The Kind Worth Killing

The Kind Worth Killing (2015)
by Peter Swanson

Imagine that you're reading a book and everything is perfectly fine and reasonably entertaining but you're pretty comfortable that you know where things are going... Then out of nowhere, things change. And then they change again, and again, and the book is suddenly much more interesting than you thought it would be. The Kind Worth Killing is another in the recent run of dark thrillers with a domestic bent (think Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train and Her) but it offers a new and unique spin on the genre and it's really quite cleverly done.

Delayed at Heathrow airport on his way home to Boston, wealthy businessman Ted meets fellow American, Lily. After several drinks, the two get talking and Ted reveals he's recently discovered that his wife Miranda is cheating on him. After a few more drinks, Ted and Lily hatch a plan to kill Miranda. After all, as Lily puts it, "Truthfully, I don't think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing".

As it turns out, Lily is a little more complicated than she seems and she has a very unique take on life with a remorseless eye-for-an-eye attitude and an alarming capacity for violence. More details from Lily's past emerge as the story develops and her unexpected interest in killing Ted's wife starts to make more sense. Things between Ted and Miranda are also a bit less straightforward than you might expect, with further complications and twists cropping up (and the body count mounting) with every chapter.

I felt like we needed another picture, so here's author Peter Swanson.

With each chapter, the narrative switches between characters and includes multiple flash-backs to further colour the reader's understanding of the characters and the connections between them. Just when you start to get a good feel for the direction of the story, a new piece of information is revealed and the narrative changes direction again. Some of the plot twists are less subtle than others but some of them are fabulous and the overall effect is to create a gripping, suspenseful story where you're never quite sure who are the bad guys and who are the good guys.

Lily is a great character - she's intelligent and crafty and completely without mercy. She's basically an awful person, but somehow you find yourself sympathising with Lily and hoping that things turn out well for her. The other characters are less unique, however. Ted is a very straightforward, slightly dull husband who seems a little bit gormless for someone who's meant to be a successful businessman. Miranda is basically just Jessica Rabbit brought to life and her handyman boyfriend is big, dumb and not particularly memorable.

Miranda and her boyfriend are about as complex as these two.

Ultimately though, this is a fairly minor complaint. The Kind Worth Killing is a great read. It's clever, thrilling and very enjoyable.

8/10

Euphoria

Euphoria (2014)
By Lily King

I took an introductory anthrolopology class in my first year at university. To be honest, I wasn't particularly interested in any of it and have since forgotten pretty much everything we covered in that class. I do, however, have a vague memory of Margaret Mead. Controversial and pioneering, she published ground-breaking research following her time spent living amongst the tribes of the South Pacific. From memory, a lot of this was later discredited and her research fell out of favour as new methods of anthropological study were popularised.
So I did kind of know about Margaret Mead, but I can't claim to have had any particular interest in finding out more about her. Having read Lily King's novelisation of her relationships in Euphoria, however, I am now really, really keen to learn more.

In 1933, Margaret Mead was conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea with her second husband (fellow anthropologist Reo Fortune) when they came across, and then began working with a third anthrologist (and soon to become Mead's third husband) Gregory Bateson. Lily King takes this real-life situation as her inspiration in Euphoria, a novel about controversial American anthropologist Nell Stone and her fellow-anthropologist husband Fen, who are conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea when they come across and then begin working with a third anthropologist, Andrew Bankson. Clearly, there are some fairly strong similarities between Euphoria's setup and the real-world situation between Mead, Fortune and Bateson - even the names are similar. I don't know enough about Margaret Mead to say whether the similarities end there or whether there are further plot points inspired by real-life events, but taken on its own merits as a novel inspired by Margaret Mead's life, Euphoria is a fascinating read.

Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune & Gregory Bateson in 1933.

In Euphoria, Lily King creates a completely convincing world, pre-World War 2, when there are still huge areas of the world unexplored and new information to be learned every day about the new societies being discovered. Anthropology is a science in its infancy and Nell, Fen and Bankson are passionate researchers, exploring new frontiers. It's easy to be caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm of the time and place. The descriptions of the Tam people in Euphoria are equally compelling. I can only imagine the amount of research that went into this book, but the lifestyles, relationships and customs of the Tam and their idyllic tropical home; it's all so well-written and so detailed that it all feels very real.

