Bob Howard works a 1970s-sitcom version of 'bureaucracy' in the 20teens government department tasked with handling the various occult irruptions that plague Stross's Britain. That is to say, this is volume seventy-or-so in Stross's ongoing Laundry Files sequence, and it's much like the others, save only that with each vol the amount of backstory exposition grows. It's an arithmetic rather than a geometric progression, this acreting, but it leads to quite a lot of padding nonetheless. And it's true that this instalment is rather oddly shaped, with a great long spool of elaborate prologue (theme: there are loads of supernatural monsters and Lovecraftian horrors in the world but there's no such thing as vampires!) before the main chunk of the story arrives to pay out the reader's investment of attention (there are vampires! they're bankers! DO YOU SEE WHAT HE DID THERE?). But it's within normal tolerances for a structure such as this: close enough as the phrase goes for government work. Now, as is typical with Stross, what the reader gets is a chunk of clever ideas and a shedload of geeky references and in-jokes; and meanwhile characters swap dialogue of the sort that would never emerge from the actual lips of living, breathing human beings in the real world. If you like this sort of thing then this is very much the sort of thing that you will ... eh ... I forget how the rest of that goes.
My personal mileage, from which yours may vary, is that Laundry Files flavour Stross is my least favourite Strosstyle. His other books are better, because here he is essaying humour, and he does not have funny bones. He has many talents and skills, but funny bones are not amongst them. So there's a scad of rather brittle in-joking, loads of meme references, and milquetoast disparagement of topics pre-selected to avoid giving offence to anybody very much ('Wolverhampton's an ugly town' and the like). Beyond that, the humour of these books is the sort that occasions a particular reaction in me: first, recognising that humour has been attempted and then, following almost immediately upon this recognition, a kind of nihilist abreaction in which I grasp that no, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing sudden all far. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous. No move and sudden all far. All least, three pins, one pinhole, in dimmost dim, vasts apart, at bounds of boundless void, whence no farther, west worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.
Apart from that, it's fine.
I do sometimes wish that sf people weren't so sensible and mature, and that there were real pressure to line up behind either Charlie or Christopher Priest. Oh, the blog posts I would write! CP's apparent humourlessness, his flat prose and his unbearable sex scenes would be evidence for the...
ReplyDelete...sorry, I lost interest in that idea halfway through.
I wonder if what Charlie writes are novels for people who read a lot (although this review suggests otherwise). I don't read much fiction, and when I do I can't be bothered with books where a thing happens and then another thing, and then someone comes through the door holding a gun (and I do mean through the door and strictly speaking it's not a gun). Still, rather him than Jasper Fforde.
Phil: well, I tend to concur. Except that CP, knowing his limitations ('a man's gotta know his limitations,' as Clint Eastwood once said, in the dirty-laudry version of himself as Harry Callahan) doesn't essay comedy. It's fine. It's grand. But a writer like Terry Pratchett, who had profoundly funny bones, would handle this sort of situation very differently. *Has* handled etc etc I think I mean to say. Even S. Beckett has funnier bones than CS.
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ReplyDeleteI read a lot and it may well be (see above) that these books are easy reading and intended for me therefore. But as AR points out, an instinctive inherent resistance to a book's tone can derail an otherwise "easy reading" experience. I enjoyed the initial books in this series very much. Nice to see someone referencing the almost forgotten Adam Hall, and even the more recent Len Deighton. But this last book seems a book too far. Trying to ramp up grimness of tone - but equally counter-balancing this with a high degree of (for me tiresome) facetiousness. To my surprise and disappointment I found the book unreadable and had to give up. A shame.
ReplyDeleteFacetious is a good word. James Thurber was funny; Jerome K Jerome was funny sometimes but fell back on facetiousness; Stephen Leacock was facetious all the time.
ReplyDeleteOddly, I've never in my life heard of Adam Hall, although I would immediately have (vaguely) recognised the name Quiller - and, for that matter, the name Elleston Trevor.
As for CP, I'm midway through The Islanders at the moment, and I think at this stage he's at least as funny as Beckett - maybe even Kafka. Terrific book.