The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

So, what with the Oscar nominations, and the fact that this movie popped up (conveniently) on Sky Movies, I decided to re-watch it. It really is a splendid piece of work: charming, witty, laugh-out-loud in places, gorgeously framed and designed and acted. Fiennes' Gustave is a beautiful performance (boo to him not getting Best Actor nod), and I would hazard the only character from any of this year's films who will enter popular consciousness in a longer-term sense. There's also the sheer pleasure of seeing Anderson make his most Andersonian film yet, and registering all the little tropes and signatures of which he is so fond: the uncondescending absorption in kitsch, the use of models, the sly but telling staging of generational misdirection and love. Charm, I have had occasion to say more than once, is really very hard to fake, and this is a thoroughly and deeply charming movie.

The question is: is it anything more? I've read criticism suggesting it is style over substance, all icing and no actual cake. Suggesting it isn't really saying anything. There is lots of running around and some artfully staged gags and set-pieces, but to what end? The first time I saw it, last year, I wondered if it was saying something about American attitudes to Europe, specifically that other-side-of-the-Atlantic sense that there is something old and elegant and a bit faggotty but above all something out-of-time and doomed about the mitteleuropäisch world. Which is fair enough, though a little shallow and caricaturing.

Rewatching it, however, was a revelation. The whole movie erects its filigree gorgeousness across a chasm, and only a fool (like me, evidently) could fail to grasp the nature and depth of this abyss. The repeated scenes, like visual rhymes, in which the old-school cultured European is on a train that is stopped in a field. Peering through the window and wondering 'why are we stopping in a field?' A whole movie structured across a tacit divide: we get the pre-war elegance and the post-war Sovietised shabbiness and downbeat melancholy. But what is the gap, exactly? What story does the film keep telling, in its various ways? Deputy Kovacs, played with swaggering elegance by the Jew, Jeff Goldblum, tries to execute the legal will of his deceased client and for his pains is murdered by the thuggish, skull-faced Jopling (played by the Aryan, Willem Dafoe). Serge X (played by the Jew, Mathieu Amalric) helps Gustave and Zero by packing 'Boy With Apple' for Gustave with the true will in the back, is also murdered by Jopling. Zero himself (played as a young man by the Guatemalan actor Tony Revolori, but realised in old age by the Jew [update: I was corrected on this point on Facebook: the actor's parentage is Syrian Christian and Italian], F. Murray Abraham) relates how his whole family has been murdered, and faces several close brushes with death himself. He survives, but everyone he loves vanishes into the abyss between the pre-war and post-war iterations of the movie. The Nazis are never mentioned, never shown on screen; but they, and the Holocaust, are the invisible centre of gravity around which the whole film bends. This is not to suggest it's in any way a gloomy or morbid movie. On the contrary the lightness and humour with which Anderson tells his story is not only wonderful in its own right; it is a very clever way of narrating the Holocaust. As M Gustave says of the perfect lobby boy, he is completely invisible, yet always in sight. I have heard the eternal footman, or in this case, lobby boy hold my coat and snicker. What happens to Gustave in the end is that 'they' shoot him. As the man himself puts it: 'You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it.'

I was put in mind of a sentence from Nabokov's 1948 story 'Symbols and Signs', perhaps my single favourite short story. The characters are two elderly Russian Jews, living in New York after the war and trying to find the wherewithal to keep their deranged, paranoiac, possibly suicidal son in the institution that cares for him. At one point, the mother pulls out a photograph album and looks through the photographs. Her attention is mostly on her son, of course; but the sentence I'm talking about is the last of this quotation, the one concerning Aunt Rosa.

She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby, he [the son] looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album. She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

There's a whole novel in that sentence (I often think Nabokov doesn't get enough credit for the sometimes extraordinary tenderness with which he writes). Rosa was right to worry, we might think; it's just that she worried about the wrong things: she fussed at the near-by trivia and did not see the storm-front rearing over the horizon. I'm not sure that's right, though. We live our life close at hand, after all; the people we care about tend to be near, and they matter a great deal. It's reasonable to hope that the huge impersonal forces of death and horror pass us by, but it's a mistake to obsess about those things. In its attention to detail, to the surface textures and delights of life, even unto the icing, Grand Budapest Hotel understands that. It also understands the abyss, into which the middle years of the century shovelled literally millions of Jewish and Queer corpses. It just doesn't put that centre-frame. When I watched it first I thought the movie charming but lightweight. Now I wonder if it isn't a masterpiece.

Kameron Hurley, Infidel (2014)

The excitedly-named but short-lived 'Vol 2 Week' comes to an end at Sibfric, with a brief notice of the second volume in Hurley's Bel Dame Apochrypha trilogy. It's a 2011 title, and old news for true Hurley fans ('Hurphiles'?). Still, better late than never. This novel, then, carries the story of Nyx, warrior-assassin for the matriarchal 'Bel Dame' Guild, past the end of the war that characterised volume one of the sequence, God's War. I reviewed that novel here, if you're interested. Barebones summary: Nyx is now too-old-for-this-shit, no longer a Bel Dame and working as a bodyguard for a diplomat's child. In an opening scene that reminded me, somewhat, of Tony Scott's Man on Fire (with Nyx in the Denzel role), she is ambushed whilst escorting her charge. Ah but the twist is: it seems the Bel Dames themselves have put a hit out against her, rather than the kid she was guarding. Throw in a wasting disease slowly killing our hero, lots of juicily repellent Bug-tech, and an incident-ful narrative more cannily paced than God's War, and the result is a very readable book. Hurley's descriptive chops are better in this instalment too, I thought. The whole is better crafted without losing its visceral, tearing-off-heads shock and vigour.