Each of the three main characters has a very clear personality and each has a different approach to their research. Nell is all-embracing, immersing herself completely in the local culture in an attempt to understand everything about the people. Fen is calculating and occasionally condescending, always with an eye on the prize in terms of digging out new, publishable findings (as well as more literal prizes at times). Bankson is fascinated but overwhelmed, with a suspicion that he is misunderstanding everything he observes. Each of the three also brings their own pre-conceived ideas to their research, with each looking to confirm their own theories about the people they're studying and quick to discredit anything that doesn't fit. It's a great illustration of the way that anthropological study must have worked at the time - despite the very best of intentions, it's not really possible to be a completely objective observer, particularly when you're living amongst the people you're studying.

Anthropology - actually pretty interesting.

There is a lot more to Euphoria though than anthrolopogy and history - the complex relationships between the three characters create a real tension that builds throughout the novel, with the conflict mirrored by events within the Tam tribe and within other groups in Papua New Guinea. The three anthropologists start out with the best of intentions, but then follows marital conflict, new romance, violence, inter-tribal conflict, death and the euphoria of the title. The storyline is anything but boring.

I did not expect to particularly enjoy a book about anthropology, but Euphoria was fabulous. It even made me rethink previously held opinions about the dullness of anthropology. Highly recommended.

9/10.

All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows (2014)
By Miriam Toews

Sometimes it's good to know absolutely nothing about a book before you read it. I'm pretty sure that I would've avoided this book like the plague if I'd realised what it was about - if you were to summarise the plot of All My Puny Sorrows, it wouldn't sound like a particularly entertaining read.

All My Puny Sorrows is the story of Yoli (a dishevelled, twice-divorced and financially struggling writer with two teenaged kids) and her sister Elfrieda (gorgeous and wealthy, a successful concert pianist in a happy and stable marriage). Having grown up as misfits in a conservative Mennonite community, Elf and Yoli may be dissimilar but they're close and become even closer as Yoli stands by her sister through Elf's consistent and repeated suicide attempts. You see, despite her fabulous life, Elf just wants to die and there seems to be nothing her family can say or do that will change her mind. Through suicide attempts including wrist-slashing, bleach-drinking, starvation and pills, Yoli refuses to give up and dedicates herself to trying to save Elf's life. This is not a cheery story. This is not something I would've chosen to read, but I'm so very glad that I did.

I wasn't exactly sure what a Mennonite was, so I googled it. Apparently these are Mennonites.

This book should be awful and dark and depressing. Elf wants nothing but to die - she is hopelessly depressed and Yoli cannot seem to help or to understand, despite her best efforts. As Yoli puts it, "Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?". Yoli is desperate to save her sister and Elf is just desperate to die. It's an awful situation, made even worse when you learn that author Miriam Toews wrote All My Puny Sorrows as a deeply personal story following the suicides of her own father and sister. But somehow, All My Puny Sorrows is joyful.
It's sweet and likeable and even laugh-out-loud funny at times.

All My Puny Sorrows is incredibly well-written. Both Elf and Yoli (as well as the many and varied members of their family) are such wonderfully written characters that they're inherently believable and understandable. Miriam Toews writes about the relationship between the two sisters with such insight and sensitivity that you empathise with both of them - Yoli's desperation to show Elf that life is worthwhile, but also Elf's need to have Yoli understand her death wish. It's truly remarkable.

The title comes from a Coleridge poem: "I too a sister had, an only sister - she loved me dearly, and I doted on her! To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows"

At one point, the sisters' mother complains about a book she's reading: "Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!". This is exactly what makes All My Puny Sorrows so good - one of the main characters is irredeemably sad but the book itself isn't really about that. It's also about all the other aspects of the characters' lives and the intricacies and joys of their relationships.

It's a beautifully written story that raises some very deep questions with compassion and a light touch. Highly recommended.

9/10

Unbecoming

Unbecoming (2015)
by Rebecca Scherm

We all love a great heist story, right? You know how it goes - there's a group of quirky characters who get together to plan an audacious crime. Following a series of misadventures, a whole lot of close calls and at least a couple of car chases, everything culminates in an edge-of-your-seat account of the heist itself and the daring escape from the authorities. The characters are normally fairly straightforward and we don't overly dwell on the consequences of the theft, but it's fast-paced and action-packed and exciting. It's a winning formula.

You know, this kind of thing. Delightfully entertaining.

In her debut novel, Rebecca Scherm has taken the idea of an art heist novel and turned it completely on its head. In Unbecoming, Grace is a young American woman in Paris, where she has assumed a false identity after an attempted heist ended in the incarceration of her friends back in Tennessee. After three years in prison, Riley and Alls are about to be paroled and in rapidly escalating distress, Grace waits for them to find her and extract revenge for her betrayal.

