Book Review | Down Station by Simon Morden

Mary. One slip, one weakness away from prison, fighting to build a future for herself out of so little.

Dalip. The gentle son of a Warrior tradition. A young man who must fight to be apart from his family.

Stanislav. Carrying the wounds of a brutal war.

They left London in flames and found a place where everything was different. A place that found you out. A place haunted by a man called Crows... 

***

Let's hear it for freedom.

Seriously: for freedom in all its forms—for the freedom to dream and the freedom to scream; for the freedom to be who we want to be, do what we want to do, love who we like and live the way we might—let's hear it!

Freedom isn't just fine, it's fundamental. We become who we become because of it. But in as much as the freedom to choose may shape us, our choices can come to contain us.

Down Station by Simon Morden is a book about breaking out of the frames we make of these freedoms, and it kicks off with a couple of Londoners losing everything they love—not least said city, which appears to burn to the ground around them in the beginning.

[Read more.]

They are Mary, a contrary teenager with anger management issues, and Dalip, a twentysomething Sikh with dreams of being an engineer. Both are working in the tunnels of the subway when the aforementioned catastrophe happens; a catastrophe that would have claimed their lives, in all likelihood, if they hadn't discovered a door that almost certainly wasn't there before. "A door that [...] more or less disappeared as soon as they closed it," (p.40) promptly depositing them in a landscape that looks absolutely natural—except, I suppose, for the sea-serpent, the wyvern in the sky, and the massive moon Mary and Dalip see it silhouetted against.

"Whoever first named it, named it right. Down is where we are," a man called Crows—another escapee from the world as we know it—explains a little later. "It is both a destination and a direction, it is how we fall and where we land." (p.126) And in Down, our everyman protagonists must discover themselves all over again if they're to stand a chance of surviving in a world which in a real way responds to their behaviour.

For Mary, an urban girl entirely out of her element, that's scary: "There were no rules. No one telling her what to do. No one to make her do anything. [...] What she was feeling was fear." (p.74) For Dalip, it's a little different:

Almost his every waking moment had been planned, since he'd been old enough to remember. This school, that club, a friend's house, the gurdwara, plays and concerts and recitals and family, so much family: brothers and sisters and cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts. The thought that he might be free of all that was... intoxicating. Even if it was just for a while, before someone was able to show him the way home. (p.64)

Alas, there are no someones coming. There's just Mary, Dalip, a few disappointingly underdeveloped supporting characters—here's looking at you, Mama and Stanislav—and the diabolical denizens of Down, one of whom generously tells our gang about the geomancer. Apparently, maps are the currency of this world most weird, and the geomancer makes them, so if anyone hereabouts can help them get home, it's her.

That's what a man made of wolves says, anyway. Me, I'd struggle to trust a man made of wolves, but this lot are desperate, I guess. And they only grow more so when—what do you know?—they're attacked on the path to the geomancer's castle. By, ah... a man made of wolves.

Down Station is a little predictable, at points, but the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of the marvelous Metrozone novels and late of the greatly underrated Arcanum keeps the pace at such a brisk pitch that you only notice the lows when they're over. In the intervening period, you've had such fantastic fun—think The Wizard of Oz with lashings of Lost—that it's easy to overlook the telegraphed turns the tale takes on the way to its eventual destination: a cracking battle between a much-changed Mary and a certain skyborn beast.

To wit, in terms of plot and pace, Morden's ninth novel is tight and taut—and I'd argue that its relative brevity is a boon to boot. At approximately 300 pages, Down Station is a ways off wearing out its welcome when the literary kitchen closes its doors; though the portion sizes might be on the slight side, chef serves up a satisfying three-course meal here, leaving readers stuffed enough, but not so full that they won't have an appetite for more when it's over. And in case you weren't aware, there will be more, folks: The White City beckons, and after that... why, this whimsical world is Morden's oyster.

Fingers crossed that he cracks the surviving secondary characters in The Books of Down yet ahead. Mary and Dalip ably showcase the transformative nature of choice and change I touched on at the top, but Dalip's impromptu instructor is so secretive he's hard to get a handle on, Mary's guardian angel is wasted in spite of a strong start, and although he shines sometimes, I expected much more of Crows, not least because he's such a central element of Blacksheep's exceptional cover art.

