Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (Graphic Adaptation by P Craig Russell; 2014)

Today's third, and last, 'Illustrated Title' for review is this graphic novelisation of Gaiman's Graveyard Book: orchestrated by P Craig Russell and featuring the penmanship of Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott. It's all very professionally accomplished: a thoroughly realised bande dessinée. It's so well done, indeed, that it feels petty to carp. Nonetheless there was a small still voice, at the back of my head, that wondered at the point of the exercise. It's not as though Gaiman's prose (never less than plainly efficient at communicating its story) doesn't work in the original at getting the whole over to its YA readership. The rather wordy, explanation-heavy original has been scripted, here, into some text-dense panels, lots of fat speech balloons lousy with words, and a slightly sluggish pace. It's by no means bad though. By no means.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (2014)

An 'illustrated' theme today; this graphic novel by Emily Carroll collects together five deliciously chilling and haunting stories, all set in a Gothic-y, Grimms-y forest world somewhere between about 1800 and about 1920. These tales work through fascinations with murder, guilt, the disinclination of the dead to rest calmly in their graves. It's beautifully done. The worst I might say is that the illustrations, and the choices Carroll has made about individual or multiple panels, occasionally force or compress the pacing in ways that seemed to me disadvantageous to the larger mood;

More, at the end of the day Through the Woods is only five, fairly short stories, which perhaps makes the book seem, overall, a touch slight. But they are all very cleverly constructed, readable and every one of them stays with you after you've finished. That's the true test of this sort of tale.

The visual style is clear-line and moderately exaggerated cartoon-y figures rendered in a more atmospherically realised world of bold primary colours, blocks of composition and filigree detail. The latter are better than the former, and the art is (I thought) better as establishing an initial mood of unease and dread...

...than at cashing-in shock moments, or startling us with visualised horror:

You may disagree, of course: these things are not measured against absolute aesthetic tables, but upon the pulse of the individual reader. And it's possible I'm only registering the old truth of horror: what's not shown but intimated is much, much more terrifying than what's shown. It's not in the thing that terror resides, you see: it's in our own minds.

A. F. Harrold, The Imaginary (2014)

Lovely older child/YA fable by the impressively bearded A F Harrold, beautifully illustrated by Emily Gravett, concerning the state of whose facial hair I have no information at present. It's about imaginary friends, but from the point of view of those imaginary friends, troped here as real but supernatural entities. Amanda, the heroine, discovers Rudger (not Roger!) in her cupboard.

They have splendid play-adventures together. Some delicious chills are provided by the alarming Mr Bunting, who has unnaturally extended his lifespan by devouring imaginary friends, and now has got a whiff of Rudger. Amanda is well realised; Rudger's adventures, pursued by Mr Bunting, and properly tense and thrilling; but the most moving part of the whole novel, perhaps surprisingly, is the secondary story of Amanda's mum, who has forgotten about her own childhood imaginary friend, a dog called Fridge; who recalls him, and then forgets him again. Heartbreakingly written! All in all: a very lovely novel indeed.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman (2014)

The Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
(For Tiger(man)'s a Harkaway thing):
Its tops are made out of Batman;
Its bottom is made out of Greene.
Its bouncy, flouncy, lit'ry, bit twee, fun fun fun fun fun,
But by far the most Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
Is its tangled-yet-self-aware-complicity-with-upper-middle-class-White-English-masculine-codes-of-right-behaviour-in-a-postcolonial-context:
Po-o-o-ost
colonialcontext.

John Darnielle, Wolf In White Van (2014)

I might say 'I enjoyed this', except that 'enjoy' doesn't seem the right word, exactly. For a first novel it's a very accomplished piece of work indeed: sensitively, evocatively and occasionally alarmingly written. It is eerie and weird and sticks in the mind after reading, like a piece of pungently delicious food sticks in the teeth. Quite apart from anything else, it offers a portrait of the inward oddness of the SF fan (the crossover between SF and gaming especially) a healthy distance away from the rather self-congratulatory cosiness of Jo Walton's Hugo-winning Amongst Others. There's little to love and much to recognise in this portrait of what it means to be a geek. Wolf In White Van shares with Walton's book a deliberately aimless structure, and little actually happens in it. A better book, though, I think.

