

And that's the very, very potted history of the Dreyfus Affair.

Annoyingly, in The Man on Devil's Island, Harris does seem to some extent to be afflicted by the assumption that her readers already know the story she's telling. Granted, what she's trying to do is less about explaining the linear story of events and more about tracing influences and movements among the people involved in the Affair, but I did still find myself wishing that she wouldn't jump about so much in the timeline. She'll start paragraphs by saying things like 'Although this was not relevant until the second trial...' when we hadn't TALKED about the second trial yet, and I had no idea there even WAS one - but despite this failing, she writes well, if in slightly dense prose, and she conveys the characters of the human beings involved in the drama with great (scholarly) panache.

And my goodness, were there a lot of human beings involved in the Affair. It seemed to me at times, bedazzled by the hail of names I was being subjected to, as though every person in France made some sort of contribution to proceedings. Not only did all the politicians, academics, writers, journalists, officers and lawyers get involved, but completely random people kept popping up to convey their thoughts and feelings on the matter. Over the course of the Affair, for example, Mrs Dreyfus got thousands and thousands of letters from total strangers who either hated her or were under the impression that they were already best friends because they'd read about her in the papers.

The Dreyfus Affair really did seem to have an extraordinary capacity for turning ordinary people into nutters, something that Harris conveys very well. When you hear about two factions arguing, you imagine something quite rarefied and mainly carried out in the correspondence pages of newspapers, but no - grown-up human beings from both sides got so angry about the Affair that they would actually go out into the streets and punch each other in the face. Literally. People got shot, they lost their jobs, they stopped talking to their families - if you want an English comparison, the nearest thing I can think of is the Civil War. It was that bad.

Not that many of the people in question weren't somewhat insane to begin with. The anti-Dreyfus crew boasted a man who wore mandrake root on a chain around his neck to ward off Jewish black magic, and the Dreyfusards had the scientist who first put forward (seriously, I might add) the existance of ectoplasm.

One of the best things about The Man on Devil's Island is how even-handed it manages to be. It's very easy - as Harris says - to think that Dreyfusard=liberal=GOOD, and anti-Dreyfusard=fascist=EVIL, but like all binaries it doesn't really bear looking into. Both sides had their share of anti-Semites, corrupt idiots and philanderers, and both sides did some pretty gross and shady things in the pursuit of what they thought was right.

Many people who joined the anti-Dreyfusard side just thought that it was the only way to protect their country and their society and to hold on to a unified French identity. They weren't really interested in the innocence or otherwise of a single insignificant man - and nor, before you think the other side was any better, were many of the Dreyfusards. They wanted a separation of Church and state and a reduction of the military's powers, and the Dreyfus Affair just turned into something  they hoped would help form a legal precident. When it began to look as though Dreyfus would lose his second trial, for example, his closest supporters seriously considered letting him die in custody, just to prove their point.

So everyone was an ass! That's the basic message of The Man on Devil's Island, anyway. Alfred Dreyfus got hung out to dry by his 'friends' as well as his enemies, and nothing much was accomplished apart from the airing of a lot of issues that keep coming back to bite the French, even to this day. Harris, interestingly, cites the recent ban on the wearing of headscarves as an example of a continuation of fears about the assimilation of different religions into French society that really began with Dreyfus.

It took me a long time to get through The Man on Devil's Island - as I said, it was dense (though I think, with the topic in question, it has to be) - but I'm glad I did. I'm still not convinced I entirely Get the Dreyfus Affair, but I understand a lot more about it, and about French society in general, than I did before, and that's always a good thing. Harris has a lot of interesting and well-argued thoughts about a very interesting case, and though I'm not sure if this is a good grounding in Dreyfus, it's certainly a good book.

3.5 stars.

Review - The Call of the Wild

Staring. Staring. STARING.

Today one of my seminar tutors was talking about war literature and said that Birdsong was a very bad book. I got so excited to discover a kindred spirit that I shouted "I KNOW, RIGHT?! I KNOW!" into his face. I think I alarmed him. It was worth it.