Then again, the Londoners above aren't friends or enemies yet—they're "just a bunch of people thrown together by the fact that [they] didn't die," (p.100) so there's hope for these folks, especially here, where they're free of "their hopes and dreams, their fears and nightmares, the past they'd lived and the future they were destined to live." (p.254) To paraphrase what might as well be the mantra of this narrative, it's what they do now that counts. Similarly, what Simon Morden does with The White City, now that he's introduced it so succinctly, will be what matters when The Books of Down are done.

***

Down Station
by Simon Morden

US Publication: February 2016, Gollancz

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Dream Paris by Tony Ballantyne

Anna Sinfield marched into the parks, when Angel Tower burned and Dream London fell. She marched to free the city, to end the madness, to find her mother and father. The day was won, but her parents—and thousands like them—are still missing, lost to the Dream World.

And now she has a chance to get them back. A man with gemlike eyes has walked into her life, wearing a bespoke suit and bearing a terrible scroll. Mr Twelvetrees claims to know where the missing Londoners are; but to find them, Anna has to give up a life she’s started to rebuild and go into the Dream World itself. Into another Paris, where history has been repeating itself for two hundred years.

Vive La Révolution! 

***

In literature and to a lesser extent in life, London has had a tough time of it in recent years: it's rioted and rebelled; it's been burned, bombed and buried; it's risen to great heights and, inevitably, it's fallen. And fallen. And fallen.

But you can't keep a city like Great Britain's biggest down—even when a living nightmare threatens to take its place, as Tony Ballantyne documented in Dream London. A notable novel which explored a notion not dissimilar to that proposed by the Philip K. Dick Award nominee's pre-eminent peer in the weird, namely the incursion of second place into a single space—see The City & the City by China Mieville—Dream London demonstrated the resilience and the spirit of even the most impoverished inhabitants of my country's capital.

If you weren't here, if you didn't live through the changes, if you didn't experience how the streets moved around at night or how people's personalities were subtly altered, if you didn't see the casual cruelty, the cheapening of human life, the way that easy stereotypes took hold of people... if you weren't there, you're never going to understand what it was like. (p.13)

Anna Sinfield remembers, however. Anna Sinfield will never forget. And yet, having lost her mother and her father and her friends to the dream world's dark designs, she still found the strength in herself to take to the streets. Alongside thousands of other like-minded Londoners, she marched into the parks when all was almost lost, the better to bring down the Angel Tower and stand against the source of the so-called incursion.

Dream London has been receding steadily ever since. The streets are straightening; people's personalities are reasserting themselves; human life means something once more. But for Anna, the nightmare is far from over, I'm afraid. When a man with fly eyes called Mr Twelvetrees presents her with a prophesy that promises she'll be reunited with her missing mum in Dream Paris, she packs a bag without missing a beat and sets her sights on the City of Lights.

Book Review | The Chimes by Anna Smaill

A boy stands on the roadside on his way to London, alone in the rain. No memories, beyond what he can hold in his hands at any given moment. No directions, as written words have long since been forbidden. No parents—just a melody that tugs at him, a thread to follow. A song that says if he can just get to the capital, he may find some answers about what happened to them.

The world around Simon sings, each movement a pulse of rhythm, each object weaving its own melody, music ringing in every drop of air.

Welcome to the world of The Chimes. Here, life is orchestrated by a vast musical instrument that renders people unable to form new memories. The past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphony.

But slowly, inexplicably, Simon is beginning to remember. He emerges from sleep each morning with a pricking feeling, and sense there is something he urgently has to do. In the city Simon meets Lucien, who has a gift for hearing, some secrets of his own, and a theory about the danger lurking in Simon's past.

***

London comes alive like never before in Anna Smaill's deeply unique debut: a dystopian love story about a boy who comes to the capital on a quest to find out what happened to his late parents, and why. Along the way unspeakable secrets will be revealed about a world in which "words are not to be trusted" (p.30) and memories are temporary—the unintended consequences of a musical final solution:

At the height of dischord, at Allbreaking, sound became a weapon. In the city, glass shivered out of context, fractured white and peeled away from windows. The buildings rumbled and fell. The mettle was bent and twisted out of tune. The water in the river stood in a single wave that never toppled. What happened to the people? The people were blinded and deafened. The people died. The bridge between Bankside and Paul's shook and stirred, or so they say. The people ran but never fast enough. After Allbreaking, only the pure of heart and hearing were left. They dwelled in the cities. They waited for order; they waited for a new harmony. (p.30)

It never arrived. But now, if you listen closely, you can hear the strains of a beautiful new movement beginning...

