From the back cover:

It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. By a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes… and on the way back from her sister’s wedding she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom.

Changing Planes is a (smallish) collection of brief glimpses of these different planes. Nothing much happens in these stories, but they are still very lively and don’t feel like mere descriptions. They are like memories of trips you yourself might have taken, described more eloquently than you could have done. When we describe a foreign country, we do not necessarily tell of particular events, but of the landscape, the people, their habits, their history. And this is what Le Guin does as well. It’s sort of like Gulliver’s Travels but with less action and less absurd worlds – and far more ideas per page.

As always in Le Guin’s books, the worlds are close enough to ours to give us something to recognise and respond to, but alien enough to remain interesting. Here, for example, is a plane where the people give up speech as they grow up, and only children talk. A plane where people migrate north and south with the seasons, like birds, and each life lasts only three (long) seasons. There is a plane where almost everyone is of royal blood, and where the tabloids are full of juicy stories about the few commoners that are left.

The book has that unmistakable Le Guin tone, quietly charming, sophisticated, humourous and somehow wistful. It is like her eyes see a more beautiful world than most of us do. (She is also a bit of a romantic – her nice worlds tend to be pastoral anarchies, and all unpleasantness stems from capitalism and the desire for progress.)

Altogether a lovely book.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Haddon tells the story of an ordinary English family – two parents and their grown children. All of their lives and relationships dissolve into a mess and some start breaking down, all at the same time. George, the father, thinks he has cancer and slowly slides towards madness. His wife has an affair. His divorced daughter is due to get remarried but is now getting cold feet. His son is gay (which George has some trouble with) and has commitment issues.

The result of all this is an understated (very English) melodramatic comedy. It’s funny, I guess, but the whole book just feels so ordinary. Families breaking down, midlife crises, failing relationships… it has all been done before. It’s just ordinary people doing ordinary things. To quote one reviewer on Amazon, “The power of the novel comes from the fact that everyone reading it will surely be able to identify some aspect of their own behaviour or that of someone they know or have known.” Sort of like soap operas, then, I guess. But if I wanted to see aspects of my own behaviour or that of someone I know, all I’d have to do is look up from the keyboard. I don’t need a book for that. I want books to give me something different from the everyday.

Where Haddon’s first book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (which I cannot help comparing A Spot of Bother to), told an unusual story from an interesting perspective, this one has nothing new in it. There are no surprises. The issues are not even explored with any kind of insight, just cheerfully and superficially reported. There’s even the predictable rose-tinted happy ending where all the “right” relationships are mended and all the “wrong” ones ended. Curious Incident had freshness, intensity and vigour, while this book is pleasant and perfectly bland. It makes me think of Hollywood romantic comedies (not that I’ve seen that many, to be honest – I guess it makes me think of my prejudices about Hollywood romantic comedies). And perhaps a movie contract is what he’s got in mind?

OK for light summer reading but not really worth wasting much time on.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

I bought this book based solely on the back cover, not knowing that it’s a classic and has been included (by very respectable SF writers) in lists like “if you are only going to read 3 SF books, here’s the ones you should read”.

Here’s what it says about the book (minus the usual gushing quotes from major newspapers):

The atomic Flame Deluge was over.
The earth was dead.
All knowledge was gone.

In a hellish, barren desert, a humble monk
unearths a fragile link to a twentieth-century
civilization. A hand-written document from the
Blessed Saint Leibowitz that reads:

Pound pastrami
can kraut
six bagels
– bring home for Emma

Civilization has been destroyed, and in a subsequent backlash against the science that enabled this, anyone who can be somehow considered responsible (meaning anyone with an education) is killed. All books are destroyed, and most of the world becomes illiterate.
In an effort to save at least some knowledge, a man named Leibowitz founds a monastic order dedicated to gathering and preserving whatever scraps of written material they can find. Most of it is incomprehensible to them, but they store it all, for many long centuries, in the hopes that some day it will prove useful.