Downside: the narrative barrels the reader through so effectively that the post-reading experience involves reflecting back in a way that starts to notice a general thinness, literally for Nyx, figuratively for the book as a whole. Of course it is marking time until the end of the trilogy; but it doesn't move us very far forward. And the villains and their evil schemes are underdeveloped, in part because the focus is so largely on Nyx and friends. There's also a degree of individual mismatch, unavoidable in the case of books and (some of) their readers, and which will certainly not bother most. In this case it has to do with the conceptualisation of war. Hurley is unflinching in showing the horrible, sickening and bloody mess war entails; and her baseline assumptions are the post-world-war-1 consensus that battlefields are arenas of savagery shaped by the hypocrisy of leaders and the pitiable plight of the front line soldiers (“We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying," Nyx said. "Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”) Not being a warmaker myself, and shaped as I am by the predominantly anti-war aesthetic of 20th-century literature, I don't exactly disagree with this; although it's enough of a consensus now (cf also: Grimdark) as to risk becoming deadening. And it opens up upon some dangerous side-alleys, not the least of which is the general contempt for 'politicians', a word treated as a synonym for 'corrupt leeches', as against honest salt-of-the-earth street brawlers and criminals (“I'm a bloodletter, not a politician," Nyx said. "I just take off heads”), which was exactly the attitude that softened the ground for the sowing of Fascism in the 1930s.

That's not my problem, though. Not really. Hurley is scrupulous in showing how much Nyx's career as a fighter has harmed her, ground her down, wrecked her body (even in a world where new body parts are easily purchased), deadened her soul. But it seems to me that the harm war does to soldiers is not the most interesting or important story to tell about war. More to the point is the harm war does to people who aren't soldiers. Both God's War and Infidel are about unaccommodated woman, the life solus, the costs and exhilarations of fighting and surviving. But that's easy. What's hard is not surviving yourself, but keeping other people alive. My own personal prejudices predispose me to think the most interesting stories are about people who raise kids in a warzone. The opening scene of Infidel made me wonder if this novel was going to address this; but it doesn't. Ah well. The thing about Achilles is that he doesn't have kids. In one sense, better than the whole of the Iliad is the scene in The Magnificent Seven where Charles Bronson spanks the Mexican kids for despising their parents. The point of that scene is: being a parent is much harder, and requires a different, more complete form of bravery, than being a gunslinger. It's the same logic that says: the Dad in McCarthy's The Road is a finer warrior than Han Solo.

I hate to extend this, really quite simple point further, but I need to clarify. One of the great strengths of this novel, and its predecessor, is the way it challenges the calcified attitudes to gender and the 'proper' role of women in society. So I need to stress I'm not talking here about anything procrusteanly woman-ish. I'm well aware of the deep-rooted bias in society (one that Hurley tackles head on) that women are 'naturally' nurturing and men are 'naturally' belligerent. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. My point is not that I wanted to read a story about Nyx caring for a child (blimey: can you imagine how that would even go?). Women are not to be defined by their capacity for caring for children. But human beings are to be defined by their capacity for caring for one another. Nyx is a warrior, indomitable and self-reliant and marvellously lacking in self-pity; but there are other, more collective and less individualistic modes of making war, and they work better. There are better military strategies than violence, too, although they may be less immediately dramatic for story-telling purposes. Gandhi made deeper and more permanent inroads into the British Empire than Hitler, after all.

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[Note: to sink into mere pedantry, I know (of course) that Greek myth attributed a son to Achilles: the ferocious Neoptolemus. But there's nothing paternal, or parental, about Achilles in the Iliad. He has his self-reliance, and his superb fighting skill, and his glory, given extra sweetness by his foreknowledge of his tragic doom; he had his lover Patroclus, his slave-girl Briseis, and that's all he wants. That and killing people. He's Nyxish, or Nyx is Achillean. One of the two.]

John Gwynne, Valour (2014)

The improbably named 'Sibfric Voltwo Week' continues with Volume Two of John Gwynne's ongoing saga The Faithful and the Fallen. I shall not hazard a review of Volume One, since to do so would be to cross swords with the not-to-be-surpassed Jared Shurin, whose detailed account of Gwynne's Malice can be found here. As you can see, vol 1 is a reassuringly or depressingly (pick whichever term you prefer) familiar High Fantasy fable-cum-potboiler: Corban, growing to adulthood, begins to comprehend he is the Chosen One as his cod-medieval kingdom is George-R-R-Martinned around him. Valour continues the story. For those desirous of orienting themselves, the publishers have provided the following jacket text.