Though he doesn't consider himself such, Simon Wythern is one of the lucky ones. Same as any other person, he forgets everything that's happened to him during the day over the course of Chimes each night, yet our orphan is able to impress his most exceptional experiences into objects, and carry them with him in this way. He keeps his objectmemories close, of course, and allows himself to indulge in one each evening:

In the depths of the roughcloth, none of the shapes has any meaning. They're just things I reach for like a strandpicker in thamesmuck. When my hands takes hold of the right one, a picture will flash up true as a bright note, clear as an unmudded stream. I don't know how it works. Maybe the object comes first; then the memory follows. Or maybe I choose the memory and my hand finds the right object to match. I do one each night only. And I can't take it with me into the morning. (p.51)

Book Review | Our Lady of the Streets by Tom Pollock

Ever since Beth Bradley found her way into a hidden London, the presence of its ruthless goddess, Mater Viae, has lurked in the background. Now Mater Viae has returned with deadly consequences. 

Streets are wracked by convulsions as muscles of wire and pipe go into spasm, bunching the city into a crippled new geography; pavements flare to thousand-degree fevers, incinerating pedestrians; and towers fall, their foundations decayed. 

As the city sickens, so does Beth—her essence now part of this secret London. But when it is revealed that Mater Viae's plans for dominion stretch far beyond the borders of the city, Beth must make a choice: flee, or sacrifice her city in order to save it.

***

There was always something special about Beth Bradley; something which went beyond her quick wit, her evident intelligence. Wasn't so long ago she was one among many—a badly-behaved teenager suffering through school, as exceptional individuals like Beth tend to—yet even then she was set apart by her street art; by graffiti which came to life because of her partnership with Pen, who'd append poetry to her pictures, turning still images into stories. Stories of the city.

Stories such as those Tom Pollock has told over the course of The Skyscraper Throne: an inventive and affecting urban fantasy saga which comes full circle with the release of Our Lady of the Streets. Be prepared to bid a bittersweet goodbye to Beth and her best friend, then... but not before they've had one last adventure together. An adventure as incredible as it is desperate; as tragical as it is magical.

Why? Because Beth Bradley is dying.

You could say she's city-sick. About to bow out because she has become London, and London is all but lost. Since the manifestation of Mater Viae's mirror image, the very streets have become fevered—a sweltering mass of metal and glass.

Most of the locals have legged it, luckily. But the infection is spreading. London is "an organic city," all of a sudden, "capable of growing hundreds of miles in only a few weeks—and bringing its sickness to everything it touches." Everything... and everyone.

Book Review | The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

Desperate to find a case to justify the team's existence, with budget cuts and a police strike on the horizon, Quill thinks he's struck gold when a cabinet minister is murdered by an assailant who wasn't seen getting in or out of his limo. A second murder, that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, presents a crime scene with a message... identical to that left by the original Jack the Ripper.

The new Ripper seems to have changed the MO of the old completely: he's only killing rich white men. The inquiry into just what this supernatural menace is takes Quill and his team into the corridors of power at Whitehall, to meetings with MI5, or 'the funny people' as the Met call them, and into the London occult underworld. They go undercover to a pub with a regular evening that caters to that clientele, and to an auction of objects of power at the Tate Modern. 

Meanwhile, the Ripper keeps on killing and finally the pattern of those killings gives Quill's team clues towards who's really doing this....

***

In London Falling, Paul Cornell introduced readers to Detective Inspector James Quill and his squad of oddballs, including undercover officer Kev Sefton, analyst Lisa Ross, and Tony Costain, a properly dodgy copper on the road to reform. In the course of investigating a series of mob-related murders, the aforementioned four were cursed with something called the Sight—the ability to see the supernatural forces underpinning the city—which has been driving them half mad in the months since they managed to overmatch Mora Losley.