The storyline of Unbecoming doesn't follow any kind of straightforward chronological order - instead there are multiple flashbacks to various points in time, which work to explore Grace's character, her relationships and the events both before and after the crime that have led her to her current covert and lonely life in Paris.
It's also revealed very early in the novel that there has been a failed robbery, that Grace was an integral part of it and that it has landed two of the thieves in prison - this means that the robbery itself is not a peak moment of suspense in Unbecoming (after all, we already know how it turns out). Instead, it's a more steadily paced, slow-building tension as more is revealed about the characters and their histories - and the reasons why Riley and Alls might be very, very angry with Grace.

Riley & Alls - presumably they're meant to be a bit more threatening-looking than this

Grace herself is a fascinating character - she is very honestly written as a dishonest, conniving liar who adapts her personality to fit different situations and manipulates those around her to get what she wants. Grace is always changing herself and adapting her identity in a process of "unbecoming" (see what I did there?). She is a deeply flawed, dishonest character and yet it's her unflinching honesty in explaining herself that makes her strangely likable.

Throughout the novel, Grace is drawn to art in all of its forms and Rebecca Scherm writes masterfully in describing Grace's fascination with various artworks and her work in Paris repairing and preserving beautiful objects (which may or may not be stolen). Grace's relationships with these objects are more honest and heartfelt than any of her relationships with people and  Rebecca Scherm's rich descriptions in these parts really add something quite lovely to the story.

Unbecoming is not a perfect read. The constant flash-backs and flash-forwards can be disorienting and a little jarring at times. Grace is a well-developed and unique character but most of the other characters (most notably the jailed Riley and Alls) are less interesting and their motivations less convincing. These are pretty minor complaints though and overall Unbecoming is an unusual, well-constructed novel and well worth reading.

7/10

The Bone Clocks

The Bone Clocks (2014)
by David Mitchell

Full disclosure: I'm a little bit in love with David Mitchell. The Bone Clocks was one of the first books I read this year and it's still one of my favourites. Then I read the equally fantastic Cloud Atlas. Then I went to hear David Mitchell speak at the Auckland Writers Festival in May and he was articulate, inspiring and completely charming. I went out immediately and bought four books purely because he mentioned them in passing (Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, a book of Philip Larkin poems and a couple of Ursula Le Guin novels). He is one of the best novelists around and The Bone Clocks is an absolute masterpiece.


David Mitchell gesticulating wildly and generally being awesome in Auckland.

Much like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is uniquely structured, in six loosely-linked parts that also work independently as six quite different short stories. Each part of the novel covers a different time in the life of main character Holly Sykes, beginning in 1984 with Holly at 15 years old and ending in 2044 with Holly now an elderly woman, having lived a very eventful life.
Each part of The Bone Clocks is set in a different time, in a different part of the world and follows a different character (Holly appears in every part of the book, but only the first and last parts are told from her point of view). Not only that, but each part of The Bone Clocks is even written in a completely different genre, covering everything from YA to literary satire to hard-hitting war story to fantasy/science fiction to cautionary post-apocalyptic fable. It's an incredibly ambitious thing to do with a novel, and David Mitchell pulls it off spectacularly - not only can he write in six different genres, but he can write very, very well in all six of them.

This is totally not what we mean by "Bone Clock", but it's kind of cool anyway.

Despite the large changes in style from one part to another, The Bone Clocks reads as one very large-scale novel and never seems disjointed or awkward. Each part adds another layer to our understanding of Holly and the world around her, as well as further developing the sci-fi/fantasy storyline of the Anchorites, which subtly carries through in the background of each part before emerging in its full glory in the (somewhat controversial) fifth part, which is a fully-fledged celebration of the most out-there type of fantasy writing. There are immortal, multi-dimensional, soul-stealing time vampires and all sorts of other goings-on that you would not normally expect to find in a critically-acclaimed novel long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It is absolutely mental and really shouldn't work (and to be fair, a number of critics have argued that it doesn't work, including the nice old lady sitting next to me at the Writers Festival) but it provides an insane, ambitious and glorious centrepiece for the book that makes it completely different to anything you've ever read before.

Apparently there are also a number of minor characters in The Bone Clocks who have appeared in earlier David Mitchell novels. I've only read two of his books so far, so can't really comment except to say that this makes me really motivated to go back and read all of these other books. It would seem that each novel on its own wasn't quite complex enough for David Mitchell, so he felt the need to intertwine elements from all of the books into each other, turning the whole thing into one enormous, ridiculous uber-novel. It's kind of a glorious project to redefine the way that books are meant to work.

It's four different books, but it's also one book. Kind of. 

