Book Review | The Humans by Matt Haig

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It's hardest to belong when you're closest to home...

One wet Friday evening, Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world's greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears.

When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he's a dog.

Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder? Can the species which invented cheap white wine and peanut butter sandwiches be all that bad? And what is the warm feeling he gets when he looks into his wife's eyes?

***

You ask me, we spend an inordinate amount of our lives wondering what the meaning of life might be.

Yes, it's a crucial question, and I'm as ready as the next person to find the answer at last. But I do wonder if we aren't wasting our time thinking along these lines, because the meaning of life must be different for every living thing. Better to ask, instead, what it means to be human; to consider what makes us different from the primates we were, and everything else on Earth in turn.

Being human is all we know, of course, so it's hard to tell... to guess what sets us apart from (if not necessarily above) all creatures great and small. Love is a lovely answer, but other animals clearly have that capacity. Our ability to appreciate beauty is another easy idea, but who can say with anything resembling certainty that sheep aren't also in awe of this wonderful world?

Feel free to disagree, but I've seen them staring... sheep with eyes that could burn holes in souls.

I may be in no position to unpick these mysteries, yet I'd suggest that a large part what makes us us is our eternal quest to discover thus. That wondering what it means to be human, as Matt Haig does in his first narrative since The Radleys, may indeed be what makes the human experience unique.

"This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It's about matter and anti-matter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It's about a forty-one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human. 

"But let me state the obvious. I was not one." (p.3)

So begins The Humans. With an unnamed alien invader assuming the identity of Professor Andrew Martin, a mathematician whose study of prime numbers has attracted the unwelcome attention of a faraway race in possession of intellect and technology leaps and bounds beyond our own.

That said, the doppelganger—who we'll call Professor Andrew Martin for the sake of simplicity—still spends the first 50 pages of Haig's latest butt-naked and bingeing on stolen Pringles. He doesn't even get away with his ill-gotten gains: when he refuses to reveal his reasons, knowing that ignorance of human culture and customs is the very sort of excuse that'll land him in an insane asylum, the police arrest him with their usual elegance. Which would be no big thing, except Martin isn't simply visiting. He has work to do.

He's been embedded, we learn, because the Professor—before he was summarily replaced by an alien—made a discovery that could potentially change everything: he solved the Riemann Hypothesis; acquired a mathematical formula others have decided we lack the enlightenment to wield wisely. Martin himself is no longer a problem, obviously, but what about his family? What do they know? What then about his friends, and his colleagues at Cambridge? The visitors do not want to wipe us all out, but they need this knowledge—in whatever form—gone.

"Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason. 

"Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion. 

"Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation. 

"Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness. 

"Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can't just let the universe do what it wants to do, because we will be inside it for eternity." (p.95)

Easier said than done, I dare say. Because in order to determine the extent of humanity's exposure to the aforementioned forbidden fruit, the replacement Professor will have to figure out what makes people tick... but in trying to pass for a person, he basically becomes one. And as a person, he starts to question his mission, which is to destroy everything that could lead back to the problematic primes, and everyone—up to and including Martin's wife and son.

Though its specifics are assuredly absurd, The Humans' general premise is if anything all too human. Born, as the author acknowledges in an inspiring afterword, from a "dark well" of depressive tendencies, Haig's latest examines a fear I warrant we've all felt to a greater or lesser extent: the thought that we are alone in the world; that what makes us who we are also serves to makes us unlike anyone else.

Then again, no-one in the milieu of The Humans is more set apart from humanity than an assassin from another planet, and even he finds something to hold on to—something vibrant and violent that describes what makes each of our lives worthwhile. He develops feelings for the family he has accidentally inherited: for Isobel, Martin's long-suffering love, and Gulliver, their teenage tearaway.

I had a harder time caring for these puny humans than I ever did our extra-terrestrial narrator, I'm afraid. The Professor's wife and child fill their roles, but little more. Right down to their quirks, they're just too typical to buy into entirely. In all honesty I was more interested in Newton—a markedly more convincing character, also a dog.

Martin, however, develops in a very real way, going from the unwitting idiot at the heart of the first act's protracted farce to a sinister figure before becoming a real boy before our eyes, and taking on all the good and bad that decision denotes. His speech patterns may be stilted, his emotional awareness basic at best, yet his outsider's perspective gives him a refreshing lack of expectations. With "no reference points [and no notion] of how things were, at least here," (p.59) some of the insights resulting are remarkable.