Generally classed as science fiction, but there is no science in it. There’s far more religion than science, in fact. I guess it’s really speculative fiction – what-if fiction. It’s one of the classic post-apocalyptic novels, written in the deepest depths of the cold war and a fear of nuclear destruction. It’s a very pessimistic book in one sense. History keeps repeating itself: the fall of Rome and the loss of the knowledge of antiquity is followed by the Deluge, which in turn is followed by another apocalypse that we see coming at the end of the book. Knowledge is lost, rediscovered, and grotesquely distorted in history’s mirror. Our efforts are futile and our lives ultimately achieve little.

But while the book is about man’s everlasting hubris and folly, it’s also about his hope and persistence. Man knocks himself down flat and still stands up again and again. And while the monks’ lives may be filled with years of futile striving, there is also belief, a sense of meaning and community.

There is a lot of religion in the book, naturally, but although it is generally presented as a force for good, Miller is not uncritical of it. The monks combine commendable persistence and patience with blind veneration of random scraps of paper. Their abbots have a tendency to oppose scientific progress and, later, stubbornly insist that euthanasia is always wrong, etc.

Two quotes that really summarise what I think Miller’s main intended message was (pages 252 and 139 in my edition):

… there was still the serpent whispering: For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods. The old father of lies was clever at telling half-truths: How shall you ‘know’ good and evil, until you shall have sampled a little? Taste and be as Gods. But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

“How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”
“Perhaps […] by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.”

On the whole this is a wonderful book, well written, thoughtful, beautiful, funny and grim and also optimistic. It hasn’t aged at all in the 40 years that have passed since its writing, and it is still absolutely worth reading.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu Chronicles is really a set of three works but since I read them all in one go (the book was a bit difficult to put down) I’m only going to write one review.

First, the plot. Wraeththu is a new race, a mutation from a human base. (Somewhat confusingly an individual of the Wraeththu race is called har, plural hara.) They are stronger than humans, have paranormal powers / magic and are generally rather hard to kill, so they gradually take over most of the world. Men (and only men) can be infected and transformed into hara. There are no female hara; the new race is hermaphroditic. Think vampires but without the bloodsucking and sun-fearing part.

The first book (The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit) takes place in Wraeththu’s early years when the race is young, somewhat goal-less and life is confusing. Appropriately, the protagonist is a teenager who has just been infected. The book is mostly about the love between him and the har who brings him among Wraeththu, but at the same time it’s about the race finding its feet and trying to figure out what it’s about. What parts of humanity do they keep? How can they make the new race something more and better than human?

The second book (The Bewitchments of Love and Hate) is about a pureborn har, one born from hara parents. This is a drama of passion within a household, with couples emerging and breaking, but it’s also the story of the wars of conquest waged by some Wraeththu tribes against humans and other tribes. In a way it’s about Wraeththu sinking back to human level, or lower. Despite the lack of innate gender, gender roles reappear, and despite Wraeththu’s great powers, many do not use them.

The third book (The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire) takes place some years (or decades?) later, and the external world has sort of settled. This is about one har, burdened by guilt and anxieties about things he has done and gone through, and his journey to find answers.

It’s quite hard to summarise the books and hard to pinpoint what genre they are, because they kept changing all the time, and kept telling many different kinds of stories. But to be honest, plot wasn’t really the book’s strong side. Some characters do strange things for no particular reason and generally just act weird. The third book is the weakest of the three – the plot is really quite predictable and repetitive. It’s almost as if a good writer was given the challenge to write a book based on a bad plot. She mostly succeeds, but the ending quite dissatisfying.

One of the more flawed plot elements is Wraeththu magic. It’s frequently referred to, but rarely used in practice. You’d think something so life-changing would affect their daily doings more. It’s also unclear how their magical practices and rituals would have arisen. Likewise the rest of Wraeththu culture, in particular their tribes. It seems a bit unrealistic that such strong culture and so distinctive tribes would emerge out of nothing so quickly.