Aside from the his ability to create a uniquely structured masterpiece of a novel, David Mitchell is a fantastic writer with a particular talent for characters and a remarkable way with words. Even when he's writing about dramatically misunderstood fifteen-year-olds or immortal super-villains, he does it beautifully : "Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul" or "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same" or "Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it". The Bone Clocks is over 600 pages of perfectly constructed sentences, but the storylines are so absorbing that you don't even notice how good the writing is.

Here's another quote from The Bone Clocks - this one was so good, someone printed it out in fancy gold text.

I could talk for hours about The Bone Clocks and how much I loved this book, but I think the main reason I enjoyed it so much was that I knew absolutely nothing about it beforehand and I would hate to spoil that for anyone else. Just know that it's absolutely spectacular and you should read this book immediately.

10/10

The Girl With All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
by M. R. Carey

Zombies are so hot right now. The Walking Dead, World War Z, Warm Bodies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - even Game of Thrones has been bringing out its undead of late. With so many zombies around, it's getting more and more difficult to find any kind of unique spin on the idea and it's always pleasantly surprising to come across something a bit different.
The Girl With All the Gifts is a zombie book, but it's also much more than that.

Everybody loves a zombie.

The story follows Melanie, an intelligent and curious 10-year-old who attends school in an underground bunker, strapped to her chair and watched over by armed guards.
For Melanie, life is pretty straightforward. She loves stories from Greek mythology and she loves Miss Justineau, the teacher who introduced her to the stories. She wishes her name was Pandora (the "Girl with all the gifts" of the title) and hopes to one day see the big city of Beacon.  
Melanie and her classmates are a lot like normal children, but there's also something very sinister going on behind the scenes - the adults of Melanie's world may hold all of the power, but they're clearly afraid of the children in their care and it doesn't look like Melanie will make it to Beacon any time soon.

It's no major spoiler to say that there are zombies in this book. The Girl With All the Gifts may be a zombie story, but it's not about zombies. It's about people and relationships - particularly the unique relationships between children and parents, and the bonds that form between very different people when they're thrown into a life-threatening situation together. It's about the way that humans cope with challenges and the way that we try to understand obstacles by dissecting and studying them. At it's heart, it's a story about humanity and how we define it - these are some pretty complex themes for a zombie story.

Melanie is a fabulous character and her smart-but-naive narration keeps things interesting as she doesn't always understand everything that happens around her. She's precocious and thick-skinned but also desperately lonely and so easy to feel for. The supporting cast of characters is equally interesting - the sweet but conflicted Miss Justineau, the aggressive scientist Caroline Caldwell (with her unshakeable belief that she'll find a cure for the apocalypse under her microscope), the exhausted man-in-charge Sergeant Parks - these are all well-developed characters who feel like real people with real back stories and understandable motivations. All of the characters continue to develop throughout the story, and none more so than Melanie as she comes to understand who she is and what's happening in the world around her.

Pandora's Box - do you really want to know what's in there?

It's a gripping, fast-moving and very readable story and it brings something special to the well-worn world of zombie fiction. While the plotline itself is not particularly revolutionary (there are some people being chased by zombies. Run, people! The zombies will eat your brains!), M. R. Carey has created a unique world peopled by fascinating, three-dimensional characters dealing with deeper questions than those usually posed in a run-from-the-zombies horror novel. He also has a bit of a gift himself, when it comes to putting words together in a very effective way - for example, "you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them" or "No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure".

It's not really a book about zombies at all. It's a fantastic novel, which just happens to have a few zombies in it.

9/10

Her

Her (2014)
by Harriet Lane

Sometimes a book really grabs you, right from the  first page. There seem to have been an increasing number of these absorbing psychological thrillers available of late - Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Before I Go to Sleep, Unbecoming and The Kind Worth Killing, to name just a few. It's a great time to be an enthusiastic reader with a penchant for suspense. Her is another one to add to this list.

It's the story of two women - Emma (a lonely, stressed and tired mother with a toddler and another on the way) and Nina (a sophisticated artist with a seemingly perfect life) whose unlikely friendship starts out quite sweetly but gets creepier and creepier as it becomes clear that Nina has her own reasons for wanting to worm her way into Emma's life. Exactly what Nina wants from Emma remains unclear for much of the book but each chapter (these alternate between Emma's and Nina's points of view) adds a little more depth to the characters and to their story and the tension ratchets up with every page. Both women are extremely complex and well-written characters. Both are women who are psychologically unraveling in different ways and it's fascinating (and a bit disturbing) to see them both slowly falling apart.