Contemplating a Mars bars, he concludes that "This was [...] a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away." (p.13) Later on, courtesy a copy of Cosmopolitan, he ruminates about belief:

"Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth." (p.87)

The Humans is as serious a story as it is endearing, as ordinary as it appears aberrant. It's thoughtful rather than provocative, funnier than anything else I've read in 2013, and truly touching, ultimately. The introductory silliness goes on a little long, and I do wish Matt Haig had invested more meaningfully in a number of the narrative's more contrived characters, but in every other respect this is a book that will remind you of what it means to be human.

And that's a beautiful thing, I think.

***

The Humans
by Matt Haig

UK Publication: May 2013, Canongate
US Publication: July 2013, Simon & Schuster

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News | The Life and Death of Dial H

Regular readers will recall that I came back to comic books a couple of years ago, after entirely abandoning what had become a bad habit at best: a pull list of single issues that broke the bank each and every week, and hardly interested me beyond satisfying my not-so-secret completionist streak.

It was something I needed to do, in truth, but I realised, relatively recently, that I'd thrown the baby out with the bathwater; that I'd gotten shot of a bunch of good comics along with all the bad books that had driven me away from the form in the first place. So I resolved to give the whole rigmarole another go.

And I'm glad I did. I'm glad because I've read some stonking good comic books since I made the decision discussed above. Denise Mina and Andy Diggle have hooked me on Hellblazer; I'm midway through Y: The Last Man, and it's getting better and better; Global Frequency was a bunch of fun; American Vampire and The Unwritten are pretty brilliant; and I enjoy a bunch of the Batman books.

But as it happens, everyone isn't a winner, so of course I've read some utter rubbish in the interim. I won't name names.

In any case, Dial H. As a devout scholar of the school of Mieville, Dial H excited me immensely. I followed the news of its conception and development with baited breath. Though I tend to consume my comics as and when they're collected, I bought the first issue as soon as I could.

On reflection, that wasn't the best introduction to what is a rather byzantine book. Afterwards, I resolved to wait for the first trade, to give Dial H a proper second shot. Into You finally came out in April, and I had a bit of fun with it, I admit. But on the whole? I'd have to say no. Or else, not yet.

I'll read the next collection when it's published, I guess — I do like to see a thing through, and knowing Mieville the book will get better as it goes — but if I'm honest, yesterday's news, that Dial H had been cancelled, was rather a relief. I'm truly sorry that the audience wasn't interested in something so different and ambitious, but let's face it: Mieville didn't make it easy. I've read almost everything he's written, and even I had a hard time figuring out whether or not Dial H was decent.

On the one hand, it's a shame that Dial H didn't work out. On the other — the glass half full hand — this frees up the esteemed author to refocus on the prose fiction I fell for in the first place, because I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the first year since 2008 that he hasn't published a new novel.

So roll on news of whatever Mieville's been working on since the release of Railsea. I still hold out hope that he'll go back to Bas-Lag, but I'll take whatever I can get... up to and including the second Dial H trade. In my heart of hearts, however, I can't help but feel relieved rather than bereaved by this news.

Is that mean-spirited of me?

Have you ever been perversely pleased to see something end, and if so, when?

Book Review | Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger

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"Once there was a Postman who fell in love with a Raven."

So begins the tale of a postman who encounters a fledgling raven while on the edge of his route and decides to take her home. The unlikely couple falls in love and conceives a child - an extraordinary raven girl trapped in a human body. The raven girl feels imprisoned by her arms and legs and covets wings and the ability to fly. Betwixt and between, she reluctantly grows into a young woman, until one day she meets an unorthodox doctor who is willing to change her.

One of the world's most beloved storytellers has created a dark fairytale full of wonderment and longing. Illustrated with Audrey Niffenegger's bewitching etchings and paintings, Raven Girl explores the bounds of transformation and possibility.

***

As oddly modern as Audrey Niffenegger's third novel-in-pictures is in many respects, the story at its core is as old as the 17th century aquatint technique she uses to illustrate it. Older, even. In the beginning, boy meets girl. They become friends... their relationship strengthens... and in due course, a strange babe is made. 