Catastrophe strikes the capital a second time in The Severed Streets, a solid sequel to a satisfying, if slow starter, but on this occasion, the team is aware of what they're up against... though that isn't to say they're prepared.

Thanks to an interesting series of interactions between this government and certain classes of the general public, it was shaping up to be one of those summers. He and his team had been told that the Smiling Man had a 'process' that he was 'putting together,' and Quill kept wondering if he was somewhere behind the violence. He could imagine a reality where the coalition in power had done a lot of the same shit, but without a response that included Londoners burning down their own communities. Really, it was down to how the initial outbreaks of violence had been mismanaged and a strained relationship between government and the Met that was leaving him increasingly incredulous. (p.15)

Or so they think, in their innocence—for though they know that there's more to London than meets the eye, they don't know much... and who in the underworld is going to bring the police up to speed?

Book Review | Glow by Ned Beauman

A hostage exchange outside a police station in Pakistan.

A botched defection in an airport hotel in New Jersey.

A test of loyalty at an abandoned resort in the Burmese jungle.

A boy and a girl locking eyes at a rave in a South London laundrette...

For the first time, Britain's most exciting young novelist turns his attention to the present day, as a conspiracy with global repercussions converges on one small flat above a dentist's office in Camberwell.

***

Though admiring them is absolutely natural, it's not always easy to enjoy Ned Beauman's novels. Take Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident: two basically brilliant books, but both are unabashedly bizarre, and decidedly distasteful. No less so Glow, in which one of Britain's best and brightest new writers trains his tremendous talents on today as opposed to the improbable parts of the past he's explored before.

On the surface it sounds almost normal—a conspiracy thriller above a lovelorn Londoner caught up in a plot by an ailing organisation which aims to make massive amounts of money by monopolising the market for a revolutionary new recreational drug—but peer beneath this veneer and Glow is revealed to be as progressive, and at the same time excessive, as its predecessors.

Book Review | The Oversight by Charlie Fletcher

Once the Oversight, the secret society that polices the lines between the mundane and the magic, counted hundreds of brave souls among its members. Now their number can be tallied on a single hand.

When a drunkard brings a screaming girl to the Oversight's London headquarters, it seems their hopes for a new recruit will be fulfilled—but the girl is a trap, her appearance a puzzle the five remaining guardians must solve or lose each other, and their society, for good.

As the borders between the natural and the supernatural begin to break down, brutal murders erupt across the city, the Oversight are torn viciously apart, and their enemies close in for the final blow.

This dark Dickensian fantasy spins a tale of witch-hunters, magicians, mirror-walkers and the unlikeliest of heroes drawn from the depths of British folklore. Meet the Oversight, and remember: when they fall, so do we all.

***

Charlie Fletcher, author of the Stoneheart trilogy for children, gives Suzanna Clarke a run for her money in The Oversight, a canny urban fantasy about a secret society sworn to protect the people from supranatural shenanigans.

"We were founded long ago," Sara said, "when the world was less crowded and people liked to fill up the space with four or five long words where one simple one would do: we are the Free Company for the Regulation and Oversight of Recondite Exigency and Supranatural Lore." (p.42)

That's magic to you and me—which is to say "strange, hidden things that happen without a normal explanation" (p.42)—and the very reasonable rules governing its usage; rules the Oversight exists to enforce... or has done, historically. These days, though, they can hardly keep their own house in order, so what hope do they have of overcoming a conspiracy of wicked witchfinders?

Once upon a time, there were many Hands in many lands, with five fingers each and an abundance of extra digits insisting on enlisting—the better to defend against those who would use their supranatural skills for ill. Then the Disaster happened; the Oversight was betrayed by its own, and you might measure the cost of its lax attitude in lives, given that the Great Fire of London was the result.

Fast forward to the year eighteen something or other. The society has been dramatically diminished in the centuries since the Disaster. No one trusts the Oversight any more, thus there's just the one Hand left standing, led—insofar as any Hand can be—by Sara Falk, a Glint who sees herself reflected in the serving girl who, at the outset of Fletcher's text, is deposited on the doorstep of the house the last Hand shares on Wellclose Square.