Story: our narrator, Sean, lives alone in Californian suburbia, coping with the consequences of some terrible incident in his youth that left his face hideously disfigured. A nurse calls four times a day to check on him and top up his treatment. The rest of the time he runs a retro-style, postal-only role-playing game called 'Trace Italian': people write to Sean detailing their next move in the post-nuclear-disaster dystopia of his game-space, and he writes back with personalised details as to how their game is going. The novel is written, in a sinuous sort of way, backwards: so we start at the end, rewind through the story of two teenage players of Trace Italian who confused the game and reality and suffered (one died, one badly hurt) as a result, and end up with the initial trauma that wrecked Sean's face. Along the way are some beautifully written excursi on solitude, imagination, science fiction and games -- the stuff on the porousness of game-players' sense of game and world struck me, post-Gamergate, as prescient (Sean has a thing for Conan, and also for John Norman's Gor novels, although not to read, just to stare at their 'shamesful and garish' covers, 'pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way': 'I didn't need to hear the stories the books were trying to tell me: their skins haunted me enough' [49]). Sometimes these excursi drag a little, but often they are marvellous embedded essays on the side of being a genre Fan upon which Amongst Others prefers not to dwell. Sean is keen not to be thought a creep and a freak, and works hard not to be; but there is something creepy about him nonetheless, and as you read through the novel it starts to dawn upon you that this freakishness is nothing to do with his ruined face or hermit existence. It's the freakishness he shares with you: the combination of desire to escape and desire to control, the passion, passivity and hatred of being passive, the strange potage of imagination, generosity, anger and perversity that is mixed in the head of the true science fiction geek. I know whereof I speak.

It's a novel about SF rather than a SF novel, without even the set-dressing of magic that made Amongst Others Hugo-acceptable. But it's a very, very good novel for all that.

Downsides: Darnielle is, perhaps, a little too obviously coy about withholding the precise details of the 'event' that led to young Sean Phillips's disfigurement. Sometimes the prose strays into mere whimsy (though this is rare). And, though the blame for this can't be laid at Darnielle's door, that cover is rather too EEEEEK! for my taste. In fact, if you stare at it, and rotate it slowly through 35° you find yourself feeling physically nauseous.

Liesel Schwartz, Chronicles of Light and Shadow 3: Sky Pirates (2014)

Liesel Schwartz’s Chronicles of Light and Shadow 3: Sky Pirates is a 400-page Adventure. There’s much incident and little depth, and a great deal of painstaking pointing-out of the states characters are in rather than trusting the Idiot Reader to figure it out for herself. For example, near the beginning, the protagonist finds herself ‘in the vastness of the Sudan’ and we’re told ‘the sight of it made a lump well up in her throat. Being out here in the vastness ... the emptiness of her surroundings perfectly matched the emptiness she felt in her heart—she felt desolate and alone’ [9]. Those last five words in particular are the prose-style equivalent of bellowing into a person’s ear because you think they’re deaf, or dim, or both. The effect on the normally calibrated ear is not an agreeable one.

Elle Chance feels an emptiness in her heart—she FEELS DESOLATE—AND ALONE—because in a previous instalment of this multi-volume Adventure her husband went missing in the netherworld, a wraith now, perhaps dead, possibly retrievable. The novel steers Elle across her steampunk world on a book-length quest for him, fighting all the time through an endless blizzard of clichés: ‘throw caution to the wind’; ‘a dull ache’; ‘a dizzying height’; ‘her back straight as a ramrod’; ‘she hated him with every fibre of her being’. It’s like this all the way through: teeth are gritted; mettle is tested; trouble kicks off. Not once but several times we have the exchange: ‘There was a knock on the door. “Enter!” X said’, where X might be any of the sinister men in Schwarz’s dramatis personae. This is how the pirates speak: ‘gold! The cap’n is going to be pleased!’ [69]. Indeed these pirates do pretty much everything you'd expect them to except actually say ‘arrr!’ ‘Dashwood’s words had struck a nerve. That nerve had been connected to sensitive thoughts she had buried deep within her’ [139]. Oh THAT sort of nerve! Moments of ultra violence jar awkwardly against this cosily over-familiar texture:

Elle raised her Colt and shot the pirate in the face. His head exploded like a melon, with bright red gore splattering against the wood panelling behind him. [68]

There’s also a sex scene in a jungle lake, where Elle shags the Pirate Captain (despite being still on the search for her hubbie) whereupon ‘they both climaxed with such force’ that it made the whole lake ‘vibrate’. That’s some shagging!