I say strange because it so happens that the girl the boy falls for is a bird: a fledgling raven who has fallen out of the nest. Seeing her, a caring mailman worries that she's broken, so he takes her home, cares for her as best he can. What develops between them then seems straight out of a wonderfully weird take on Aesop's Fables. 

“The postman was amazed by the intelligence and grace of the Raven. As she grew and lived in his house and watched him, she began to perform little tasks for him; she might stir the soup, or finish a jigsaw puzzle; she could find his keys (or hide them, for the fun of watching him hunt for them). She was like a wife to him, solicitous of his moods, patient with his stories of postal triump and tragedy. She grew large and sleek, and he wondered how he would live without her when the time came for her to fly away.” (pp.18-19) 

But when the time comes, the raven remains. As a matter of fact, she was hardly hurt in the first place; she stayed with the lonely postman for her own reasons. 

Time passes. Magic happens. 

In short, a child is born: a young human woman with the heart of a bird. Her parents love her utterly, give her everything they're able. Still, she longs to share her life with others like her. But there are none... she's the only Raven Girl in whole wide world! 

"The Raven Girl went to school, but she never quite fit in with the other children. Instead of speaking, she wrote notes; when she laughed she made a harsh sound that startled even the teachers. The games the children played did not make sense to her, and no one wanted to play at flying or nest building or road kill for very long.  

"Years passed, and the Raven Girl grew. Her parents worried about her; no boys asked her out, she had no friends." (p.36) 

So far, so fairy tale. But Niffenegger does ultimately capitalise on the aspects of the uncanny at the heart of her narrative. Later in life, the Raven Girl goes to university and learns about chimeras from a visiting lecturer, who says the very thing she's needed to hear for years. "We have the power to improve ourselves, if we wish to do so. We can become anything we wish to be. Behold [...] a man with a forked lizard tongue. A woman with horns. A man with long claws," (p.43) and so on. It only takes a little leap for us to foresee a girl with working wings. 

And so Raven Girl goes: right down the rabbit hole of body horror. 

It's a somewhat discomfiting turn for the tale to take, but soon one senses this is what the author hopes to explore: the book's beatific beginnings are just a way of getting there. Thus, they feel slightly superfluous—an assertion evidenced by the lack of artwork illustrating the opening act. At 80 pages, Raven Girl is the longest of the three picture books Niffenegger has created to date, but not out of narrative necessity. 

When Raven Girl finally takes flight, half its length has elapsed, but the half ahead is certainly superb. This may not be a fable for the faint-hearted, yet it stands a strangely beautiful tale all the same... of light glimpsed in the night, of hope when all looks to be lost. As the author attests:

"Fairy tales have their own remorseless logic and their own rules. Raven Girl, like many much older tales, is about the education and transformation of a young girl. It also concerns unlikely lovers, metamorphoses, dark justice, and a prince, as well as the modern magic of technology and medicine." (p.78) 

It is this last which sets off the plot of Niffenegger’s new novel-in-pictures: the idea of science as supernatural after a fashion. Together with the muted elements of the macabre aforementioned, Raven Girl feels like kid-friendly Cronenberg, and the artist’s moody aquatints very much feed into this reading. 

No doubt Audrey Niffenegger is most known as the mind behind The Time Traveler's Wife, but her latest emerges instead from the manifest imagination of the artist who produced The Three Incestuous Sisters, for instance. Like that dark objet d'art, Raven Girl is an insidious intermingling of words and pictures to be treasured: a beautifully produced, lavishly, lovingly illustrated fairy tale for the modern day—and very much of it, also.

***

The Raven Girl
by Audrey Niffenegger

UK Publication: May 2013, Jonathan Cape
US Publication: May 2013, Abrams ComicArts

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Book Review | The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

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The 1st Wave took out half a million people.

The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.

The 3rd Wave lasted a little longer. Twelve weeks... four billion dead.

In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people.

And the 5th Wave? No one knows. But it's coming.

On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs. Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive... until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, he may be Cassie's only hope.

***

When they came, everything changed. 

But the Arrival did not happen in the blink of an eye. It took weeks for the mothership first glimpsed at the outer reaches of our solar system—as yet a speck among faraway stars—to glide its way to its intended destination: Earth. 