Guest Post | "Stranger Than Fiction" by Sarah Pinborough

I am not a natural researcher when it comes to writing fiction. I find it slows the act of storytelling down—I like to get into a flow with the words and pausing to check facts can be jarring. I love reading historical fiction but I vowed to myself I would never write it. Then I came across the Thames Torso murders, and having read Dan Simmons' The Terror [doesn't get better, does it? — Ed] I felt inspired to give writing a blend of fact and fiction ago. 

I took advice from several friends who've written historical fiction and their universal top tip—which I've since passed on—is not to get bogged down in trying to research everything before you start. You can get lost in it, and by the time you come to need a small piece of information, like for example, what a middle-class late-Victorian family might have for dinner, you've forgotten what your research told you. 

Also, you can get caught up in tiny details and miss big things. While writing Mayhem I very nearly missed the Dockers' Strike of 1889, and given that some of my action takes place in the wharves, that could have been disastrous. When planning Murder the first thing I did was a quick search on major events that happen during each year of the book. Although Murder is quite a claustrophobic story of paranoia, Queen Victoria's diamond Jubilee took place during one of the years of the story. It was a huge nationwide celebration and to not feature it would have damaged the authenticity of the narrative.

Writing a novel set in Victorian London can also be a double-edged sword in that we each have an image of the era in our heads from various film and television adaptations of famous novels. In some respects, that's great in that you don't have to set up the entire world for the reader, but the danger is that your description can become generic. Luckily, if you dig around on the internet (the saviour of the modern writer) you can find some great contemporary accounts of various parts of the city written by journalists and diarists of the time which help with small details and getting the atmosphere of the place right.

Newspaper archives are also great for understanding the feel of the era. I subscribe to the Times Archive (all the newspaper articles in both Mayhem and Murder are authentic), and I searched for murders that made the papers of the day and investigations that both Dr Thomas Bond and Henry Moore were involved in (other than the most famous, the Jack the Ripper case) to use as the backdrop to events in Murder.

When I'd found those I also read other sections of the newspapers to try and get into the mentality of the period—the social issues, the politics etc. in order to make my characters' behaviours more realistic. It's surprising how similar in many ways we are to those who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. We both exist in fast-changing times with huge divisions between the rich and poor and the problems that come with that.

Using real people and events from history creates its own problems when weaving a story around them but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a magic in having written a book about people who you come to think of as 'your' characters and then searching old newspaper reports and learning more and more about their fascinating lives. I love writing fiction, but if there's one thing I've learned from writing these novels, it's that there is sometimes nothing stranger than fact.

Book Review | Murder by Sarah Pinborough

Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, thinks he has finally recovered from the terrible events of years before. He no longer has nightmares about Jack the Ripper—or the other monster, an enemy even more malign who hid in Jack’s shadow and haunted the streets of London at the end of the 1880s. He has made his peace with his part in bringing calm back to the East End.

His fame as a profiler of criminals is increasing, his practice is steads, and Dr Bond is beginning to dream of marriage, and children. Life is good.

But when a woman’s body is found brutally beaten to death in a railway carriage and a letter written years before is discovered by the police, the past he has fought so hard to put behind him begins to taint the present, and he can no longer fight his new suspicions.

Just when he thought life had returned to normal, Dr Bond is about to discover that some things will not remain buried: once again his uncanny enemy is loose on the streets of London... and this time Dr Bond is alone.

***

Mayhem was "a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign." This was essentially set dressing, however. Instead of simply reiterating that grisly business, as many such texts have been content to, Sarah Pinborough's plot revolved around "another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him," including Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, who returns—rather the worse for wear—in Murder.

It's been six years since the shocking events at the end of Mayhem, which saw Bond and his assistants in all things mystical—a priest and a pauper—catch and kill the Thames Torso Murderer: one James Harrington; husband of the beautiful Juliana, whose heart the doctor dearly desires.

Harrington, for his part, was hardly to blame for his horrendous descent: it was the Upir—a violent parasite he picked up in Poland—which led him down that dark path. And though the host is dead, the creature he carried on his back lives still... and hungers, I shouldn't wonder.

Murder begins with Bond feeling free of these fears for the first time in recent years, and planning, at long last, to propose to Juliana. But his hopes have to go on hold when an American friend of Harrington's arrives in the capital with a collection of confessional letters which implicate their late acquaintance in some truly unspeakable deeds.