Rachel Pollack, The Child Eater (2014)

Pollack's Golden-Compassy braiding of 'fairy tale world' and 'modern Western society' story strands starts with such storming brilliance it can almost not help itself but slide, a little, and diminish as the story is spooled out to 350 close packed pages. Matyas, a potboy at a run-down inn in fairyland hangs out after his shifts with the young daughter of the local blacksmith. They swap stories to alleviate the boredom.

They talked of women with fishtails and the heads of birds who sang to sailors and drove them mad. And angels, or maybe demons, that rode on great fish that could swallow men whole, with room inside for the men to build homes, and fires to keep themselves warm.

When they tired of talking about the sea they imagined the cities they might visit if they could ever cross the water. Cities where the animals had taken over and now the people had to beg for bones at the feet of long tables where dogs lay on silk pillows. Cities where the buildings sang strange songs all night long and everyone had to go deep underground to be able to sleep. Cities where golden heads on silver poles lined the streets and would tell you anything you wanted to know. Cities where the children had killed all the adults and used the blood for magic spells that forced angels to give them whatever they wanted. [1-2]

Potentiality being so much more magical than actuality, it proves impossible for the on-the-page story of The Child Eater to live up to these marvellous glimmers of possible story. It's by no means a bad novel. On the one hand, there's Matyas's dream, equal measures starry-eyed (or starry-haloed) and ruthless-selfish, of escaping poverty and becoming a 'Master' wizard, through which we get a great deal of magical specificity. On the other, over in our world, there's Jack's magic-stifling obsession with being 'normal, and the consequences it has for him, and later for his son, witch-born Simon. It's good, readable stuff. It's just a little ponderous after that gorgeous beginning. What is it Auden says?

The empty junction glitters in the sun.
So all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell,
To what dishonour all adventure leads?

It's not that the actual bi-plot drags its heels: if anything both storylines are a trifle too busy. The Child Eater entity itself is less gory than you might be thinking, although it certainly has its bloody moments; and I found the rather egregious Tarot theme more tiresome than anything. But the novel is detailed, intermittently powerful, and full of excellent things. It is a notable book. Ah, but ... but ...

Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Interminablestellar.

COVER REVEAL: Metametamorphosis/SAINT REBOR

The excessively talented Chris Baker has rustled up the above, for Ian Whates' forthocming NewCon Press edition of my short fiction. The collection is to have the sanctified title SAINT REBOR, and the specific image Chris has chosen is from my Bugs-On-The-Moon story 'Metametamorphosis'. Nice, no?

Den Patrick, The Boy With The Porcelain Blade (2014)

DRAMATIS OPINIONAE

TITLE

'The Boy With the Porcelain Blade'

I find myself unable to read this title without immediately picturing Morrissey waving gladioli and crooning against plangent Johnny Marr guitar chords. Surely I can't be the only one? 'The bo-o-oy with the po-orcelain blade/Behind the hatred there's laid/A murderous desire for ...' Wait. What?

LUCIEN 'SINISTRO' DI FONTEIN

Young, charming, a dazzling swordsman, a heart of gold, no ears. I've met Den Patrick in real life and couldn't help picturing him as Lucien. Except for the ears. I believe Mr. Patrick possesses ears.

CHARACTERS

Plenty of these, disposed for convenience onto a three-page list of dramatis personae at the beginning of the book. They are either virtuous or wicked, and they roll very smoothly onto the stage (or page), along their respective grooves, as the story requires.

STORY

Alternating chapters between (a) Lucien's adventures after failing the test, with his improbably brittle sword, that would have granted him admission to the higher echelons of 'The Desmesne', a huge Gothic castle in which the King and his elite govern cruelly and autocratically over some generically lumped-together farmers (actual farmers are not included in this pack), a test he fails by being too noble-hearted to execute certain prisoners, and (b) flashback chapters of Lucien's upbringing inside the Castle Keep.