Her is a beautifully written, dark novel that explores themes of memory, identity and revenge. It's a very convincing study of an unusual relationship between two women who could easily have become cliches (the unhappy stay-at-home-mum and the unhappy aging career woman) but instead are fascinating and unique characters. Harriet Lane is very good at capturing the everyday details of life and the frustrations felt by both women are so very believable and relatable that both Nina and Emma become real, three-dimensional people. Emma's housewife frustrations are beautifully and sympathetically observed, as she struggles with the loss of her own identity:"the vanishing of personality as everyone else's accrues".
The unresolved questions around the mysterious, chic, Prada-coated Nina create a building sense of paranoia and suspense, which drive the story along at a cracking pace throughout its relatively short 261 pages.

Apparently Nina wears Prada coats, so I assume she looks something like this. Classy.

There is one real issue with Her - it's not so much the ending itself (which is subtle, chilling and cleverly done) but the bit just before this, which finally explains Nina's motivation behind her actions throughout the book. Without giving away too many details, Her is a fast-paced, adrenaline-driven thriller that builds perfectly throughout until you are desperate to find out what happened in Nina's past to drive her behaviour - then you find out and it's all just a bit of an anti-climax. This has caused severely divided opinions among readers. A quick look on Goodreads or Amazon will show you a large number of 4- and 5-star reviews and an equal number of 1- and 2-star reviews, from readers bitterly disappointed by the book's resolution. According to one school of thought, this is a fantastic, well-constructed psychological thriller with a bad ending. The other school of thought argues that the book remains true to its realistic characters and their real-life motivations, culminating in a very realistic and true-to-life conclusion. The book itself argues for this point of view at one stage, when Nina is disappointed by the over-the-top ending of a novel, complaining that real life doesn't have such dramatic plot twists. Nina feels that real life "turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small, quiet moments, misunderstandings or disappointments, the things that it's easy to overlook".

It's a good argument, but in my opinion, an unconvincing one. While Her is more than your run-of-the-mill page-turner, it is still a thriller - a very well-written one, with extremely distinctive and convincing characters - and it ultimately disappoints with a conclusion that fails to match the quality of plotting throughout the rest of the story. It is the only part of the book that seems patched-together at the last minute rather than intricately planned out, as if Harriet Lane hadn't thought of a motivation for Nina until she got there and then plonked in the first thing she could thought of to vaguely explain things...
 However, the rest of the book is so very good, that it remains a great read anyway - don't expect too much from those why-did-she-do-it chapters and you really will be wildly impressed.

8/10

God Help the Child

God Help the Child (2015)
by Toni Morrison

What can you say about Toni Morrison, that hasn't already been said? She is ridiculously good at what she does - she uses words in a way that turns her prose into something more like poetry. It's not poetic in terms of being flowery or pretentious - its more like every word is carefully chosen and every sentence artfully constructed so that nothing is unnecessary and every word contributes something. I guess they don't hand out Nobel prizes to just anyone, but she really is masterful.
Not only does Toni Morrison write beautifully, but she can also tell a fantastic story. She creates these incredible, three-dimensional likeable-but-flawed characters who stay with you long after you've finished the book. At 84 years old, Toni Morrison is still an absolute maestro and God Help the Child is just another example of this.

Toni Morrison - 84 years old and still writing FANTASTIC novels

God Help the Child is centred around Bride, a very dark-skinned young woman who is beautiful, powerful and successful. Formerly known as Lula-Ann, Bride has emerged from an imperfect childhood with a mother who (depending on whose perspective you take) was either a)neglectful and cold or b)preparing her daughter for life. Bride's adult life and her relationships continue to be coloured by her past, right back to early childhood as she tries to make amends for mistakes she made twenty years earlier.
The narrative moves back and forward in time, adding more layers to the story and fleshing out the characters with every chapter. You're left with a complex and satisfying story where everything just feels real and believable - the characters, their relationships, their motivations and choices.
God Help the Child is not a long book - it's short and succinct and you can blast through the whole thing in one sitting  (or two, if you have kids who like to distract you), but it has a huge amount of depth for a relatively short book.

There are some really affecting themes in here, most notably around childhood and how it affects the rest of our lives (although there are also questions raised in the book around the idea self-acceptance, the lies we tell ourselves, construction of self-identity and the importance placed on women's physical appearance. Just to name a few). There are characters in the book who generally mean well, but drastically affect others' lives anyway - it really emphasises the huge importance of adults' behaviour and attitudes in their children's lives. As the book says, "What you do to children matters. And they might never forget." It's a sobering message, delivered in a beautifully written novel - undoubtedly one of the best of the year.