The Banished Lands is torn by war as High King Nathair sweeps the land challenging all who oppose him in his holy crusade. Allied with the manipulative Queen Rhin of Cambren, there are few who can stand against them. But Rhin is playing her own games and has her eyes on a far greater prize... Left for dead, her kin fled and her country overrun with enemies, Cywen has no choice but to try to survive. But any chance of escape is futile once Nathair and his disquieting advisor Calidus realise who she is. They have no intention of letting such a prize from their grasp. For she may be their greatest chance at killing the biggest threat to their power. Meanwhile, the young warrior Corban flees from his conquered homeland with his exiled companions heading for the only place that may offer them sanctuary - Domhain. But to get there they must travel through Cambren avoiding warbands, giants and the vicious wolven of the mountains. And all the while Corban must battle to become the man that everyone believes him to be - the Bright Star and saviour of the Banished Lands. And in the Otherworld dark forces scheme to bring a host of the Fallen into the world of flesh to end the war with the Faithful, once and for all.

Also provided is a five-page list of dramatis personae. That's five full pages packed tight with names like 'Dath', 'Gar', 'Heb', 'Rafe', 'Vonn', 'Kai', 'Morc', 'Rhin', 'Rath', 'Jael', 'Wolf', 'Bos' ,'Walk', 'Tanc', 'Flai', 'Jam', 'Nitti', 'Grittay', 'Tolkien', 'Tutti', 'Bois', 'Frum', 'Dee', 'Bigg', 'Bad', 'Citi', 'Dissis', 'Djamhodt', 'Dissis' ... look, I'm making these up now, I freely confess, and have been doing so since 'Bos'. But at least 'Bos' is an actual character in this book. There are also two individuals called 'Fray' ('Benothi Giant, companion of Uthas') and 'Ventos' ('a Helveth travelling merchant-trader') who, one earnestly hopes, come together in the main narrative to sell meat pies. Then: a map.

Not a bad map, as these things go. Then a poem:

Not a good poem, as these things go. Then: a cauldron!

The cauldron was a hulking mass of black iron, tall and wide, squatting upon a dias in the centre of a cavernous room. Torches of blue flame hung upon the walls of the chamber. Uthas of the Benothi giants strode towards the cauldron ...

Now that I have 'pies' in my head, I can't read 'Benothi' without salivating. Mmm! Anyway:

...strode towards the cauldron, his shadow flickering on the walls. He climbed the steps and stopped before it. It was utterly black, appearing to suck the torchlight into it, consuming it, reflecting nothing back. [1]

None more black! This gives you a flavour of the whole: unafraid of a bit of cheesy Gothic melodrama. When the story gets going it's all about the many characters all travelling from place to place and scheming and fleeing and fighting. Perfectly serviceably done. You, for instance. Yes, you. You may well be looking for a huge swamp of a narrative in which you can lose yourself, like sinking into a warm bath. If so, then this is for you, It's utterly unoriginal, full of violence, lots of things happen and it doesn't really go anywhere. Me, I found the prithee sirrah idiom hovered uncomfortably between too wincingly archaic ('"Did you see Akar fall?" "Aye. Calidus spoke true. A giant did slay Romar"' [19]) and frankly not archaic enough ('Textual inconsistencies are remarkably rare in the giants' histories' [316]). There's every dramatic cliché you can think of, most of the stylistic ones, and that irritating convention by which characters' inward thoughts are rendered onto the page in slabs of italics. Aye, he thought to himself, that has always annoyed me, when writers do that. What do they hope to gain?

The world is early medieval, largely Celtic in flavour with a strong dose of Norse: giants, dragons and other monsters are real. But the worldbuilding is the usual Fantasy mishmash and omnium gatherum: bits of French ('"I'll not be a corsair for you!" [333]), Greek ('amphorae of wine' [117]), Persian (carpets are mentioned on p.141) and Indian ('"Avatar of Elyon!" [179]) and so on. Chapters are short, heavy on the dialogue, threaded with detailed descriptions of stabbing, mauling, decapitating, torturing and slaying, and each ends with a mini-cliffhanger or duh-duh-DUH! revelation. The author's website suggests he plans four volumes of The Faithful and the Fallen, but I see no reason why it couldn't go on forever. I admit I found it draggy and stale, but your George-R-R-Mileage may vary.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword (2014)

This week is 'Vol 2 week' at Sib Fric, as we move (is that a sigh of relief I can hear, or a puncture deflating?) towards the end of this ridiculous reviewing-2014-titles-splurge. And today's vol 2 is Ann Leckie's second Ancillary instalment: after Justice, Sword. Perhaps because our hero Breq now has to shore up a corner of Radchaii space using just his sword. Or else. You know. Not. Quite apart from anything else, Breq's possessive is a 'her' not a 'his', just like everyone else in the novel. The sword in this case is a huge Fuck-Off class spaceship, the Mercy of Kalr, with a crew of bristling, honour-obsessed Radschaii officers for Breq (who has been given command of the craft by the Emperor herself) to whip into shape. Or line, is it? Does one 'whip into line'? Or is that lick into shape and ... what into line? Straighten?

Sorry, my attention keeps wandering. The story picks up soon after the end of Ancillary Justice; thousand-bodied emperor Anaander Mianaai gives Breq command of the ship and sends her to Athoek to guarantee the system's safety after two 'hyperspace' gates were attacked and destroyed. She is given three officers: two experienced lieutenants called Seivarden and Ekalu and a 'baby', the inexperienced but well-connected 17-year-old Tisarwat. When they get to their destination they tangle with local politics, including the ethical problematics of a programme of in-all-but-name enslavement of the locals.