KEEP

The front and back cover namecheck Gormenghast, but Patrick's world is considerably less ornate and rococo than Peake's. This is a slim tale built for reading speed, set in a pared-down imaginative realm, better on action than on its rather pro-forma touches of 'Gothick' mood. (The cover blurb also implies the book is like a Scott Lynch novel. Like that's a good thing! Right there, on the cover! I mean: seriously. Rest assured, it's better than that.)

PRO FORMA GOTHICK MOOD?

Lucien takes refuge from pursuit in a cemetery at midnight: 'An unkindness of ravens heckled outside the mausoleum, their voices carrying over the windless sky ... the sepulchre was a welcome refuge, shielding him from the night and the questing gazes of House Fontein' [89].

WHAT, AS IN DAME MARGOT FONTEIN, THE BALLERINA?

No.

SWEARING

Cod Italian.

WORLDBUILDING

I was occasionally put in mind of The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but with more pseudo-The-Borgias Renaissance swordplay. A spaceship has colonised a distant world with a hierarchical, rather cruel society. There's some confusion over which characters are humans and which aliens. But where Gene Wolfe writes deeply unsettling ontological ambiguity, Patrick puts the emphasis more on flashy, video-game-ish and sometimes frankly improbable sword-fights.

FRANK IMPROBABLE?

There's a moment where Lucien is charged by a sabre-waving enemy on horseback. Our hero falls to the ground, lies beneath the galloping creature as it passes above him, hacks upward with his (by this point in the story, metal) sword, cuts the cummerbund or surcingle without so much as scratching the horse's belly, and then leaps to his feet. The rider's saddle slips, and the rider falls ignominiously to the ground.

NO, I MEANT: IS THERE REALLY A CHARACTER CALLED 'FRANK IMPROBABLE'?

There is not. I think you may have misread what I wrote.

I SEE THAT, NOW.

Not to worry.

FUN, THOUGH?

Yes. A fun read.

James Smythe, The Echo (2014)

This is the second Smythe 2014 title I've reviewed here; and although my rapture about the first was muted just a tad, I'm much more impressed by this second. Altogether a more solidly rendered, more subtle, complex and resonant tale. It is, in point of fact, the sequel to 2012's The Explorer, and Book 2 in a planned foursome modelled, of course with all necessary sciencefictional mutati mutandibus, on Eliot's Four Quartets. This is a very good thing. SFF needs more grand structural ambition of this sort; and a quaternionic sequence like this makes a refreshing change from those endless herds of trilogies that sweep across miles and miles of golden genre, silently and very fast.

The Echo plays intriguing games with the doubleness of its sequel status. It is both a retread of The Explorer and, somehow, completely different. Story is set twenty years after the events of the first vol., when the Ishiguro disappeared into the strange deep-space 'anomaly'. A new mission is readied, developed by two brilliant scientists, both fascinated by space travel since their young days: the identical twins Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen. Smythe is as interested in the 'echo' implied in genetic twinship, not a million miles away conceptually (although literally a million miles away in distance) from Bruce Chatwin's uncanny little 1982 novel, On The Black Hill. The closeness and rivalry of these two is exceptionally well realised, through unobtrustive telling and deftly interpolated flashbacks. It's a bold step by Smythe to walk his plot through the same steps as The Explorer: the expedition through space, the anomaly, things getting weirdly tangled and fucked-up. It's hard to discuss the specifics without spoilerization. Suffice to say it's beautifully paced, really eerie and gripping.

Not that I'd say it's quite perfect: Smythe's scientists (the most talented scientists in the whole world, we're told) don't at all have the vibe of actual scientists, and don't do any of the things one might expect actual scientists to do. They 'ping' the anomaly (what, like a submarine?), even though the 'pings' 'disappear into it'. The launch of the Lära is a bit screwy: they all have to be protected, within sealed units that 'create their own pressure level inside them' (eh?) since 'the speeds that the ship will reach as it pushes off from the NISS...' (eh? Newton's equal-and-opposite, though, yeah? Won't this shove the NISS out into deep space?) ' ... free of the trappings of any real gravitational pull ...' (eh? still in the Earth's gravitational well, though, yeah?) '...are so ridiculously powerful that they could -- or would -- damage the human body' [32]. But, OK: I'm not one to be a Hard Physics pedant. This isn't a Hard Physics book. All I'd say is: The Echo manages, intermittently but potently, to generate some of the sense of human frailty in a profoundly hostile environment that made the Gravity movie so memorable; but Gravity was scrupulous about getting the science right, which only increased the potency of the film; whereas you get the impression Smythe is simply less scrupulous about such things. He's more interested in the interpersonal than the interplanetary, in the psychological than the physics-logical. And in those areas, Smythe is absolutely second-to-none amongst contemporary writers of SF.

