Review: The Chrysalids

Look at this book, this book is amazing

Confession: I completely forgot I had even read this book. But then yesterday I was ill, and I realised that I absolutely had to read Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones.

Please note that I have read this book approximately 30 times before, as I have everything Diana Wynne Jones has ever written. She is one of the main reasons why, whenever I hear someone say that they are (or worse, tell off a child for being) 'too old' for a particular book, I want to set myself on fire. There is NO SUCH THING IN THIS UNIVERSE as being too old for a book. Sure, you can be too young for a book (consider American Psycho before you tell me this is not so), but you can never, ever, ever be too old to read a book that you love. If you think you are, then you have gone sadly wrong in life.

Hexwood is a classic tale about knights, dragons, intergalactic travel, robots and a contract killer with a heart of gold, and it could take most of the stuff that is sold as 'teen fiction' these days and grind it under its blood-red cyborg boot. In it, main character Ann has grown up with four imaginary friends constantly chatting away inside her head, but as the story unfolds she begins to realise that these people might not be imaginary after all. When she asks them to stop behaving as though they're real, they're each shocked, because she's the one who's not real - and of course it then emerges that all five of them are living human beings with a special mental connection.

Anyway, I read that part and suddenly remembered that I finally know (or at least can strongly guess) where Diana Wynne Jones got that particular idea from: I'd read something just like it two weeks ago in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.

Which is when I remembered that I'd read The Chrysalids. Oops. To be fair to me, I read it in two hours, on the train to London and then on the train back again, so I must have failed to register it as an event. But on the other hand (it's all coming back to me now) I loved it. I loved it more than anything else I've reviewed on here for months. During the two hours it took me to read it, I sent a series of over-excited capslocked texts to my boyfriend telling him that HE SHOULD READ THIS and EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS and THERE SHOULD BE TEN SEQUELS TO THIS. Also (and most relevantly to this post so far) that I HAD FOUND THE BOOK THAT THE X-MEN CAME FROM.

I know I get really over-excited about literary influence (please see: my dissertation topic; countless other tinhatty rants), and I also know that it is impossible to second-guess the referential workings of the human subconscious, but I really struggle to see how a book first published in 1955 about people whose genetic mutations give them superpowers but also make them reviled by non-mutant society could NOT influence the content of the X-Men comics (first published 1963). The main characters are telepaths (they are all linked at the mind, hence the similarity to Hexwood), and that's really the only ability that's properly explored, but there's a fascinating background range of mutants who have incredibly long arms and webbed feet and so on, all just begging to be turned into superheroes. There is even a mutant described as 'the spider man' (to which I say: I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, STAN LEE).

John Wyndham is an author I don't talk about much. For some mysterious reason potentially to do with mind control (he is a science fiction writer, after all) I can never seem to remember how highly I rate him until I pick up another one of his books, at which point I am amazed afresh at what an understated genius he is. Like all the best sci fi writers, he goes about the business of writing fantasy as though it was fact, taking a particular proposition (in this case: a nuclear event has resulted in extreme genetic mutation) and following it through to all its logical conclusions. The hyper-religious civilization he has imagined in The Chrysalids has laws, prohibitions, holy texts, sayings and subcultures, and it all seems not only plausible but disturbingly likely.

Set in underpopulated, post-apocalyptic fronteer land, The Chrysalids is the story of the early life of David Strorm, son of the district's most outspoken and fanantic critic of all things mutated. In his society, mutant crops or animals are known as 'deviations', and mutant humans are 'blasphemies', and their holy book says that thou shalt not suffer a deviation or blasphemy to live. David doesn't really question this until the day he meets a little girl who is extremely kind and nice but who has six toes on each of her feet. Not long after that, he discovers that his ability to talk to his cousin and some of his other friends in his head is not exactly normal, and not long after that he realises that if he isn't careful, his natural desire to live without fear of being killed or maimed might suffer a considerable setback.

The Chrysalids is such a simple, linear story, but its background is so beautifully thought out that the novel could have been twice as long (or three times, or four sequels) and still have been just as fascinating. At times, actually, I got frustrated at Wyndham for making up something so great, dipping his toe into it and then getting bored and wandering away. There's so much that isn't fully explained that you're left crazy for more detail. How is it fair that the Twilight saga is half a million dribblingly pointless words long when this piece of perfection is less than 150 pages?

Nevertheless, what is here is mind-bogglingly smart and self-assured, an out-of-left-field work of the imagination that reads like lived truth. I love John Wyndham, I loved this book and I want very badly to resurrect its author so I can get him to write another five of the same.

4.5 stars.

Here Be Monsters: Two Leviathan-themed Reviews

Today's reviews come to you dressed up as a literary fight, because 'comparison' sounds boring, and because I think both of the writers concerned are appropriately ferocious and war-like. One of them actually was a sailor, and the other looks as though he ought to be a boxer, and so the idea of them settling their differences through fisticuffs is not entirely crazy. Except that one of them is dead, which might make things a little difficult.

NEVERTHELESS.