Character portrayal on the other hand is far stronger than the plot. There are many charismatic characters, and they all get a lot of space to develop. Many characters recur throughout the three books, which is why I think the books really work better as a whole than they would if read separately.

The hara all have a certain wildness, they are filled with passion and they’re not afraid to show it, which generally makes for a gripping and intense reading experience. Much of it feels quite raw and honest, somehow, even though it’s a fictional book about a fictional race. There is also a sensuous, ever-present eroticism, sometimes stronger, sometimes fainter. A lot is about sex and sexuality seen from many angles – how it relates to love, to power, to beauty; sex as a weapon, sex as healing, sex as magic, etc.

Despite the violence and wildness this somehow felt like a female book. Sexless vampires and gay men tend to be female topics, for starters, but the whole thing felt like it was observed by a woman. For some reason I thought Storm Constantine was a man and I tried to reconcile this with the female feeling of the book and sort of failed, and now I found out she actually is a woman. That explains things.

Wraeththu isn’t exactly what I expected – from my hasty browsing in the bookshop I saw that this was about a new, magical race, but I got the impression that it would be more cerebral and far less sensual. But I’m pleased with what I found instead. Despite the book’s weaknesses (not just the weak plot but also spelling errors and – horror of horrors – a glossary at the end) the whole thing is written with such skill and passion that the characters simply come alive (cliched, I know) and I couldn’t help caring for them and feeling strongly for them. As soon as I’d finished it, I considered re-reading it, and I know I will, sooner or later.

Green Man Review has a good review that does more than rehash the plot.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

After Arcadia, I thought that Tom Stoppards other plays would also be worth reading. I approached this one with great expectations, but was really disappointed.

The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the play are, of course, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. Stoppard’s play takes place behind the scenes of Hamlet, with Ros and Guil hanging around and spending most of the time wondering confusedly about what’s going on, why they exist, what’s expected of them etc.

The play is strongly inspired by Waiting for Godot, which I didn’t much enjoy either. Absurdism is not for me. And the play is so obviously a young playwright’s first work, where he is trying hard to be clever and mature and funny. The result is both clever and funny but above all I found it very affected. He was trying too hard, simply. (And absurdist existential angst and confusion about the meaning of everything somehow just seems like such a teenage subject for a first work.) Although both the humour and cleverness obviously seemed genuine to other people because the play won all sorts of awards and apparently made Stoppard instantly famous.

After one total hit and one total miss I’m not giving up on Stoppard but I will be taking more care when choosing the next work to read.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

My first encounter with David Mitchell was Cloud Atlas: a strikingly unconventional and well-written book.

Black Swan Green is nothing like Cloud Atlas. This is a conventional book telling the story of a normal young boy: Jason, aged 13, living with his parents and older sister in a village in Worcestershire (in the middle of nowhere, that is). It deals with the usual early-teens anxieties: growing up, fitting in, the puzzling creatures called girls, etc. There is also a fair bit of English 1980s nostalgia, with references to pop music and other products of that time.

Jason struggles more than most boys at his age. He starts the game with two handicaps – he writes poetry, and even worse, he stammers. (But he only stammers if the word begins with an N or an S, so he thinks one sentence ahead and rephrases it to avoid those words. Which, of course, doesn’t work when he is asked in maths class how much 9 times 11 is. When that happens, Jason chooses to appear stupid rather than stammer.) The struggle to be popular, or at least not get beaten up or called gay or laughed at, takes up a lot of his energy. The petty cruelties of his friends are compounded by the equally petty quarrels of his parents. But the tone of the book is nevertheless positive, and Jason is never whiny. Throughout the book he slowly matures, growing a backbone and some character.

It’s not a fabulous book, but still a pretty good one. There is a believable character, easy to sympathise with, a fair amount of humour and a lot of raw honesty. There is enough happening to keep the story interesting, and it’s well enough written. But on the whole it just seems relatively… ordinary.