In these End Times of ours there are as we know rumours of things going astray, and amongst those rumours is one that intimates the year-by-year schedule for the publication of Smythe's Anomaly Quartet might be going astray. If these rumours are true, then I may have to start a petition. Or organise a march. One thing that reading The Echo makes clear, that a reading of The Explorer alone does not, is that it won't be possible properly to judge the success with which Smythe achieves his impressive ambition until all four books are out. The sooner that this happens the better.

Diana Gabaldon, Written In My Own Heart's Blood (2014)

Read in my own eyes' weariness.

William Gibson, The Peripheral (2014)

Reviews that are about the process of writing the review rather than about the title under consideration are exceeded in annoyingness only by reviews that are about the process of not writing the review. So I apologise. My usual practice is: I read a book and write a review straight away, partly to get my thoughts in order, and partly because then it's fresh in my head. But pressure of other things meant that I wasn't able to do this with Gibson's much-anticipated new novel. I read it. Then I left it a week. Now that I have some time to turn over to it, I've already read a number of other reviews, by critics whose judgement I respect. They all like it a great deal. The most recent issue of SFX talks of 'the Return of the King', as if this novel marks a glorious renascence. I find myself out of step. It makes me doubt myself.

I guess I could still write a arrow-to-target review, I suppose; or I could spend a whole blogpost fretting around the peripheries of the novel. What you gonna do? *sniffs*

It's not that I hated it. I didn't hate it. I didn't especially love it either. The first 200 pages set up the novel's bivalve premise in rather trudgy fashion; the remaining 250 pay it off, slowly, and with a good deal of characters-explaining-things-to-other-characters. Its bivalve premise? Well, one part is a near future rural USA where main character A, Flynn Fishers, lives hand to mouth picking up piecework (her brother is a frazzled army veteran who persuades her to take over his job, which he tells her is beta-testing a new immersive video game. It's not though.) The other part is a further-future, set after a perfect storm of environmental collapses known as 'the jackpot'. We're in London, where the super-rich are enjoying themselves under the distant, light-touch tyranny of the Chinese. Main character B, the dreadfully-named Wilf Netherton, is a PR/minder figure for pop celebrities. He has a problem: the sister of his client has been murdered. The two chambers of the novel are linked with a time-travel remote viewer powered by handwavium. People in the further future are communicating with people in the nearer-to-us-future, and vice versa. When Flynn thought she was beta testing a game she was actually flying an observation drone around further-future London; and what she thought was a bit of in-game assassination was an actual murder. So she's a witness, and accordingly some ruthless people in the further future are after her. As regards the time travel conceit, Netherton at one point asks 'can't you just jump forward and see what happens? Look in on them a year later, then correct for that?' and is told 'No, that's time travel. This is real.' [92] I quite liked the chutzpah of that, except that subsequently the explanium leaked, rather, from its containment chamber:

'When we sent out our first email, we entered into a fixed ratio of duration with their continuum, one to one. A given interval in the stub [the novel's name for the past being contacted, because it's assumed to be a bifurcated alt-historical divergent line going nowhere important] is the same interval here, from first instant of contact. We can no more know their future than we can know our own, except to assume that it ultimately isn't going to be history as we know it. [92]

It struck me as a rather high-handedly arbitrary and contrived premise. We might wonder whether there are reasons of pseudo-physics, rather than merely reasons to do with the exigencies of plotting, that mean the further-future can't send a second email to a later time in the stub? Or have an AI send a million emails and sketch out the shape of the stub? (Maybe each email would open a new stub; but then the further-future make multiple contacts with Flynn and each just carries on the story of their interaction.) But, wait: I speak too soon. The passage goes onto directly to address the question of why 'time travel' is configured this way:

'And, no, we don't know why. It's simply the way the server works, as far as we know.' [92]

Well. That's clear, at any rate.