Melville wins on beard

In the red corner, we've got a writer who's been the bane of American teenagers for generations. He's a fearsome racist, a very dodgy scientist, a Bible obsessive and a man who really, really likes whales. Ladies and gentlemen, it's... HERMAN MELVILLE with MOBY DICK.

Facing off against him in blue is a man with a very different literary reputation. He's young, he's cool and in his time off from churning out amazing novels he teaches creative writing at my old university (he never taught me - I think I missed a trick there). Let me introduce you to the one, the only... CHINA MIEVILLE and his novel KRAKEN.

(Cue applause.)

But Mieville wins on sheer number of earrings

This is such a great pairing not only because I think Mieville's book is a response to Melville's, but because of who Mieville is. Melville spends a large part of his novel being patronising about a bald, tattooed, non-white man, and then one hundred years later a bald, tattooed, non-white man whose name differs from Melville's by only one letter (seriously, I'm getting confused just typing them out) takes Melville's concept and flips it into something totally different and totally awesome. The universe definitely has a sense of humour.

If a lot of people complain that Melville is much too popular, then Mieville suffers from the opposite problem. I've complained about this before: he's an absolutely excellent writer, but all the same he tends to be shoved onto the genre shelves and largely ignored by people who like Serious Books (who all, of course, will tell you that they love Melville). This is particularly ironic, because I think that what Melville and Mieville are doing is not at all dissimilar: both of their books are rip-roaring yarns with a twist; brainy, well-informed takes on a genre that's usually agressively masculine and aggressively brainless. That I enjoyed Mieville's book isn't surprising, but I'm still reeling from the fact that I didn't only like Melville's book, I completely adored it.

China Mieville is a writer whose brain seems to be constantly shooting out amazing plots in all directions like an overactive tumble drier, and the plot of Kraken is, as you might expect from him, both intense and intelligent. In an alternative London where the elusive giant squid has actually been captured, the Natural History Museum's prize specimen goes missing. The prime suspects are an underground religious group who worship the Kraken as a god, and who now believe it's about to be used to bring about the end of the world. Cue wild shenanigans as the squid's curator Billy discovers an extremely dark and dangerous alternative London where tattoos are alive, where statues talk and where there's even a crack anti-magic police unit.

I was sold Kraken on the basis that it was a reworking of a Western, and it's certainly got those influences going on, but after reading Moby Dick I realise that what it really is is a seafaring epic on dry land, and that what it's doing is taking literally a concept that runs through the heart of Moby Dick.

Now, everyone thinks they know what Moby Dick is about: some dude called Ahab chasing a white whale for 500 pages while nothing else happens. I am delighted to tell you, however, that this is not really the case. I was expecting a lot of angry masculine people yelling at each other in gale-force winds, and it isn't really that at all. Sure, Ahab slopes about, being moody (this is Melville's favourite descriptive word; the phrase 'moody Ahab' appears so many times that you might conclude it was Ahab's given name), shaking his fist at the sky and screaming 'DAMN THAT WHITE WHALE!' or words to that effect, but the revenge plot only takes up about a quarter of the text. Moby Dick really is, to use Melville's own term, a book of cetology, a very charming pre-Darwinian attempt to understand the nature of the whale. Is it a fish? (Melville delightfully concludes that it is, because only a stupid person could possibly suggest that mammals might live in the sea) What does it eat? What shape is its face? (This is honestly a chapter) How do you kill one, and when you have, how do you cut it up? What does it taste like? How long does it live? What is its history and mythology and what will be its future?

Melville's cetology can be pretty much summed up as an elaborate How To guide to worshipping the sperm whale. To most of the characters in Kraken, Moby Dick would be read not as a novel but a holy book, part of the huge underground library the Kraken worshippers have filled with books about their deep-sea god. I'm really not going out on a limb here at all - at one point, the text actually calls Moby Dick a god, and it's pretty clear that the men in Moby Dick are out there killing whales not only because it brings them money to do it, but because they believe in what they're doing. You could make a definite argument for whale-slaughter-as-ritual-sacrifice, and if there isn't a Moby Dick as Old Testament God thing going on I'll eat my Oxford World's Classics edition.

The sea appears in both novels as an almost human (or more than human) presence - in Kraken it even has its own house next to the Thames. Kraken's Billy, just like Moby Dick's Ishmael, teams up with a big bruiser with a harpoon and both pairs of men go adventuring together in pursuit of the big prize god, who may or may not (no spoilers here) be the death of them. As I've said, there's a lot of other stuff going on in Kraken too that comes from different literary traditions, but on one level it absolutely has to be a very sharp and well-considered response to Moby Dick.

And much as I liked Moby Dick, it definitely needs responding to. Ishmael is an absolutely infuriating narrator who spends his entire time making clanky puns and being willfully obtuse for humorous effect: he's the kind of man who, if he met someone called Miss Fine, would say something like "In fine, it's a fine day to meet someone so fine, I find!" (This is partly why he does not have a lady friend waiting for him at home like all of the other sailors; it also may have something to do with how much he likes cuddling in bed with his friend Queequeg.)