I daresay Leckie was writing this follow-up before Ancillary Justice created such an impressive splash in the rock-pool of contemporary science fiction: Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, BSFA, Nobel, Olympic Gold and Jules Rémy, all in one year and all for a debut. Genuinely impressive stuff. At any rate, A. Sword has all the marks of an ambitious writer determined not simply to repeat herself. So, where A. Just. was a multi-P.O.V. action-packed adventure, A. Swo. is all Breq, and very low-key on the Things Happening front. The emphasis is on character interactions, and interiority; the beauty of inflections rather than the beauty of Big Explosions (though there is a bomb and some fighting near the end). It's a cooler, more considered book, interested in the protocols of interpersonal interaction, and also with protocols as such. There's a great deal of pother about using the right crockery, about the dos-and-don'ts of courtesy, hierarchy and propriety. More Silver Fork than slash-and-burn. There's also an attempt to engage with questions of colonialism, slavery and class prejudice, although here the evident wrongness of all three quantities (speaking absolutely, but also in terms of Leckie's moral universe) rather undercuts the novel's drama. It's not that the book's various moments of righteous outrage aren't right-on; its more that they feel as though they could be cut-and-pasted into any number of contemporary online situations. One major theme is that the requirement that women and other oppressed minorities register their disaffection 'politely' is itself oppressive:

“When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?” ....

“For my part,” I replied, “I find forgiveness overrated. There are times and places when it’s appropriate. But not when the demand that you forgive is used to keep you in your place.” ....

“You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side.”

One problem I had with the first novel was the way the experience of belonging to a vast hive-mind, of splitting oneself into myriad individuals and then recombining them, was rendered in traditional, monadic-human terms. Leckie's imagination does not, in this case, run to a deleuzeguattarian body-without-organs, or even to a Hardt-and-Negri multitude. And in paler form the same limitation haunts A. Sw. too. Breq is on her own now, although able to augment her mentation by connecting with the systems of her ship. A couple of the perkier, livelier elements read like they come from another novel altogether. For instance, 'Translator Dlique, a diplomat for the scary warrior alien race 'the Presger', with her pleasantly scatty inability to remember such human social conventions as sitting up straight and not dismembering people, has a very Iain M. Banks vibe about her. Also Banks-y is the tendency to name alien races after the sort of noises associated with coughing and wheezing ('Geck! 'Rrrrrrr!'). But reminding her readers of Banks runs the risks of reminding her readers of those Banks qualities (verve, humour, energy, spuming inventiveness) that don't particularly characterise this novel.

Leckie's decision to downplay the bang-bang-bang, and aim for a different set of novelistic qualia, a more thoughtful low-key narrative, is commendable. But commendable isn't necessarily the same thing as likeable, and I didn't rattle through A.S. the way I did A.J. Too much gubbins about bowls and plates; the ‘justice, propriety and benefit’ trilectic had its handle cranked a little too often. The whole thing just cooled an already cool set-up. But that's OK. Maybe you like your set-ups on the gazpacho side.

Tajinder Hayer, North Country (2015)

I count myself lucky to have met playwright Taj Hayer at last year's 'Stage the Future' conference on science fiction theatre, organised by Susan Gray and Chris 'Simon' Callow. I'm posting about him today because there's a reading of his new play North Country happening this coming Wednesday (14th Jan) at 9pm at the Arcola Theatre in East London. This is how you get to the Arcola. And this is what the blurb says: "North Country follows three young people over the course of forty years in post-apocalyptic Bradford. Director: Alex Chisholm. Cast: Michael Cahill, Dina Mousawi, Nima Taleghani". All I know is that Taj is a brilliant writer. Go check out his play. You can thank me for the heads-up afterwards.

Diamond Head, Borrowed Time (1982)

Rodney Matthews' artwork for the cover of this album, offered pretty much without comment. Click to embiggen. It's Elric, you know. You remember that Moorcock novel where Elric stands on a gigantic cork, just outside his serpent-awning lair, and shakes his fist at a distant mauve city? I believe it was called Elric the Camp. Actually, that could be pretty much any Elric novel.

Will Wiles, The Way Inn (2014)

It's come to something when postmodern work like this—an absorbingly Ballardian tale of life in those temples of simulacra, high-end corporate chain hotels—is best described as old-fashioned. But old-fashioned, in a queer way, Will Wiles's gem of a novel is. Once upon a time Modernism was the new, and the post-modern glimmered on the cusp of futurity. And then, like turning a corner in Jameson's Westin Bonaventure Hotel, it's suddenly behind us. It was the future for fifteen-minutes. Now it's so last century. There's something significant and, it strikes me, even beautiful about that larger fact, if only because I'd suggest 'the postmodern' still informs and horizons so much of modern life. Mirrors can be flashy and obvious, or weirdly inconspicuous. The pomo dazzle ship is anchored right in front of us, and we unobserve it. The point may be that 'we' have put postmodernism behind us, because 'we' are more comfortable that way. It's still our world, though. It's still where we live. I daresay I'm an outlier here, taste-wise: still plugging away at my own twisted version of the Jamesonian Pomo. I do so because it still seems to me relevant and eloquent. I may be wrong. At any rate, I'm predisposed to like this kind of novel, when it is done well. And Wiles does this novel very well indeed.