But alright: I'm not going to review the plot, except to say that it struck me as intricate without being complex, which is not praise. And I'm not going to review the characters (sophisticated agalmai humanised with one main flaw, like Wilf's alcoholism or Flynne's, uh, blandness) or the pacing, except to say that whilst individual chapters (these are many and short) were OK, the pacing of the whole seemed to me too slow. On the other hand, there's a '3D printing' thread that runs through the whole, and I can see that the novel, towards the end, pulls together its components in a way reminiscent of the way 3D printing works: initial elements that seem weirdly decontextualized slowly, even painstakingly, reveal themselves as part of a larger whole. As to why it takes so long, and moves with such ponderous grace: I'm not sure. It's half-way through before Flynne gets uploaded, avatar-like, into a further-future waldo robot thing—the device is called a 'peripheral', hence the novel's title. It's not that the first half lacks incident or interest. Not exactly. It's more that I got the impression the to-and-froing was there to show-off the Gibson vibe, the patent Gibson 'kick-ass' prose.

As far as that goes, I was unpersuaded. It is very far from being badly written, of course. Indeed conceivably that was my problem: it reads like prose that has been very assiduously written and rewritten. It isn't a question of obliquity, although Gibson takes an evident and rather sweet pleasure in making his readers work, or at least wait, for the full comprehension of all his slang, clipped allusions, specialised vocabulary and so on. But that's fine: stubs, hate Kegels, the klept ('not funny at all', 322), flu (not in the sense you think), artisanal AIs, battle-ready solicitors, autonomic bleedover, continua enthusiasts and haptics. Bring it on. Not that, but  rather a sense of effort in the prose itself, a something that stops it moving with the smooth fluency it needs to. Hard to pin down, actually.

Let's agree that 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel' is a great opening sentence: eloquent, atmospheric, calibrated to wrongfoot the reader by precisely the right amount. And let's agree, hell why not?, that: 'the future is there, looking back at us; trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become' (from Pattern Recognition, and perhaps the kernel of this new novel) is a good sentence. The opening sentence of The Peripheral is: 'they didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.' That's not as good a sentence, I thnk: the uneuphonious tangle of consonants with which it ends; the back-breaking comma. Starting a novel by telling us something that unnamed individuals did not think is rather a turn-off. And all the way through I found myself snagging on sentences that didn't quite solder together their idioms of expressive insight with their idioms of proletarian stylised suspicion-of-intellectualism-as-elitism inarticulacy. I mean all the too-cool-for-school stuff: the 'shit in that game. She hated that shit' [52]; 'What you been doing?' 'Fucking the dog.' [43]; 'Not worth it, Conner.' 'Fuck-all ever is' [56]; 'I don't give two shits where he's from' [405] stuff. There's a lot of that stuff in this novel.

To be clear: I'm not trying to imply Gibson thinks working class people are actually inarticulate and unintelligent. I'm suggesting he's aiming to reproduce a distinct proletarian idiolect, that of the sort of people who (to quote Mona Lisa Overdrive) 'have grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.' Bobby in Count Zero is described as having repudiated religion:

religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.

And it's the mode of expression that interests me, rather than the sentiment: qualifiers that work to emphasise the unruffled rejection of fancy speech and complexity through an implicit 'YMMV/whatever' textual strategy both distancing and ironizing. 'Basically', 'the way he figured it', 'that shit', 'he guessed'. There's a good deal of this in The Peripheral. Indeed, one of the key ways Gibson generates his aesthetic effects is by rubbing that kind of thing close up against a completely different idiom, informed by a kind of decadent pseudo-poetic oddness eloquence. One the one hand tech might be 'no shit? a drone? Serious-ass sensing capabilities' [328]; on the other hand, tech might be a 'vaguely Egyptianate, milkily translucent giant sperm of a cam' [392]. It means that scenes might be set with prose like this:

He was trying to sleep on a granite beach in the tall cold hall of Daedra's voice mail, while trains, or perhaps mobies departed, dimly announced by gravely incomprehensible voices. [440]

Or like this:

The house had floodlights trained on it, bright as day and ugly as shit. They'd painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn't. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership onto a McMansion. [292]

It can work. It has worked for Gibson before. It didn't really work for me, this time. But shit, man. You know? *shrugs*. YMMV.