10/10

The Martian

The Martian (2014)
by Andy Weir

Sometimes you find a book that reads like a great action movie - fast-paced, plot-driven and suspenseful; these are the kinds of books that keep you up really, really late at night because you just need to finish this chapter, and then the next one, and then the next one, until eventually you finish the entire book in one sitting.
The Martian is one of these books(so is The Girl with All the Gifts, but we can talk about that one another time). The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney and his desperate efforts to survive being stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew evacuates (believing Mark to have died). Mark is left on Mars with a temporary shelter, no means of communication and very little food - he doesn’t have the resources to survive until the next Mars mission arrives and he has no way of letting anyone back on Earth know that he’s still alive. In Mark’s own words:

“If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.”

So, right from page 1, things are looking fairly dire. Optimistic beyond all reason, however, Mark proceeds to tackle the situation head-on, using all of his engineering and scientific know-how trying to keep himself alive in an incredibly inhospitable environment.

                                           Mars - quite far away from Earth, as it turns out.


To be completely honest, science fiction is not normally my cup of tea. I find that storylines often play second fiddle to the author’s self-congratulatory explanations of all their clever future-tech ideas. The characters are often weak and the writing style so clunky that you don’t get sucked into the story in the way you would like. Good sci-fi, however, is rare and precious and should always be celebrated. The Martian is very, very good sci-fi.

            

 

The Martian is not this kind of Sci-Fi.


When I was younger, I loved Jurassic Park and I felt that Michael Crichton had included just the right amount of genetic and paleontological and biological background to the story, such that the whole thing seemed possible. Not exactly probable, or even remotely likely but possible. The Martian works the same way - author Andy Weir clearly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to space travel (as well as chemistry, physics and various other fields of science that Mark Watney depends on throughout the book)so that everything in the book seems possible - again, not exactly probable, but just possible enough to allow complete suspension of disbelief. As with Jurassic Park, the science provides an important background to the story, but that’s not what the story’s about - The Martian is about people and survival-against-all-odds, and it’s fairly intense stuff.

Apparently the movie adaptation is coming out later this year. This could actually be a wee bit awesome.

Mark Watney  is far from the two-dimensional cliched characters you may have encountered in sci-fi before. Mark has a very clear personality, which really shows through in the first-person narrative used throughout most of the book. Mark is obviously something of a bright spark (they don’t let just any old moron go to Mars, clearly), with a talent for thinking his way into unique fixes for life-threatening situations. He’s sarcastic and witty with an unstoppable sense of humour and a very stubborn refusal to quit. The situations Mark finds himself in are extremely dangerous and clearly very serious, but he refuses to take himself seriously. Mark’s personality infuses the whole book with a sense of dark comedy, which provides moments of pleasant relief from all the oh-my-god-he’s -gonna-die while also making it even more stressful because Mark is so likable that you really do want things to end well for him.
Having said that, I suspect that Mark Watney is such a strong character with such a clear voice, that this may also work against the book at times - I loved Mark, but I’ve read a few scathing reviews of this book where people found him irritating. And if you don’t like Mark, you won’t like the book. His cheery attitude and self-deprecating jokiness is inescapable - the story is told very much in Mark’s words. Words like:

“I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for”
“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped”
“After I board Ares 4, before talking to NASA, I will take control of a craft in international waters without permission. That makes me a pirate! A Space Pirate!”

After coming into this with extremely low expectations, I loved The Martian. It’s a well-written, fast-moving adventure that’s charming and captivating and terrifying. Plus, I learned all sorts of things about interplanetary travel and am fairly confident that I now know how to create water using flammable gases and an open flame. The Martian was so absorbing that I read the whole thing in one sitting, completely neglecting my children for half a day (they don’t seem too badly scarred and I figure that they’re well compensated by their mother’s newfound ability to create water in the vacuum of space).
This was a brilliant read.

9/10

Cartwheel (and why I love my Kindle)

Cartwheel (2013)
By Jennifer duBois

I must admit, I was initially dubious but am now a committed devotee to all things Kindle. I love my Kindle like it’s my third child - except not, because I take him (yes, him. His name is Ed. Because Edward>Ed-wood>wood>kindling>kindle. It’s not weird) everywhere with me and become a little panicky any time I realise that I’ve left home, kindle-less. What if I have to wait somewhere for some unknown purpose, with NOTHING TO READ?!
Anyway, I digress. What I meant to say is that one of things I like best about my Kindle is the complete lack of context for most of the books on there. I have a tendency to stumble across various lists (50 best books of 2015; 25 up-and-coming authors to watch; 100 books everyone must read…) and methodically go through said lists, downloading every book mentioned. As such, I end up with a fairly enormous collection of books in my to-read folder, with no memory of what they’re about or why I have them.
 Cartwheel was one of these mystery books, which I stumbled across in the depths of my Kindle recently and started to read with absolutely no idea of what it might be about. And it was good!