Name-checking the simulacrum, there, licenses me to talk about the book's many family resemblances, though I do so not to deprecate its own distinctiveness and originality. One of the pleasantly non-Euclidian aspects of postmodernity is its understanding that originality is achieved through intertextuality, just as sincerity is reached through the Alice's-path of irony. 'Way Inn' is the name of a chain of global hotels catering largely to the travelling businessmen and conference trade. Our hero, Neil Double, loves staying in them; loves the anonymity and predictability, the blandness and the comfort. Prefers staying in the Way Inn by the Excel Centre in East London to staying in his own flat, a few streets away. His job is attending boring business conferences so that his clients don't have to, and at the moment he's at a conference of companies that organise conferences. This sort of recursive 'Ministry of Administrative Affairs' humour runs right through the novel; but it's more than just throwaway comic affectation. Recursion is the Big Theme, and Wiles handles it well. So, he takes his Accidental Tourist, or Up In The Air premise, writes it with a precisely observed, slightly prissy tone that dwells on all the little details of contemporary work-travel life (something like a more British version of Coupland); and having done this, he launches the whole artefact into the universe of Smallcreep's Day. That's a spoiler, I suppose; although Brown's novel is obscure enough for it not to eat into your reading pleasure. I was also reminded of James Lovegrove's early fiction (Days especially, but also The Hope), a little of Borges, and rather more of The Prisoner and Christopher Priest. There's a miasma of Murakami too, though that's quite a common thing in fiction nowadays.

There's real meat to this pared-down vision; lots of observations that chime true so far as your experience (or mine) of staying in this sort of hotel is concerned. Wiles is good on the epiphenomena; on the strange, derationated aura of sexual possibility such hotels generate; on the way their very blankness provides a weird relief from authentic lived experience. The 'twist', if that's the right word, isn't too hard to intuit; and this perhaps means that the first 200 pages are a little too leisurely. Wiles prose is good, but since it trades on a particular kind of precision, or attention to detail, those places where it falls from this high standard are more distracting than they might otherwise be. Sometimes Wiles observations spool on, outstay their welcome, lose their pithiness; and he has a provoking habit of splitting his infinitives ('I felt a strong impulse to simply forget the incident', 111), getting his subjunctive wrong ('...as if this mutual sound was a medium in which we all swam' 77) and using 'enormity' when he means 'enormousness' [249]; though fair play to him, he knows that 'congeries' is a singular form as well as being a plural ('a congeries of spheres', 186). And the novel builds to a splendidly Escher-y, Inceptionesque conclusion. Much recommended.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (dir. Peter Jackson 2014)

My review of this last Hobbit movie is up on Strange Horizons now. Long review short: it's The Hobbit: The Bad Tale of the Five Armies.

So: none of the character motivations make any sense, with the possible exception of Bilbo—and he gets much too little screen time in this, especially considering that the movie's main title refers to him alone. Not that the film's subtitle accurately reflects the movie either. I don't just mean the numeration; I mean the "battle" part. Some long shots of CGI hordes flowing over CGI landscapes aside, this movie has no interest in "battles" as such. It is interested in single combats, for which war, howsoever meager the causus belli, provides the opportunity. This individuation of war is part and parcel of the "defining" nature of these films taken together. They cannot, it turns out, think the collective at all; they can only think the individual—the fan favorite, the key prop, the singular. That's a pity.

It's a pity for the logic of a film called "The Battle of the Five Armies," but it's a bigger pity in terms of the adaptation from Tolkien. Indeed, I wonder if this—rather than the spurious addition of sexy elvish maidens, giant rock chewing worms, and Super Mario-ish combat sequences—is the main mismatch between Tolkien's source text and Jackson's films. Jackson thinks in Romantic and post-Romantic terms, of tragic-heroic heroes and heroines; his vision is fundamentally Byronic and Gothic. Tolkien, though, is a deeply pre-Romantic writer, who thinks in terms of communities, peoples, languages and the idioms of human congregation. These are his great themes, and his evils are things (like the Ring) that cut the individual off from human community.

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[A Message From Our Sponsors]. By way of a PS. The point, in this review, about the balletic quality and function of the choreographed fighting in these movies is cribbed from Professor Robert Eaglestone, of Royal Holloway London, who first noted it (I think on Facebook) with reference to Hobbit 2. If you liked the Hobbit 3 review, you'll find more like it in this volume, for a piffling £3.42. In slightly, though not entirely, more serious mode, The Riddles of the Hobbit (Palgrave 2013) sees me pondering The Hobbit (the book) and other Tolkien-related issues at greater length.

Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road (2014)

This is a really good novel. Hard to summarise, and at times hard to like, it is always written with courage, vividness and power.

It starts out more-or-less near-future SF conventional: Meena, one of our two heroines, wakes in Mumbai with snake-bite wounds fresh on her chest. Convinced she is being targeted for murder, she flees; and her slightly paranoid, cycloptropic character is very well drawn as she makes her way across India to Africa. This entails crossing the Arabian Gulf on a bridge known as “The Trail”: a pontoon made of cleverly designed blocks to harvest wave-energy (walking, and indeed living, on The Trail is supposed to be illegal; but that doesn't stop people). Meena's journey is full of colour and incident, much of it sexual; but it becomes plain early on that she is an extremely unreliable narrator, and that the mysterious trauma from which she is fleeing more complicated than we at first think. The other heroine, Mariama, is younger and a little more reliable; crossing Africa towards Ethiopia, escaping the repeated rape of her mother by the man who insists he owns them. She joins an overland caravan transporting oil and falls under the spell of a beautiful woman called Yemaya. This grown woman engages in sexual acts with child Mariama, and Byrne's handling of this element is rendered hard to read by a refusal to simply repeat the narratives structures of uncomplicated outrage that usually frames accounts of sexual activity with children. That's doubtless Byrne's point (her view of the ghastly consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse is, otherwise, clear-eyed and unsentimental). Saying so doesn't make it any easier to read. The Girl in the Road understands how sex can be oppressive, and also how it can be liberatory; understands how vast the human forces and energies are that it channels. This certainly adds nuance to the story, although it also perhaps muddles the whole. 'How beautiful and revolting sex was,' one character thinks, late in the novel. 'How its juices are both nectar and poision' [193].