A Space Elevator On The Far Side Of The Moon!

A pause in reviews whilst I clear a great pile of other work that must be done. This is my choice of 'intermission' title board. Just because it's so ... say what?-ish

Tana French, The Secret Place (2014)

A Dublin police procedural, set almost entirely on the grounds of a posh private girls' boarding school where a handsome but flirty and selfish boy called Chris (from a neighbouring boys' school) has been found with his head bashed-in. The murder weapon was a hoe from the groundskeeper's hut, but the groundskeeper has an alibi. The murder was investigated, not solved, and so shelved. A year later, on a noticeboard in the school called 'the secret place' (a board on which people post anonymous messages of the 'I stole your cake!' 'I fancy so-and-so', 'I hate so-and-so', 'I want a boob-job' sort, a pressure-valve for the high strung schoolgirls) a person or persons unknown has put up a card that reads—you can see it on the cover, up there—'I know who killed him'. This restarts the murder investigation. Ambitious young Stephen Moran, our narrator for half the tale, is handed the card; he gets together with ball-busting Murder Squad detective Antoinette Conway. They go to the school. 500+ pages later the mystery is solved.

That's one problem, there. The novel really doesn't need half a thousand pages to tell its story. The prose is well-formed and readable, the dialogue (including a pleasingly high number of uses of that splendid Irish word 'bollix') mostly lively, the class tensions well drawn, and the murder absorbing. But it all goes on too, too long. There are far too many repeated scenes of the detectives interviewing teenage girls, too much (I'm sorry to use the word, but) padding to do with seeming apparitions of the ghost of Chris. The intention I'm guessing is to paint the closeted high-strung world of the girls' boarding school with some of the hues of Miller's The Crucible; but although French strains pretty much every pip in her writing to achieve this, it simply doesn't come off. Feels told rather than shown, not helped by French leaning too heavily on the 'ohmygod!' 'that's totes freaky', 'um, hello, like, actually I didn't kill him, alright?', 'whatevs' idiom for her central group of girls. I'm not saying this is badly observed, where teenage girls are concerned; only that this idiolect becomes monotonous in such a large dose, and that this monotony is aesthetically counter-productive.

There's one other element in the tale, but the fact that I've left it to this last brief paragraph indicates its semi-detached relationship to the rest of the novel. Interleaved with the police procedural chapters are flashback chapters in which the main group of friends bond over midnight trips to a nearby field, and discover they have actual magic powers. This 'fantastika' element is worked-in to the solution, but never felt very real to me. It needs to be uncanny and unnerving; but it reads more like a blander version of that 1996 movie The Craft.

Graham Hancock, War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent (2014)

Permit me to quote Wikipedia on this one:

"La Plume de ma Serpente: le Retour" is a phrase in popular culture, attributed to elementary French language instruction (possibly as early as the 19th century) and used as an example of grammatically incorrect phrases ('serpent' is actually a masculine noun in French) with limited practical application that are sometimes taught in introductory foreign language texts. As SIBFRIC (magazine) formulated in 2014: "As every genre reader knows, the most idiotically useless phrase in a beginner's French textbook is La Plume de ma Serpente: le Retour. The phrase is also used to refer to something deemed completely irrelevant."

Hancock's is a classic example of the mode. Set notionally in the 16th-century, during the Spanish conquistador incursions into Mexico, the world of the novel is fashioned from equal parts cardboard, laboriously infodumped historical research, and anachronistic dialogue ('they say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush', as one 16th-century Spaniard says to another 16th-century Spaniard [225]). We also get: flat characters adopting a series of melodramatic postures, dramatic cliché, stylistic cliché, egregiously bloody interludes of violence and torture, more cliché and a draggy over-long telling that starts and ends in medias res, for there are more, and perhaps woe-is-it-unto-us many, many more, volumes to come in the War God series. Bloaty stuff. Not my favourite novel of 2014.