Cartwheel is the story of self-absorbed 20-year-old American student Lily Hayes, whose semester abroad in Buenos Aires is (somewhat inconveniently) interrupted by the violent murder of her roommate, Katy. Unfortunately for Lily, she is the prime suspect and is quickly carted off to Argentinian prison. Her unusual behaviour after the murder - like putting on a massive PDA with the neighbour shortly after finding Katy’s body, or pausing mid-way through her interrogation to do a cartwheel - really does not help her case.

An actual cartwheel. Like this. As you do, when in mourning for your murdered friend.

The narrative follows Lily’s from her arrival in Buenos Aires through her developing relationships with those she meets (including poor old Katy), to the night of the murder and the ensuing interrogations, jail time and court case, but it also cuts back and forth in time and between one character and another. Cartwheel is written in the third person, so each chapter isn’t so much narrated by a different character as it is coloured by one character’s point of view - this switches between Lily, her parents, her sister, her interrogator and the PDA neighbour; the clear differences in tone from one chapter to the next are very impressive with each chapter adding another layer to the personalities of the main characters, particularly Lily.
Possibly the biggest strength of this book is the fantastic characters. Nobody in this story is simple or straightforward, everyone is complex and it’s not even particularly clear whether any particular character is good or bad. They’re all both and neither at the same time (just like real people), which I loved. Lily’s character is particularly complicated - she is the cliche of a typical American teenager in a lot of ways: loud, selfish, oblivious to those around her. But she’s also strong and opinionated and you come to realise as a reader that many of the behaviours her parents put down to naivete are actually well-considerd and completely intentional. Every other character in Cartwheel has a completely different understanding of who Lily is as a person, what motivates her and how she has ended up in this situation.
It’s very cleverly done and really pivotal to the story - these complex, interesting, odd characters are really the bones that hold the whole book together and a big part of what makes it so readable. It is very, very readable. Cartwheel is one of those books that you don’t want to put down until you find out what happens next - it’s interesting and absorbing and suspenseful but there’s also a real depth to Cartwheel that you wouldn’t find in your typical whodunnit story.

This is Amanda Knox. Her roommate was also murdered and then she acted a bit odd about it.

Cartwheel is said to be “inspired by” the Amanda Knox story. Being very unfamiliar with the Amanda Knox case, I took this very much at face value. Having spoken to a few other people since, however, it would appear that this is kind of a point of controversy when it comes to this book. According to some, Cartwheel is almost a point-for-point retelling of the events in the Amanda Knox case - apparently even the mid-interrogation cartwheel is something that Amanda Knox was rumoured to have done. To be honest, I haven’t really taken this into account at all but it is possible something to keep in mind if you are more familiar with this case… Potentially, Cartwheel could be seen as exploiting Amanda Knox and the really crappy things that have happened to her (assuming that she was innocent?) just to get a storyline for a novel.
I also suspect that Jennifer duBois may have taken a few liberties in writing about Buenos Aires - again, I’m no expert but the Buenos Aires of this book is dark and seedy and dangerous. It’s like a third-world country where murderers, thieves and rapists lurk in every shadow, where a young woman should never walk on her own (even in broad daylight in an upper-class neighbourhood), drug dealers are constantly on the prowl and corruption is rife. To me this sounds a little too much like a vague desciption of scary-overseas-country-that’s-not-america rather than the real life city of Buenos Aires, which (correct me if I’m wrong?) is a vibrant cosmopolitan city with lower rates of violent crime than many cities in the US? I don’t feel like I’m particularly qualified to comment on this but to me it just seemed a little bit lazy compared to those beautifully complex characters.

Buenos Aires - actually looks quite nice here...

And here

And here too

Possibly these people are running from violent crime? They're not running very fast though...

Aside from Amanda Knox & Buenos Aires concerns, Cartwheel is a great book. It’s well-written and cleverly constructed, with some of the best-written characters I’ve come across. It’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely worth your time.

8/10

Cloud Atlas (possibly the best book ever written)

Cloud Atlas (2004)

By David Mitchell

I’m not sure whether other people do this too (or whether it’s just part of my own unique weirdness) but I have a Guilt List. It’s an ever-increasing list of books that I should read, but very rarely do. I know that I should read these books because they’re classics that have won all sorts of prizes and been critically acclaimed. They’re works of art. But usually, tackling a work of art just seems like a bit too much work.
Cloud Atlas has been on my Guilt List for quite a while. I knew it was supposed to be fantastic. I knew it was a stunning, prize-winning example of conceptual fiction. For a really long time though, I honestly just could not be bothered reading it. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got round to it and I have never in my life been so pleasantly surprised by a book.