More than that about the book is hard to lay down in a short review, partly because Byrne doubles down on her point-of-view characters' unreliability or partiality because much is told via a complex network of mythic and magical allusions (snakes figure a good deal) dreams and magic. The novel goes out of its way to avoid being too pat or obvious, and Byrne's energetic and sometimes over-energised writing style refuses to let the reader settle into any kind of complacent groove, reading-wise. That's a good thing, by and large. We assume that Meena and (the rather more likeable) Mariama are going to meet, or at least that their storylines are going to intercept, even though it becomes apparent that the narratives are set at different times. Byrne's future-third-world felt real to me, though I hold up my hand and confess I'd be the last person to be able to judge the accuracy of portraiture of places and cultures I have never, myself, visited. Byrne's prose is a superior instrument, and she is mostly in charge of it (she's especially good on descriptions of landscape and the natural world; and her dialogue is snappy and well flavoured). I like the bright-eyed way the novel handles its future tech; none of that Frankenstein-syndrome bollocks here. It's people who cause other people hurt, not tech, in Byrne's world. All in all this is a remarkable novel, made more remarkable by the realisation that it's a debut. The road goes ever on.

Gaie Sebold, Shanghai Sparrow (2014)

Enjoyable if slightly underwhelming steampunk adventure: I read it easily and with pleasure, but it left me feeling a bit meh. Stea-meh-punk. Our main P.O.V. character is alt-Victorian orphan thief-and-chancer Eveline Duchen, a sort of female Artful Dodger ('Martha Dodger'?), who lives with a gang of like-wise lightfingered girls presided over by Ma Pether, a sort of female Fagin ('Faye Gin'? Look, I'm coming up empty here ...). She is caught in the process of robbing a sleazy old cleric by a certain Mr Holmforth. Rather than face deportation, Evie agrees to be trained up by Holmforth and the severe Miss Cairngrim so as to be useful to the Empire in unspecified 19th-C spy-y wy-y shenanigans. Evie's backstory bogs down the middle chunk of the book rather; but we learn eventually that Holmforth thinks that Eveline may have inherited a familial ability to harness quasi-magical 'etheric power' (or something), which in turn could be put at the service of expanding the British Empire globe-wide. However much this latter eventually is (we can all agree) a consummation devoutly to be wished, Eveline doesn't actually have the etheric powers for which H. is hoping. She is, though, a pleasantly feisty, resourceful heroine, and the story moves along.

It's almost all London. There are a few interspersed sliver chapters set in the titular Shanghai, and a late flourish of story set in China (reached via super-speed airship, of course). There's a teacher figure called Liu, who was a touch too orientalised-inscrutable for my taste (generally speaking Sebold goes out of her way to be sensitive to issues of gender, race and class; I don't mean to misrepresent what is a work genuinely thoughtful about empire and its problematic). Also I'd say that 312 pages is somewhere between 111 and 112 pages too long for the story Sebold wants to tell: a short, sharp, steamnoir adventure yarn. Not bad. That's a dispiriting two-word judgment for any writer to encounter, I know; but it's better than the latter term on its own.

What's that? What d'ye say? Bof. "Spy-y wy-y" is too a real English idiom. How very dare you.

Big Hero 6 (dir. Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014)

There's a lot of love out there for this movie, so I'll sound merely grumpy when I record that I liked it, but didn't love it. The Japamerican design work is certainly cool; and there are some laugh-aloud moments (I laughed, out loud!) in the middle portion, all of them associated with the Baymax character, and the loudest laughs in my corner of the cinema provoked by a sequence where low battery power renders the medical robot, in effect, drunk. Ah, but. But: I thought the throughline story weak, the moral Bildungsfilm of 14-year-old protagonist Hiro Hamada abrupt to the point of jerkiness (in his anger he reprograms his robot to kill the villain! Then he instantly realises the ethical delinquency of this action, and changes back! That's it!) and unconvincing, and the action sequences weirdly uninvolving. But that's just me. Everyone else loves it. You will too.

And to double-down on my grumpiness by adding-in spoilers. So the 'villain' is driven to villainy by the fact that his daughter has vanished into the weird dimension between the two matter transporter portals. He's reputedly the world's smartest scientist, yet he decides to don a kabuki mask and terrorise the city rather than, let's say, look for a way to retrieve his daughter? We assume from the cues the movie provides that he's been involved in developing said portals, and he's for instance able to resurrect one and set it to destroy a university: but it doesn't occur to him to at least take a peek inside? In a related grump: are we to assume that the Baymax floating inside the mystery dimension, having gifted its green 'good' programme chip back to Hiro, is left only with its kill!-kill!-kill! karate red chip inside it? So that's a killer evil Baymax floating through the mystery dimension to ... wait, really? And here's a more personal snark: in the movie's big car chase sequence, humour is generated by the fact that the driver of the car in which our heroes are fleeing the bad guy is an obsessive-compulsive neat-oid type, who stops at the red lights despite the imminent peril behind him and so on. I, the author of this very post, put exactly that scenario into the central car chase of this novel, published some years ago. I daresay the film-makers never read that particular book. I daresay.