For the record, I watched the first 30 minutes of the BBC adaptation and then sunk under the sheer amount of fish-like gazing I was being subjected to. I will say it was better than its source material, but that's not difficult. (Yes, I am now firmly in the anti-Birdsong camp. It is a scourge upon this earth. Come at me.)

What was good, though - I think I may have mentioned this before - was the BBC's Sherlock. I've reviewed it - and talked about what makes a good adaptation - over at Litro, and I've also done a piece on why Culture should be for everyone (but Ulysses is very bad).

Now. I keep saying I won't review the books I read for my MA course. And then I read a set text and end up weeping covertly into an airplane window so the guy sitting next to me won't think I am mad or regretting my decision to commit an act of international terrorism (though considering this flight was going to Cork I'd have really been thinking outside the box, target-wise. Note: I am a law-abiding tender-hearted humanist. If any policemen are reading this, I'm joking, don't arrest me).

Anyway, my point is that some books are too good not to tell you about, and so it is with The Call of the Wild. 

The Call of the Wild is great in two very different ways. The first sixty pages (it's a tender morsel of a thing at just under 100 pages) make up one of the greatest wilderness novels I've ever read, simply because Jack London has realised something really crucial about wilderness novels: if your protagonist is a human man, it's never going to work out. Your guy can get busy hefting hacksaws and bringing down bison but ultimately he will feel the call of cooked food and toes that are not frostbitten, and he will go back to New York, or London, or wherever it is, and get hitched.

In fact, most wild men aren't really that wild at all. Robinson Crusoe looked at nature and saw a table, and from then on people in wilderness novels have approached the landscape in terms of the best setting for their new log cabin. But if at the centre of every man's heart is a large feather bed, in the heart of every dog lurks a wolf, ready to jump out and rip everything to shreds. Therefore, if you make your protagonist a large dog, and stick him in the middle of the snowy wastes, then shit, my friends, is going to go down and it's never going to stop.

The Call of the Wild is the story of Buck, a large dog (you see where I am going with this) who gets kidnapped from his cushy home in Southern California and shipped off to the Klondike goldrush to become a sled dog. Horribly mistreated and forced to fend for himself, his layers of good-doggishness get stripped away to reveal the neolithic badass wolf beneath. Buck goes wild, and then wilder, and it's all so incredibly hardcore that even reading it makes you feel awesome by association. By page 40 I  wanted to run straight up the nearest mountain and punch the sky in the face.

And then, just as I was powerfully psyched and ready to see Buck become king of the world, the novel changed pace and became one of the most beautiful human-dog relationships I've ever read. Buck is rescued from particularly wicked owners by the gentle woodsman John Thornton, and they fall instantly and madly in... love, I guess, that special sort of human-dog adoration that's almost better than anything you can get from another person.

This is something that has a huge capacity to affect me. I lost the canine love of my life two years ago and to a large degree I think I'm still in mourning for her. When she died it felt as though I'd lost a family member, and even now I have moments when I think of her and feel absolutely bereft, that I'm missing something I'll never get back again. So the bond between dog and human, if written well, has a great potential to make me cry. But I defy even you, dogless ones, not to feel a pang at the moment when John Thornton puts his entire life savings on the line over a bet that Buck can drag half a ton (because he thinks that Buck is the best dog there is and won't hear anyone say otherwise), and then Buck does it, on his own, out of sheer mad fidelity to his master.

Where it goes after that I won't say - but really, I just want to know where this book has been all my life. It's wonderful. Brutal and incredibly sweet by turns, it's got dogs, nature, Victorian adventure and most importantly DOGS, and I am absolutely writing my essay about it when the time comes.

And best of all, it's on the 1001 Books list.

4 stars.

Review - Mr Briggs' Hat

In Litro news, my first blog of the year is up there, a review of the recent BBC Great Expectations.Which I liked, although I think I was feeling a bit post-Christmas grim when I wrote it. Be warned. Also, Writersdock has very kindly reblogged my review of Birdsong, which is especially relevant right now since the BBC is about to air their remake of that, too. It may be good. The book was a turd.

Anyway. Today my review is non-fiction, and also crime, which is my favourite sort of non-fiction (this probably doesn't imply good things about me). Here goes.