Humanity spent this time speculating. Watching endlessly looped footage of an alien eye in the sky until we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were not alone in the universe. What had brought these unexpected guests to our corner of the cosmos? No one knew. All too soon, they would. In the intervening period, a lot of pointless posturing, a surplus of purposeless panic. But in truth, nobody had a clue what to do. 

"We figured the government sort of did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced, like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about.  

"Some people nested. Some people ran. Some got married. Some got divorced. Some made babies. Some killed themselves. We walked around like zombies, blank-faced and robotic, unable to absorb the magnitude of what was happening." (p.19-20) 

Would it have mattered, at the end of the day, if people had been better prepared? Who's to say? What happened next would probably have happened anyway. 

Long story less long, the aliens waged war. Their first strike took out our electronics, and to them, the half a million casualties that came of this incident was simply a happy coincidence. After all, billions more would be dead within days. 

Cassie and her family got off lightly: they survived. For a little while, at least. Seeking safety in numbers, they hole up in a camp commanded by an old soldier, but when his buddies from the army arrive, they come bearing Others. Cassie's dad dies violently before her eyes, and she has no choice but to hide when her baby brother is taken away in a repurposed school bus. 

An experience like this is apt to do one of two things to you. It may break you—make you more afraid, make you an easier target—or it might make you. Cassie comes into her own as a part that latter category. The awful things she's seen harden her: 

"When I first came to the camp, I heard a story about a mom who took out her three kids and then did herself rather than face the Fourth Horseman. I couldn't decide whether she was brave or stupid. And then I stopped worrying about it. Who cares what she was when what she is now is dead?" (p.108) 

Having resolved not to be some little lost girl in the world, our lonesome leading lady learns how to fight, how to shoot, how to kill. She means to use these skills to save her missing sibling Sammy, assuming he's still alive. Sadly, a sniper with other ideas spots her, putting paid to Cassie’s plan. But she does not die. She wakes up in the care of a beguiling farm boy called Evan Walker. A fellow survivor... or so he says. 

I'm sure I need not add that there's more to this young man than meets the eye. 

The subsequent sequence seems straight out of Stephen King's Misery—neither the first nor the last narrative that Rick Yancey's new novel recalls. At points, I was reminded of The Passage; there are some very I Am Number Four moments in store; an entire section inspired by Ender's Game; and—inescapably I dare say—The Hunger Games comes up. Cassie is not quite Katniss, but to begin with, they're certainly similar. 

The 5th Wave is a hodgepodge, in short: an amalgamation—however canny—of bits and pieces borrowed from other books. But somehow, it works. Somehow, it makes for an exhilarating reading experience, as relentless and harrowing and inspiring as any of the fictions aforementioned. 

I'd ascribe its success to character and narrative in equal part. The plot is perhaps a little predictable, but it moves like a man on fire, allowing us truly few opportunities to dwell on what's next; even when we see something coming, there's another twist waiting in the wings. The nature of the titular fifth wave, for instance, is far from the revelation intended, but when the hammer finally falls, it's still shocking. As Cassie concludes, "There's an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don't buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts." (p.310) 

Yancey isn't afraid to take his tale to some dark places, either. In fact, in the first chapter, Cassie murders a man by accident, which sets the scene for a procession of tragedies both unimaginably massive and indescribably minor. The effect these have on our protagonist is tangible. She may begin an innocent, but she becomes something far less simple than this, and her development, though accelerated, is never less than credible. I dare say I'd take Cassie's complexities over the meandering of the Mockingjay any day. 

The 5th Wave is primarily Cassie's narrative, but there are other characters, of course. First and foremost, let me introduce you to Zombie: 

"There is the snow, tiny pinpricks of white, spinning down.  

"There is the river reeking of human waste and human remains, black and swift and silent beneath the clouds that hide the glowing green eye of the mothership.  

"And there's the seventeen-year-old high school football jock dressed up like a soldier with a high-powered semiautomatic rifle [...] crouching by the statue of a real soldier who fought and died with clear mind and clean heart, uncorrupted by the lies of an enemy who knows how he thinks, who twists everything good in him to evil, who uses his hope and trust to turn him into a weapon against his own kind." (pp.318-319) 

I'll let you find out how this happens first-hand, but Zombie is a fine counterpoint to Cassie. He doesn't have her depth, however his perspective proves crucial, offering an alternate angle on the alien invasion—plus he's better supported than our central character, by Ringer and Dumbo and Teacup among others... including a little boy known as Nugget. 