Also, and more disturbingly, Melville himself is quite obviously racist in a way that's not just unthinking but disgustingly deliberate. There's a horrible scene where a white character unleashes a torrent of verbal abuse on one of the ship's black servants just because he exists and the white character feels like it, and at another point a different black character is told that if he falls into the sea while they're in pursuit of a whale he won't be saved, because the whale is worth three times his price in Alabama. Even the broadest allowances for time and culture don't exuse it, and I was left wishing I could unleash not only China Mieville but Toni Morrison upon him. Nasty man.

Talking about the Great American Novel, by the way, I cannot understand how anyone not completely insane could ever think it was a good idea to set Moby Dick as high school reading. Large parts of the text are plotless meditations on whales, their history, biology and mythology, and the parts that are actually about moody Ahab and his Great White Whale nemesis are so heavy with intense Biblical references that the average page needs to be glossed five times. Your typical teenage reader is going to have jumped ship by page twenty. Moby Dick is the kind of book you need to come to on your own, and read it because you want to. If you do that, it's a delightful Victorian curiosity cabinet of a novel with some startlingly good writing hiding inside it. There's a scene where Melville's describing the ship setting light to excess bits of whale as it sails along in the dark: the ship is burning and it's making the sea burn and the whole thing looks like it just got thrown up from hell. It's an absolutely great description, and, like his hilarious cetology, totally unexpected.

In fact, I'd have to say that I think Melville is the better writer of the two. Mieville has a cracker of a plot, and an exceptionally vivid writing style, but at the same time it feels a bit chaotic and unchained, all his mad descriptions and ideas pinwheeling about with not much focus. Melville handles delicate and serious just as well as he does crazy and bold, and as a result Moby Dick is less of an exhausting adrenalin rush and more of a stunning piece of artistry.

Both Kraken and Moby Dick are exciting and extremely fun - unexpectedly so in the case of Moby Dick. I'd certainly recommend them both, and I definitely enjoyed reading them, but even though I'd far and away prefer to hang out with Mieville the person, I think Moby Dick might just have the edge on its opponent in terms of sheer textual excellence.

 IN SUMMATION

RED: 4 stars
BLUE: 3.5 stars

AND SO RED WINS IT. I know, I was shocked too.

Reviews: Roots of Betrayal and City of Bohane

Customers are very strange. Yesterday afternoon:

Customer: I would like Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Me: That'll be downstairs in Philosophy.
Customer: Can I borrow it?
Me: We're a bookshop. All our books are only for sale.
Customer: So I can't borrow it, then?

And later:

Me: Do you need a bag for your purchase?
Other Customer: Yes, I do.
Me: Our large plastic bags are 10p.
Other Customer: That's outrageous! How dare you! Charging me to cart away your items! Disgusting.
Me: I'm very sorry, but it's company policy.
Other Customer: DISGUSTING.
Other Customer: *reaches into coat, pulls out plastic bag, puts in his purchases and storms out*
Me: I see that you really did need that bag, then.

Anyway, today I have two reviews - The Roots of Betrayal by James Forrester (who, interestingly, is actually the historian Ian Mortimer in disguise) and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (who, if you believe the book's blurb, is James Joyce in disguise. As far as I can tell, this is not at all true.)

In which I realise I am old; also Review - The Map of Time

 So. Tea Obreht won the Orange Prize the other day. Tea Obreht is 25. I am 23. What have I done with my life. If I haven't won the Booker by next year I will be the literary equivalent of an old maid. Tears, recriminations, Mr Collins etc await me.

As a bookseller, I am similarly unhappy. Tea Obreht's publishers, amusingly enough, noticed that the Orange Prize would be announced on the 8th and decided not to print The Tiger's Wife in paperback until the 13th, so we have no copies in the store and no way of getting them. If I had taken the precaution of painting WE HAVE NO TIGER'S WIFE HERE, COME BACK NEXT WEEK on my forehead this morning, today would have been about 75% easier to handle.

But anyway, onto today's book review, which has nothing in common with The Tiger's Wife at all, since it is mainly concerned with time travel, H G Wells and giant robots from the future.

The Map of Time, in proof copy form, has been sitting on my floor since, I think, February, just languishing away at the bottom of my to-read pile. Every time I got to the point of picking it up, I ended up being repulsed, and if you look directly left you will see why.

This, I think you'll have to agree, is an utter turd of a front cover, simultaneously evocative of Twilight, a wasting disease and MS Paint. It is vomitous. I kept hoping that the actual book would miraculously not look like this, but the trade paperbacks came into the shop yesterday, and alas, they look just as bad as my proof. I can't even imagine which market the publishers thought they were going to reach out to with this - people who cannot see? The deranged? People who wished that Twilight was more robotic than it already is?

So anyway, although chronically repulsed by the cover, I finally decided to read the first chapter to check if it really was as bad as it looked - and the first chapter turned out to be all about a young aristocrat, tragically in love with Jack the Ripper's final victim. Ahah! I thought. This IS terrible! This is incredibly stupid! This writing is totally clunky! I'll just read one more chapter to make sure it keeps on being ridiculous, and then I'll stop.

And then I finished the book.