To keep up appearances, he has to be seen to take these seriously, and inevitably, his investigations lead him back to Jack. Harrington, he realises, couldn't have been the Ripper, as he had in his heart of hearts hoped... but perhaps his parasite played a part. Perhaps the mayhem that the Upir created in its wake drove another member of Juliana's family to madness. Perhaps her outwardly affable father, whose alibi falls apart the moment Bond subjects it to the slightest scrutiny, is a killer in their midst.

Book Review | The Happier Dead by Ivo Stourton

The Great Spa sits on the edge of London, a structure visible from space. The power of Britain on the world stage rests in its monopoly on the Treatment, a medical procedure which transforms the richest and most powerful into a state of permanent physical youth. The Great Spa is the place where the newly young immortals go to revitalise their aged souls. 

In this most secure of facilities, a murder of one of the guests threatens to destabilise the new order, and DCI Oates of the Metropolitan police is called in to investigate. In a single day, Oates must unravel the secrets behind the Treatment and the long-ago disappearance of its creator, passing through a London riven with disorder and corruption. As a night of widespread rioting takes hold of the city, he moves towards a climax which could lead to the destruction of the Great Spa, his own ruin, and the loss of everything he holds most dear.

***

As one of the twentieth century's most missed musicians once wondered, who wants to live forever?

A better question to ask, perhaps: who among us doesn't?

As far back as in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's first literary works, we have dreamed as a people of sidestepping death; as far back as that, and further, immortality—whether through mythical or material means—has fascinated us in fiction and in fact.

According to certain scientists, these discoveries may be made mere decades from today, thus the promising premise of The Happier Dead. In the near future of Ivo Stourton's new book, eternal life is indeed achievable, but far from free, I'm afraid. You could spend your entire natural life putting every penny you earn in a pot and you'd still struggle to cough up the deposit.

But in a society where passing away has become an embarrassment, what price wouldn't you pay to avoid dying one day?

The magic happens in an egg-shaped structure so monolithic that it has altered the landscape of London, where Stourton stages the murder mystery at the haemorrhaging heart of The Happier Dead. The Great Spa can be seen from space, even, and "at its uppermost limit, the great red beacon on the top was so close to the rainclouds that the light illuminated them beneath with a cherry-red glow, giving the sky above [...] the look of a vast special effect, a stage show for the passing motorists." (p.15) Fittingly, then, treatment within this modern day Tower of Babel is the preserve of the ridiculously rich—as well as those with connections, yes.

But there are also those willing to sacrifice more than money in exchange for an immortality ticket. Detective Chief Inspector Oates calls them Eddies: poor people, presumably, who can be talked into confessing to anything—though in practice they tend to take the fall for murders—so long as they're assured a top-tier treatment at the end of whatever sentence they get. To wit, when a man dies very violently in the safe haven that the spa is meant to represent, and a groundskeeper admits to killing him, Oates' first priority is to establish whether Ali Farooz is an assassin or a patsy.

Book Review | Dream London by Tony Ballantyne

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Captain Jim Wedderburn has looks, style and courage. He's adored by women, respected by men and feared by his enemies. He's the man to find out who has twisted London into this strange new world.

But in Dream London the city changes a little every night and the people change a little every day. The towers are growing taller, the parks have hidden themselves away and the streets form themselves into strange new patterns. There are people sailing in from new lands down the river, new criminals emerging in the East End and a path spiralling down to another world.

Everyone is changing, no one is who they seem to be.

***

Most of us know better than to judge a book by its cover. What with marketing's manifest need to mislead, this is a useful rule of thumb... albeit one easier said than done. But for Tony Ballantyne's new novel? Maybe make an exception, because Joey Hi-Fi's starkly stunning cityscape tells the same terrific tale Dream London does.

Take a closer look, if you like. This isn't London as as we know it, no, yet a great many of the capital's architectural landmarks are present... if not necessarily correct. There's Big Ben at the centre, standing triumphant at the edge of the Thames. To the left of it, the distinctive domes of St. Paul's Cathedral catch the shadow of several crooked cranes; and to the right, there's the Shard, and the Gherkin as well — all rendered in grayscale most grave.