The main shortcoming was the boy’s “poetic” descriptions of things around him. He jumps too abruptly between teenage slang and this overblown self-conscious lyricism. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a 13-year-old with literary aspirations might produce. I don’t really know, I haven’t read anything actually written by a 13-year-old with literary aspirations.

Here’s a representative sample:

In my parents’ creamy bedroom I sat at Mum’s dressing table, spiked my hair with L’Oréal hair mousse, daubed an Adam Ant stripe across my face, and held her opal brooch over one eye. I looked through it at the sun for secret colours nobody’s ever named.

Salon’s review told me something about the author that I didn’t know:

… the autobiographical tone of “Black Swan Green” could be false, another one of Mitchell’s uncanny impressions, but it writhes with a loathing that would be mighty hard to fake.

[…]

All this amounts to a damning portrait of the pettiness of British middle-class life and an excellent argument for why a sensitive, aesthetically inclined young man might run off to Japan (as Mitchell did). Though it’s less playful and complex than his earlier books, it also feels more emotionally rooted – even if the emotion it’s rooted in is a still-raw disgust.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Fragile Things is a collection of short stories, with a few poems thrown in for good measure. Most are about small adventures or odd events – but there are also vignettes inspired by a Tory Amos CD and instructions for how to survive if you should find yourself in Faery. They are all unmistakably Gaimanish, with humour, imagination, poetry and often a touch of sweetness. Quite a few of them are stories about stories, about writers and writing, or about fairy tales, including a few retellings of old stories in shapes where you might not even recognise them.

All were worth reading and many were really good, but few were the kind that sticks in your mind forever. Still, worth reading for the gentle sensation of pleasure.

As I’ve noticed before, it’s hard to say much about a book of short stories…

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

“The Importance of Touch”.

This chapter goes through the development of the sense of touch, which is the first sense to emerge and the most advanced one at birth. It also covers the related senses of pain and temperature. Touching is shown to be immensely important for the normal development of a baby, with babies raised in isolation growing up stunted physically, mentally and emotionally (or dying in early age).

A few interesting facts I learned:

• Nerve signals for touch, temperature, pain and proprioception go along very similar, parallel pathways.
• Touch signals are mapped to a body map in the brain (which I knew). This map needs stimulation to develop: if it gets no signals from a certain part of the body, the corresponding neurons do not develop normally. In humans this development happens before the baby is born.
• The sense of touch is diffuse in babies. Over time that map of the body grows sharper and babies get better at distinguishing which part of the body they felt the touch on.
• Touch develops head to toe. The face is most sensitive to begin with, and remains more sensitive than the hands until the child is 5 years old.
• Babies (human and animal) need touch for their normal development. Babies who get adequate food and medical attention, but are not touched and held, grow up sick and stunted. Massage is beneficial for babies and children with all sorts of medical problems.

(more…)

Dave is a cab driver in London. He ends up in a semi-accidental marriage that slowly goes downhill and becomes more and more miserable, until the couple separate and Dave cannot meet his son any more. This leads to a severe depression and Dave suffers a nervous breakdown. During that period he feels compelled to write a book containing his most important thoughts about the world – most of them strongly coloured by his broken marriage and by cabbie lore.

Hundreds of years later in a post-apocalyptic England (flooded rather than nuked, unlike most post-apocalyptic visions) the book is found and taken as gospel. The entire world is organised around Dave’s misogynistic ravings about men living separately from women and children being in shared custody, and women being evil bitches. That, and the Knowledge. The symbol of the religion is the Wheel, the priests are called Drivers, and driving terms have permeated all parts of the language.

The book cuts between these two stories.

The future story is a satire of religion – a book of dubious provenance is taken as god’s literal truth, and interpreted by men both literally and figuratively. Rules that made sense in a specific situation hundreds of years ago are applied to everything. As a satire it was very straightforward, unsubtle and not particularly interesting.