Cloud Atlas is written in six sections, covering several centuries and following a number of very different characters. Each section is so completely different to the others that they stand on their own as individual short stories/novellas, with each section written in a different style (historical fiction/crime novel/sci fi)and each following a very different protagonist. This gives each section a unique voice and makes for a fantastic read.
But David Mitchell is very clever, so this is just the beginning. In very basic terms, the six different stories work like this:

Part 1. Adam Ewing is an American travelling home from New Zealand’s Chatham Islands in the 1830's, having spent time with the settlers and the enslaved Moriori people of the islands. This section is written in the form of Ewing’s journal entries.
Part 2. One hundred years later, Robert Frobisher (a young composer in 1930’s Belgium) reads Ewing’s journal. This part of the book is made up of Frobisher’s letters, addressed to his friend Rufus Sixsmith (possibly the best name ever, by the way.
Part 3. Sixsmith (still in possession of Frobisher's letters from forty years ago) is a nuclear scientist in 1970’s California, involved in all sorts of conspiracies, death threats and chase scenes with plucky journalist Luisa Rey.
Part 4. In 1990's England, publisher Timothy Cavendish has a series of tragi-comedic misadventures in a rest home, having recently received the manuscript of a 1970's crime novel (featuring Rufus Sixsmith & Luisa Rey in California) in the mail.
Part 5. A few hundred years later in Korea, a genetically modified “fabricant” called Sonmi-451 watches an old movie about Timothy Cavendish’s time in the rest home. This part of the book takes the form of a recorded interview with Sonmi-451.
Part 6. Set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, this section follows the trials and tribulations of Zachry (a young man who has seen the video footage of Sonmi-451's interview) as his family struggles to survive in a potentially dangerous place.

In case that wasn’t complicated enough, there’s more! The first half of the book unfolds in chronological order: 1830's journal, then 1930's letters, then 1970's crime novel, then 1990's movie, then futuristic Korean interview, then extra-futuristic Hawaiian story. Each of the first five sections finish mid-story (sometimes even mid-sentence), with the second half of each story unfolding in reverse chronological order in the second half of the book, until you finish back where you started, with Adam Ewing in the 1830's.

No idea whether the movie adaptation was any good or not, but like the poster says: everything is connected.

It messes with your understanding of what you’re reading and plays on some fairly deep themes around fiction versus reality. Is Adam Ewing’s story meant to be real? Or is he just a character in a forged diary read by a composer who wrote letters to a scientist in a novel read by a character in a movie, watched by a Korean “fabricant” interviewed for a video watched by a young man in Hawaii? Is Zachry the only real character? Or is the real character someone else again, to whom Zachry is telling his story? It’s so cleverly constructed that it’s a bit of a mind-f##k, really.
The most impressive thing about Cloud Atlas though, is that David Mitchell has created this absolute masterpiece of conceptual fiction in such a way that it’s an absolute pleasure to read. The structure of the book is complex and layered but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re reading it - it just reads like a collection of well-written, absorbing stories that you don’t want to put down. Each of the characters is believable and likable (in their own special way) and each story inhabits a well-constructed, fleshed-out world.

It would be an understatement to say that David Mitchell has a way with words - Cloud Atlas includes some of the most beautifully put-together phrases I’ve ever read, but it’s not self-congratulatory or pretentious. He just has a way of finding exactly the right words. Lines like: “A half-read book is a half-finished love affair” or “Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty” have meant that Cloud Atlas quotes pop up all over the place - just google it and you’ll find an extensive list of them.

When I’ve read Guilt List books before, it’s usually a fairly forced experience and I’ve found a number of the critically-acclaimed award-winning novels have left me feeling like I’ve been wallowing in someone else’s misery. I read Nobody is Ever Missing recently and felt like I’d wasted my week reading about hopelessness. It is my strongly held belief that a good book makes life better (even if only in the sense that it provides a nice distraction from life - I refuse to judge those who love crime fiction or chick-lit). Cloud Atlas made my life better. I feel like there were a whole lot of themes and messages in this book that I missed the first time through, but I plan to go back and re-read with wild abandon on frequent occasions, so I imagine I will understand more of this with time. Despite some relatively dark subject matter, Cloud Atlas is not depressing. In fact, I would almost say it’s life-affirming and optimistic - as summed up in the final line from the book: “…only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” Damn straight.

What I’m trying to say, is that Cloud Atlas is absolutely worth your time. Of the 54 books I’ve read so far this year, this one is my favourite by a mile - in fact, I think it’s even usurped Chuck Palahniuk’s “Lullaby” to become my new favourite book of all time. Drop everything and read it immediately.

10/10