But there's something very wrong with this picture, isn't there? Never mind the fact that these distinctive buildings are arranged strangely. Instead, look above and beyond the iconic clock. What's that massive skyscraper doing there? Why in the world are blood red tentacles pouring out of its peak? And wait a second... is that a gargantuan ant?

Yes. Yes it is.

It had started out as a glass skyscraper, that was obvious, but over the past year it had grown taller and taller. The top had started to bulge and had turned from glass and steel into something else. It looked like a plant budding. I wondered if those were vines or creepers I could see, spilling down from the top of the tower. (p.85)

Fully twice as tall as Big Ben, Angel Tower has 1204 floors, and a new level is added every day. It obviously doesn't belong, yet all of Dream London has come to revolve around it regardless. Why? Well, that's what Ballantyne's book is about, at bottom.

No-one can say with anything resembling certainty why the city is so different today, though most residents at least remember when the changes came. It's only been a year — no time at all in the scheme of things — but London is essentially unrecognisable now, as are most of those folks unlucky enough to live there. Consider our protagonist James Wedderburn: a soldier of old, his new persona, Captain Jim, is at present engaged in the business of a pimp. He looks after the ladies of Belltower End, and takes pride in the pleasure he purveys; or, to put it more plainly, the sex he sells — and pursues in his own time, too.

But property is at a premium in Dream London; someone has been buying up all the real estate of late, and subsequently squeezing every shilling out of the people who need it. So when a flamboyant man called Alan — also Alphonse — offers the Captain outright ownership of Belltower End in exchange for a few unnamed favours, he simply can't resist the thought of the profit.

Alan/Alphonse's emotional motivation, meanwhile, speaks to the way the city has shifted:

"I'm a man whose way of life is being pushed back into the shadows. I'm a man who doesn't want things to go back to the way they were a hundred years ago when people like me were outcasts. And I'm not alone. This new world is creating winners and losers, and some of the losers still have enough power and influence to try and fight back. We want you to help us." (p.25)

Alan/Alphonse isn't the only figure interested in the Captain's assistance. Dream London's double-dealing drug lord, the Daddio, also sends an envoy: namely Honey Peppers, a sweet-looking little girl with the foul mouth and murderous mind of a career criminal. Honey Peppers only promises our protagonist his continued existence, so the crafty Captain promptly accepts the former fella's offer, and sets about investigating the root cause of all this wrongness.

All roads lead to Rome, of course — or rather the great skyscraper at the centre of the city. If "Dream London is a place where the normal rules of the universe no longer apply [then] Angel Tower is the place where the rules are rewritten." (p.139) Thus the Captain uses his new contacts to secure a position on the 829th floor, where it becomes clear that the various changes made to the capital are far more momentous than he had imagined:

I knew that Dream London was changing the shape of the buildings, and I knew that the books were changing, I was used to that. I was used to the way Dream London rewrote the words on the page. It even rewrote people's behaviour. I had accepted that. People could be manipulated. Who knew that better than Captain Jim Wedderburn and his lovely girls? 

But I didn't realise that Dream London was changing the shape of the numbers as well. That gripped deep inside. It felt so wrong. (p.103)

So wrong... yet so right!

I dare say Dream London is difficult to get into, initially — the Captain is a hard man to feel for, whilst this world of altered aesthetics, reengineered roles and unfamiliar fundamentals is so deeply disconcerting that identifying what's wonderful about it, and what's just window-dressing, takes time — but once you get into the swing of things, Ballantyne's exceptional new novel goes from strength to strength.

The jaunty plot kicks in quickly, and develops in interesting directions; the pace quickens until readers are rattling along happily like runaway train cars on runaway train tracks; and though questions accumulate, Ballantyne hardly hoards the answers we require, as certain authors without the walk to back up all their talk tend to.

Resolutions are arrived at with refreshing regularity. Just desserts are soon served up on glittering glass platters. This drip-feed of facts and complicating factors, however cracked, helps us invest in the hallucinatory setting despite our incipient resistance to it, and as the tale twists and turns, the characters writhe and wriggle in rhythm. Even the crass Captain seems sympathetic eventually.