Whenever there's a lull in the principle plotline, Zombie's part of the overall arc is more than able to take the strain, and it's insidious stuff, ultimately; as discomfiting in its way as Cassie's strained relationship with her so-called saviour. Meanwhile waiting for these disparate perspectives to meet somewhere in the middle is obscenely appealing. 

Without giving anything else away, let me say I love how Yancey resolves it all. The 5th Wave is the beginning of a trilogy, so spanners are surely in the works, but the finale is so satisfying that I'd be perfectly happy if the series ended here. 

The 5th Wave is a fair way from original, admittedly. If you're looking for new ideas, you're not likely to find them here, I fear. That said, this is no ignominious knock-off, more a fearless fusion of initially familiar futures, bolstered by smart, commanding characters and an admirably alarming narrative that chills as often as it thrills. 

I say roll on the next wave of Rick Yancey's YA invasion, because the first phase is tremendously entertaining.

***

The 5th Wave
by Rick Yancey

UK Publication: May 2013, Penguin
US Publication: May 2013, Putnam

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But I Digress | The Limits of Cinema

It's been a while since I blogged about movies.

Truth be told, though, it's been a while since I saw anything particularly interesting.

When I was a much younger man, I'd watch a movie every night, almost without exception. Admittedly, a lot of the movies I watched during these grass-is-greener years were utter rubbish... but I knew that, even then. To an extent, I revelled in it, because I was also aware that I was living through a period of unequalled freedom; that it would be a long, long time before I had so many hours to spend on nothing of note.

That's very much the case these days, I'm afraid. 

When the opportunity to sit down with a film presents itself, the first thought that crosses my one track mind is: That's however many hours I could spend reading the next book in the review queue! And all too often, my nasty adult brain baulks at the prospect. Invariably, I end up doing something responsible instead. Mowing the lawn or preparing a class or rewriting a review.

I do realise that going to the cinema isn't in itself an irresponsible act, but I do feel like a negligent person when I follow my heart instead of my head. And perhaps that's played into my feelings about the occasional films I have seen this year. I thought Cloud Atlas would be awesome. It wasn't. Ambitious, absolutely, but really rather flat. Mama, meanwhile, is a singularly silly film.

I can't even remember what else there was.

These are films I would have watched quite happily when I was a smaller Scotsman. Enjoyed, even. Today, they feel like a waste. Of my time, which obviously there's less of than there was then.

I'm getting old, I guess.

On the other hand, I realise how self-fulfilling my attitude to movies at the moment is. If I won't give a film the time of day, then of course I won't see one that changes my mind. So for the last little while, I've been on the hunt for something extraordinary.

Today, I have likely candidate, the poster of which was recently released:

Fingers crossed it doesn't disappoint!

Not unrelatedly, I've just ordered a copy of Upstream Color. Primer blew my mind back in the day, and though I don't expect that of this, something reminiscent is all I really need. A reminder that cinema can be as profound and affecting as the best written fiction.

Because it can, can't it?

Book Review | Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough

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When a rotting torso is discovered in the vault of New Scotland Yard, it doesn't take Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, long to realise that there is a second killer at work in the city where, only a few days before, Jack the Ripper brutally murdered two women in one night.

Though just as gruesome, this is the hand of a colder killer, one who lacks Jack's emotion.

And, as more headless and limbless torsos find their way into the Thames, Dr Bond becomes obsessed with finding the killer. As his investigations lead him into an unholy alliance, he starts to wonder: is it a man who has brought mayhem to the streets of London, or a monster?

***

Generations hence, it's entirely possible that people will revere 2013 as the year of Sarah Pinborough. She's been absolutely everywhere of late—the first of her modern-day fairytales, Poison, was published just this month, merely a few weeks after North America's introduction to The Forgotten Gods in A Matter of Blood—and that trend looks to continue for the foreseeable future: Ace Books plan to release the remainder of said supernatural noir trilogy before Christmas, meanwhile Poison will promptly be joined by Charm and Beauty too.