Not just personal grump, though, I think: too much of this movie felt second hand, in a tired way. Hiro flies Baymax through the clouds whooping with delight, and it's all a bit How To Train Your Dragon. Other bits strike too The Incredibles, or Wall-E, or Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs vibes. But, never mind what I say. The film has enjoyed the second-best opening weekend, in terms of gross, of any Disney animation, behind only the juggernaut that is Frozen. So you'll probably love it.

Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising (The Grisha: Book 3) (2014)

This book is not aimed at people like me: middle-aged men with thinning hair and bags beneath their eyes; professors of literature and old farts who have read Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov and think that's how 'it' (let's say, for the sake of argument, Russia) should be done. There are people—other people than I, young people, eager people—for whom books such as this are written. People who don't experience a sinking of the heart at the dead facility with which commercially successful franchises can be mashed together (of 'Grisha' Book 1, The Stylist magazine lamented 'it's like The Hunger Games meets Potter meets Twilight meets Lord of the Rings'. Wait. Did I say 'lamented'? I meant: gushed enthusiastically). There are people for whom Bardugo's Fantasy-Russia 'Ravka' makes a refreshing change to Westeros and District 13 and wherever it is Divergent is set (Chicago, is it?). People who find the Goth intensity and doomed love story of the main character Alina dreamy and wondrous, not cloying and shallow. Bardugo's villain is called 'The Darkling', and it's nothing to do with Keats's bird. It's because he's dark; and Evil in this universe is a literal darkness ('The Shadow Fold') and Good is manifested as a hero with the skills of a 'Sun-Summoner', like the refrain from that song by the cockernay Chimney Sweep in Mary Poppins. Because some people don't find crashing literalness of imagination deadening. They think it's cool. Good luck to those people. May they enjoy this turgid, drawn-out, talky finale to the Grisha trilogy. May they likewise enjoy their lives, and the company of their fellows; may they laugh and dance and drink wine together in the sunshine.

I am not of them.

Jo Walton, My Real Children (2104)

A jonbar-point family saga that construes two versions of its central character and leaves them in a kind of strange superposition. Patricia Cowan grows to maturity through World War 2, in which conflict she loses her only sibling, a brother, as well as her father. After the war she goes to Oxford, where she shows promise. She also meets an emotionally strangulated (because closeted) man called Mark who proposes marriage. She accepts, and doesn't accept, in the two parallel timelines. In the first, she sinks into a miserable life with the horrid, cruel and uncaring Mark, through a series of exhausting births and miscarriages, into a 1960s and 1970s where, late to the party, she embraces Women's Lib and starts to put together a life of her own. In the other timeline, she finds happiness with a woman called Bee, becomes an expert in Italian Renaissance art, and creates an oasis of joy, having children on her own terms via donated sperm.

Its high-concept Sliding-Doors-y premise aside, this is a thoroughly old-fashioned piece of novel writing, which fact is both good and bad for the success of the whole. Amongst the good, and bordering on the very good, is its absorbing, unfussy attention to lived experience, and the way that generates a genuinely moving emotional weight. Also good is the way Walton sets up her sad life/happy life divide—which of course runs the risk of being a little too pat, dramatically speaking—only in order to give it a good shake. In the second half of the novel, Patricia A ('Trish') discovers a strength and purpose that her decades of misery seem almost to have prepared her for: she divorces her ghastly husband and leads a socially useful, engaged life. Patricia B ('Pat') however finds that decades of happiness have not readied her terribly well for the, slightly arbitrary (that's life I suppose) trials of her later decades. But there are downsides too, though, in the way My Real Children is made. One is that the narration sometimes strays into flatness and telling-not-showing. It's not a long novel, and covering more or less the whole 20th-century not once but twice means that we rattle through major events rather too briskly; the total is a summary of life rather than a recreation of lived experience. And the ending is a misfire, which is a shame, because Walton has built up a considerable reservoir of readerly good-will by then. Still, I like that the jonbar-point is not something that has to do with wars or assassinations; I liked the SFnal touches (moon bases, voyages to Mars); and the research was, as far as I could see, impeccable. Walton gets not only the facts and dates right, but the tone of repressed English desperation, of politeness as an idiom of loathing, of the strait-jacket of class and gender. I spotted only one error and it's vanishingly trivial; early in the novel we're told of Patricia at Oxford that 'Tolkien taught her Old English'. He wouldn't have called it that. It was one of his quirks that he studied 'Anglo Saxon' not 'Old English' (J.I.M. Stewart, who was himself taught by JRRT, records this fact in his semi-autobiographical novel Young Patullo (1975), where his based-on-Tolkien don Professor Timberlake rebukes Patullo for referring to Old English: 'you wouldn't call Latin Old Italian, now, would you?') But, now, look: I've gone completely off the point of the review. This is a fine, memorable novel, for all its flaws. It doesn't rise to the force or intensity of Kate Atkinson's peerless Life After Life, but it is, in its quiet way, moving and eloquent.