There is a railway bridge that runs right in front of my window. It's one of those heavy red brick ones with arches and built-in storage units (incidentally, the owners of the unit closest to me may have found the entrance to Narnia, judging by the astonishing number and range of goods and people that go in and out of there every morning). Commuter trains rattle across it for 20 hours a day, pleasantly lit up and sounding vaguely like the washing machine. It's a very nice view. I get to stare at the trains as they pass, and presumably the people in the trains get to stare at me staring blankly at a computer screen and drinking coffee. Sometimes they also get to see me putting on my tights.

My point is, what with that and the Tube, trains make up a large part of my urban day. It's strange to think that once upon a time 150 years ago trains were still a deeply unnatural and quite frightening imposition on Londoners' lives. Even stranger, for those of us used to watching babies and drunkards weaving their way up and down between carriages, is that trains used to be the ultimate locked room scenario. Until the late nineteenth century there were no connecting doors between carriages, just side doors that got locked between stations. Once you were shut in, there was really no way out, and you just had to cross your fingers and mightily hope that you were not sharing your space with a mad axe murderer.

Unfortunately for senior bank clerk Mr Thomas Briggs, that was more or less what happened to him. Poor Briggs, the subject of Kate Colquhoun's book Mr Briggs' Hat, has gone down in history for being the man with the dubious honour of being the first person to be murdered on a train in Britain.

The facts in his case are briefly these:

Just after 10pm on the 9th July 1864, two men trying to board a train carriage at Hackney Wick station in London discovered it empty but slathered in blood. The alarm was raised, and subsequent investigations found Mr Briggs lying upside down on the track between Bow and Hackney Wick, in a coma from which he never recovered. A more thorough search of the carriage and Mr Briggs revealed that he was missing both his watch and his hat. A hat was found under the carriage's seats, but, crucially, it did not belong to Mr Briggs.

SHIFTY FOREIGNER

With the sort of blugeoning fit-the-peg-in-the-hole certainty familiar to those familiar with the police and/or the Victorians, the detectives on the case worked their way via hat and watch to a 24-year-old tailor named Franz Muller, who was German and thus seemed shifty. The only problem was that by the time they were ready to make their arrest, Mr Muller was already en route to America.

I won't give you the details of the rest of the story, which involves intrigue, complex watch- and hat-swapping scenarios, a brilliantly slow high-speed sea chase across two continents and a lot of confusion, but I will say that Kate Colquhoun is quite right to give her book the subtitle 'A Sensational Account'. It's one of those true stories so interesting that it ought to be fiction, and Colquhoun tells it sensationally (with all the 1860s connotations of the word) and at speed. There's a lot of high colour and general jollity, and though Colquhoun obviously has done her research on the era and the case, she doesn't smother the reader with needless superior knowledge (which I like, on the whole, although I do wish she'd found out about quotation marks - as a temporary academic I feel strongly that italics are not how we quote).

There's such a lot of atmosphere and local colour that it can get oppressive sometimes - cockneys hawking haddock, pea soupers, rough waves, sweltering Upper East Side days and so on - but if you shove all that fog out of the way there's an interesting and surprisingly informative account of Britain and America in the mid 1860s lurking beneath it. There's also a fairly interesting and twisty mystery. I was expecting an open and shut case, but the more I read, the more doubt began to worm its way into me. Could there be other explanations? Could Muller's alibi be true? I don't know, and now it's bothering my brain.

I do find it odd that, at the end, after managing to question so much of the evidence against Muller, Colquhoun doesn't come down firmly on one side or the other over the question of his guilt. I think she thinks he didn't do it, or that it was sort of an accident, but she doesn't say, and it left me feeling slightly at a loose end. Sensation fiction is supposed to end with certainty, damn it, and the small matter of this being fact shouldn't prevent a good bit of editorial wrapping-up.

What we do hear is that the Briggs case heralded a new era in train safety, in that it made people realise for the first time that train safety might be a good idea. It also (and I know this from my own crime obsession) was the crime that spawned a thousand books. You can see the shadow of Mr Briggs in countless train-carriage murder mysteries, in hordes of respectable white-haired murder victims, in foreign suspects and thrilling chases and objects that manage to silently tell the story of the crime.