And then there's Mayhem. Mayhem, which I enjoyed more than any of the Sarah Pinborough I've had the pleasure of reading previously. It's a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign. But this is essentially atmospheric set dressing: Mayhem revolves around another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him, or her... or it, as the case may be.

At the outset, the author confesses to playing slightly fast and loose with the truth, and I want to thank her for that: like one of the characters caught up in the terrible events Mayhem in a sense supplements, I may never have gone near water again otherwise, and that could've proved... problematic.

In any event, it's 1888, and Saucy Jack is the talk of the town. London, however, is as loud as it is cowed, as Inspector Moore muses whilst discussing the state of play in the pub:

"Londoners were strange folk, he had concluded a long time ago, never more alive than when in the presence of death. The food stands which had sprung up at the murder sites, the street theatres recreating the tableaux of the unfortunate women's deaths: entertainment crafted by the grip of terror. Was it too much, perhaps, he wondered as he looked at the glazed eyes and flushed faces of those who filled the surrounding tables. There was something amiss in the people of the city, even he could sense that: a hysteria maybe. There had been too much violence done on London's streets this year. It needed to slow down" (pp.64-65)

It does anything but. Within weeks, Jack is back, and in the intervening period it's become clear that the torsos in the Thames are the work of another murderer—thanks in part to the efforts of Dr. Thomas Bond, a Scotland Yard surgeon who sees "something... other," (p.88) something still more chilling than the Ripper killings, in the dismembered body parts he has examined.

Bond—our protagonist, and the only character whose chapters are related from the first person—is an insomniac opium eater who soon becomes obsessed with the Thames Torso case. When in the course of supplying his spiralling habit in a dingy den one evening he meets a man in a long black coat, he's struck with the certainty that he has seen this stranger before. Eventually he connects the suspect to the scene of a previous crime... but Bond doesn't immediately tell his superiors. He opts to follow the fellow himself.

Not right down the rabbit hole, but slowly, so. Little does our hero realise that the old man is hot on the heels his own embodiment of evil. With a perfectly straight face he refers to it as "a parasite [...] An ancient wickedness. Something from a legend almost forgotten. It is rotten. Old, earthy—but it is sentient; it wants our reactions to it. It wants us to hunt it. It enjoys the game." (p.196) Bond isn't so far gone as to swallow the crazy stranger's story whole. As he admits, "this nonsense was not what I had been expecting," (p.118) but in time he comes to wonder if their murderers, however differently envisioned, might not be one and the same... man or monster.

One of Mayhem's greatest strengths is how the narrative of the novel develops in tandem with its central character. Bond is to begin with an upstanding man of science—and Mayhem, initially, is a fairly familiar crime thriller. Over-familiar, even, since it's set in a time and a place explored to the point of pointlessness by any number of other authors. That said, Pinborough's conceptualisation of ye olde East End is perfectly credible, and from early on, the reader realises that there's something amiss in this picture; something fictional amongst the factual.

That's the Upir, and the closer our protagonist comes to accepting the possibility of its existence, the more the story diverges from the crime thriller's typical tack, carving a course of its own. Come the conclusion it's hard to credit that there was nothing ostensibly speculative about the larger part of Mayhem's narrative, because the feeling that there will be is pervasive from the first: a fine line between too much and not enough the author walks wonderfully.

Discovering what shape the supernatural elements of the tale will take is reason enough to read on, particularly considering the barely restrained manner and measure of Pinborough's prose, but there's much more to recommend Mayhem. However often we've seen it previously, its setting is exceptionally well rendered; its array of primary and secondary perspectives are purposeful and plainly entertaining... though in one case too pointed to buy into entirely. The atmosphere, however, is fantastic without caveat; meanwhile the pace is great—full steam ahead until the end—and the plot not at all ponderous.

Not a year's gone by since Sarah Pinborough's made her debut almost a decade ago that hasn't seen the release a new novel with her name on it, so she's always been prolific, if not to the extent she will be in 2013. You won't catch this critic complaining in any case. A Matter of Blood was a high watermark for me amongst the work of hers I had read—a compelling blend of contemporary crime fiction and classic dark fantasy—but Mayhem is even better: wholly absorbing Victorian horror with just enough of the ordinary about it to set the extraordinary off.

Next stop, Murder most horrid!

***

Mayhem
by Sarah Pinborough

UK Publication: May 2013, Jo Fletcher Books

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