Mira Grant, Symbiont (2014)

This, the second volume in Grant's "Parasitology" dyad, turns out actually to be the middle volume of an on-the-hoof refashioning of Grant's "Parasitology" series into a trilogy. Maybe vol 3 will turn into a two-part conclusion, which in turn will yield four instalments and so on. I don't know. At any rate, the premise here is that near-future humanity all have special 'SymboGen' tapeworms in their guts to enable them to combat disease, obesity and so on. The tapeworm in question is called 'The Intestinal Bodyguard', which I don't believe would get past the product development Beta Testing stage, name-wise. Personally, I'd have suggested 'Gut Lord', and licensed that Blur song for advertising purposes. Anyway, not to get distracted: the iron law of Frankensteinian Unintended Consequences means that these tapeworms malfunction, become self-aware, clamber up through their host's bodies, killing some people and turning hordes of others into zombies. The z-word is, naturally, never used: the afflicted are called 'sleepwalkers'. But don't let the terminology fool you. This is pure AFZN, an acronym which here stands for Another Fucking Zombie Novel.

Grant deserves credit for the sheer boldness and oddity of writing a tapeworm/human interspecies romance. The thing is, she doesn't take proper advantage of the weirdness of this conceit. Repeating the phrase 'a tapeworm in a human suit' is as far as the novel goes by way of flagging up the David-Cronenberg-ish yuk! potential. In the telling the fact that our narrator is 'a chimera of human and tapeworm, a dead body piloted through the world by an invertebrate' [359] is handled in a clean-as-clean-can-be fashion. The reader is given great wodges of talking, exposition, padding, running about, pseudo science and hand-waving: 'the science was all gibberish delivered by people wearing white coats and serious expressions. The fact that I was actually a tapeworm in a woman-suit made no more or less sense than anything else' [63].

Bottom line: the book stands or falls on how far it convinces you of the resonant pathos of its central conceit, viz. 'I would love him until the day I died and we would never be the same species' [367]. It's an emotional swipe that completely failed to land, for me. Your wormileage may vary. 'And don't forget I'm... I'm also just a parasitic flatworm of the genus Platyhelminthes Cestodea, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.' Without that emotional piquancy, I found reading this long narrative increasingly wearing. It's a book with the texture of cotton wadding, the dialogue is flat, the scenes where the characters are in peril from the zombies sleepwalkers are unexciting, there are various holes in the plot, and I was left with no desire to read volume 3. Thog might like it, though:

His affronted expression [was] melting into guilt. [30]

There was a hand on my shoulder. I didn't want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant admitting that I had a shoulder. [49]

As with the gurney from before, I was strapped to the surface that I was on top of. [158]

I swallowed hard, trying to convince my salivary glands to do their job. [159]

Sherman's eyes raked dispassionately over the three men. [192]

Gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. [273]

Her bare skin [was] humping up into goosebumps as the air-conditioning rolled over it. [364]

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head until my hair whipped against my forehead like a hundred tiny, stinging lashes. [365]

The hot/cold slush in my belly was beginning to melt, becoming a warm, solid mass of resignation. [406]

I shook off the veil of disgust that had settled over me. [434]

My favourite of these is probably the Ernie Wise-ish one from p.158. And so ends the review what I wrote.

Andy Weir, The Martian (2014)

This foresquare piece of Hard SF competent-man-in-astro-peril novel proved one of the 'event' genre titles of 2014 (Ridley Scott's movie, starring Matt Damon as the title character, is set for an Autumn 2015 release). Self-pubbed in 2012 it got the mainstream press treatment last year, but I didn't get round to reviewing it. Ian Sales wondered why this was so on Twitter. I already knew he disliked the book.

@arrroberts I thought it was pretty shit. Should have been called The Potato Man in the Very Cold Place
— Ian Sales (@ian_sales) December 31, 2014

His reaction was the more: shun. I wasn't quite so negative. As I replied:

@ian_sales I quite liked the way it stuck straightforwardly at its task, like its protagonist.
— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) December 31, 2014

Still, it's a metaphorically and in places literally pedestrian work, and the rapture with which it has been greeted in some circles is a tad puzzling. Mark Watney is the NASA astronaut marooned on the Red Planet (I've a 'Watney's Red Barrel' joke in reserve, back here, in case it's needed) who has to keep himself alive by growing potatoes, patching up his kit, and hiking from place to place to avoid dust storms. He's eventually rescued, or else he eventually dies on Mars. I mean, obviously you know without reading the book it's going to be one of those two endings. More, you can easily guess (without reading the book) which ending Weir goes with.

So why did I like this book so much more than Ian 'Chuckles' Sales? It may be because The Potato Man in the Very Cold Place strikes me as an genuinely excellent title for a SF tale (so much so that I may steal it). Contemporary SF, I'd say, could do with little less explosive pow!-pow!-pow! heat, and rather more emphasis on the potatoes side of things. I'm reminded of the Steve Baxter novel (Titan, I think it is) where the whole deep-space exploration plot hinges on the carrots one of the two astronauts grows on board. Baxter is a much better writer of Hard SF than Weir, mind you; and Ridley Scott would do better optioning one of his novels for the blockbuster treatment. But you can't have everything.