Not, of course, that this would be much consolation to Mr Briggs, or, if he was innocent, to Mr Muller. But it's all very interesting to think about, and Kate Colquhoun's presentation of the Briggs case is also a lot more fun to read than Love and Mr Lewisham was. Enjoyable stuff.

3 stars.

Review - Birdsong

OK. Readers of the world. What has Sebastian Faulks done to you? What dark arts has he been employing? Because that is the only reason I can think of to explain Birdsong's inclusion on numerous Best Of booklists (including my very own 1001) and for the glowing, goggly-eyed review snippets that are plastered across my edition's back cover.

Honestly, what did he do to persuade an actual human being (and a literary critic, at that) to declare that 'This is literature at its very best'? Because, dear readers, this is not literature at its very best. This is a bad book.

Actually, I don't think the writing is particularly terrible. It's just lazy - a random firing of adjectives and adverbs that don't fit and don't make an awful lot of sense. Sebastian Faulks seems not to understand how to make language work for him. Words aren't just collections of letters, they mean something, they have connotations and nuances, but Faulks appears to have missed this important creative writing lesson. How else do you explain his description of a husband in the middle of arguing with his unfaithful wife as rejuvenated, or mentioning that someone bursting into a packed meeting hall to start a riot has candid eyes? Yes, candid means open, honest, but it also (at least for me) has overtones of calm and friendly. Which I don't think you get much of at a riot.

When I was reading I had huge difficulty getting any sort of mental image from the scenes at all, because all those wrong words kept bursting in and disrupting my thoughts. Possibly as a result of this I found it very difficult to connect with any of Faulks's characters. 504 pages of Birdsong later, I would be hard pressed to give you any sort of explanation of what sort of person the hero Stephen actually is. What is he like? Well, I suppose I could say that he's got dark hair, he's weirdly mature for his age, the war makes him angry - but those things don't add up to a character. He's just a human-shaped word blur. But if Stephen is a blank slate, don't even start me on his 'love-interest' Isabelle. Her hair is strawberry-chestnut coloured (really. Seriously. We get told this more than once) and, er, she has really great skin (also repeatedly described), but in terms of a personality she's just a big hole for Stephen to put his issues and his penis into. I've read better love stories in Hello!

As far as plot goes, it's supposed to be a sweeping and tragic account of World War I, an epic romance, a tale of one woman finding out who she really is, and so on. Love story, soldiers, suffering, you know the sort of thing. But whatever the plot is at a macro level, most actual scenes can be summarised as follows:

The room was quiet. They looked at each other. Emotions passed between them. They shared an experience, such as sex or a dramatic and unlikely conversation, described using many unsuitable adjectives. The structure around them creaked ominously, because all life ends in death. Outside, the birds were singing.

 Oh god, the birds. The birds are EVERYWHERE, fluttering and cheeping and being meaningful - except that they're inserted as a metaphor so often that they cease to have any particular meaning at all. I guess Faulks meant to make some point about freedom and natural life, but all it did to me was to make me really hate birds for a while. 

Actually, for a book that's all about emotion, I don't think I felt moved by it (in the ways I was obviously meant to) once. The characters either have the responses they ought to feel - which inevitably tend towards the melodramatic 'Alack, my love, the tragedy of our lives!' sort of thing - or they have bizarrely over-experienced, over-understood thoughts on the universe that, for me, ring equally false - because who ever heard of an Englishman saying, "I saw the void in your soul, and you saw mine?" No, when they want to convey that sort of deep love towards another human being they pause for a long time and then say something like, "Should be a nice day tomorrow." Now that's a conversation I could believe in.

I found Birdsong without suspense, without interest and without soul. The twists didn't suprise me, the story didn't carry me and the sex scenes just made me snigger on the Tube. Give the man a Bad Sex award by all means (he more than deserves it), but don't, for heaven's sake, read this book.

2.5 stars.

(My latest Litro blog, by the way, is getting into the Christmas spirit by singing the praises of books as gifts. This is not, in case you are wondering (or my family) a hint. I'm just, as you may have noticed, a fairly pro-book kind of person. Enjoy.)