The degeneration of society and the devolution of language get a lot of attention from the author. Terms half-understood are applied to only remotely related concepts: all trousers are called jeans, and all lamps are called lectrics. Some of these are quite obvious, whereas others are so obscure that Self has felt it necessary to include a glossary at the end. (Which sort of brings to mind cheap Tolkien knockoffs with made-up languages.) The future world speaks mokni (a derivation of Cockney) which the author spells phonetically.

– Owzabaht Dave, Mummi, vairs ee?
– Ees sittin infruntuv uz, luv, but we carn C im coz ees invizzibull.
– But ee can C uz, carn ee, Mummi?
– O yeah, mi luv, ee can C uz, ee sees uz in iz mirra.

The premise was interesting and the writing too, but the book as a whole was not my kind of book.

It’s a rather depressing read. I do not like books about miserably failing marriages and quarrelling couples. And the future, with its society crippled and brutalised by stupid rules, offers little hope either.

I also felt that I never really got a clear picture of what that future is like. And the transition, the emergence of a world where a religion is born from a single copy of a single book and then proceeds to conquer the entirety of England, is hard to envisage and hard to believe.

In the early chapters one has the joy of seeing the connections between the now and the future, and guessing at what will happen in Dave’s life to make him leave such a dismal legacy. But after the initial direction has been set, the rest never goes anywhere much, and the book becomes a bit tedious. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker was, in my opinion, a better realisation of the degenerated-future, degenerated-language idea.

Amazon UK, Amazon US

I never buy comics – I don’t think I’ve bought a single one. Eric, on the other hand, buys lots, and sometimes gives one to me to read. “You might like this one.” Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, but by now he knows enough about my taste to get it right almost all the time. Gemma Bovery was one of his recent recommendations, and I liked it a lot. Gemma Bovery is small and light-weight but very well done and I really enjoyed reading it.

To be honest I’m not even sure if it qualifies as a comic or even a graphical novel. It floats somewhere in the no-man’s-land between an illustrated book and a graphical novel. There is about as much text as there is illustration, both are equally important, and often the two are integrated. Some parts of the story are told through both channels; others only through one.

As you may be able to tell from the title, the story is inspired by Madame Bovary. Like that book, it is set in France, and there is a frustrated young woman with a love affair and a tragic death. Except in this case the woman is English, and the action takes place in the present time. All the people in the village notice the similarity between names Emma Bovary and Gemma Bovery, and then one man notices striking similarities in their lives as well.

The story itself is not particularly complex or exciting or even that interesting, to be honest. But it is expertly told, using the two mediums – image and text – to great effect, and utilising the strengths of each one. Pictures describe places and faces and scenes, while text sections narrate thoughts, feelings and sequences of events.

The drawings are simple but expressive in black and white and lots of gray. Every detail is carefully chosen, observed and exhibited; there is nothing superfluous. The same goes for the text. And both are often very funny. I am quite impressed that one person has done both, and done them so well: comics are often collaborations between a writer and an artist (or more).

As an extra twist, the text and captions freely mix French and English. The French speak French; the English speak English. Longer and more complicated French utterances are translated, but many shorter ones are not. I guess the reader is expected to either ignore those, or deduce their meaning from the rest of the conversation. So for full enjoyment of the book you should probably learn some French. I especially liked the way the characters sometimes read a text in the other language and struggle with colloquial expressions that any native speaker wouldn’t think twice about, but that most dictionaries would exclude. It’s a feeling I recognise very well!

It would also be helpful to have read Madame Bovary. I read it some time in high school and only remember the plot vaguely – enough to recognise the parallels between the major plot turns of the two works, but I am sure I missed a lot of more subtle allusions.

If you’re interested, and perhaps want to hear more about the plot, you can find another good review here (good both in the sense that it is a positive review, and in the sense that it is well-written).

Amazon US, Amazon UK.