Dream London reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris series, The City's Son by Tom Pollock, and the Bas-Lag books, too — particularly Perdido Street Station — but in typical Dream London tradition, the opposite is true too. As the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Chris Beckett contends in the quote on the captivating cover that demanded I take note of this text, Tony Ballantyne's masterfully imagined new novel is "unlike anything I've ever read before." Smart, stylish, and as alarming as it is indubitably alluring, Dream London deftly demonstrates that the weird still has a thing or two to prove.

***

Dream London
by Tony Ballantyne

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Solaris

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Guest Post | "Taverns Measureless to Man" by Tim Powers

To mark the paperback publication of his newest book, Hide Me Among the Graves — a sequel of sorts to his classic 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard which has been described as "Dickens as directed by David Lynch" — in addition to the re-release last week of Last Call as one of Gollancz's new-fangled Fantasy Masterworks, it's my pleasure to welcome the one and only Tim Powers to The Speculative Scotsman, to talk about nothing less momentous than how steampunk started.

***

If you ever find yourself thirsty in Orange, California, you could do worse than to stop in at a place near the Orange Circle called O'Hara's Pub and order a pitcher of beer. Sit at one of the booths right across from the bar, and you're right where Steampunk started in about 1976.

Of course lots of books that we now recognize as Steampunk were published before that — Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! and Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, and Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium, to name just three — but it was K. W. Jeter who coined the term that made the subgenre distinct, and Jeter was sitting in that booth in '76, along with James Blaylock and me.

The three of us were, or had recently been, English majors at a local college, and all three of us wanted to write science fiction and fantasy books. Jeter and I had in fact recently sold novels to a very low-paying publisher called Laser Books, and my own plan had been to go on writing books for Laser and live on two-thousand dollars a year... but Laser folded, and the three of us were left to while away the afternoons over endless pitchers of beer at O'Hara's.

Mornings too — I remember standing with Blaylock outside of O'Hara's before the place opened, and quoting Omar Khayyam:

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted - "Open then the Door!

"You know how little while we have to stay,

"And, once departed, may return no more."

And I'm sure I quoted Coleridge about passing "through taverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea."

But luckily Laser had not been the only light that failed — the editor at Laser had told us that a British publisher wanted a series of novels based on the idea of King Arthur being reincarnated over the centuries to save the West from various catastrophes, and we had got busy writing them — but eventually the British publisher had become disenchanted with the notion, and all three of us were left with books about reincarnated King Arthur and no publisher.

Jeter, fortunately for us all, had chosen Victorian England as the setting for one of his — Morlock Night, which was eventually published in 1979 — and he found, and told Blaylock and I about, Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was a journalist who wrote in painstaking detail about the lives of all sorts of poor people in Victorian London, honest and crooked, and two collections of his work, Mayhew's London and London's Underworld, were in print. Presented with such a near-infinite source of research details, all three of us proceeded to write science fiction and/or fantasy novels set in 19th century London. And we managed to sell them.

I believe Blaylock had actually seen London, if briefly; Jeter and I had not. And all three of us were writing about a London that existed more in our heads than it ever had in reality, largely derived from Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. The books we wrote about it are now three decades old, and I must admit I look back at them, and the times in which we wrote them, with fondness. And when Jeter, Blaylock and I are sometimes credited with having started Steampunk, I politely don't argue.

***

Thank you a thousand times for the insight into steampunk's early years, Tim, and for taking the time to stop off at The Speculative Scotsman.

If you're looking for more from the man, then to begin with there are his books — every one of which I've read I'd recommend — but be aware, as well, that "Taverns Measureless to Man" is just the latest in a line of great guest posts he's put together for a few of my favourite blogs, including Fantasy Book Critic, Falcata Times, A Fantastical Librarian, SF Signal, Civilian Reader and Fantasy Book Review.

Plus he'll be propping up Pornokitsch all of next week, I believe.

Guest Post | "The Inverted Image" by Tom Pollock

So... The Glass Republic. I loved it.

One of the things that fascinated me most about the book was its preoccupation with perfection and reflection, so when the opportunity arose to have the author blog about something for The Speculative Scotsman, it didn't take long to for me to come up with a potential topic for Tom.

Alas, the blasted Book Smugglers had already booked the author for a post about beauty, but Tom, ever the gentleman, was willing to approach the idea of the images from another angle. And in the end, I think it worked out well. Fittingly, in fact, you could consider the guest blog below the mirror image of Tom's contribution to SFF In Conversation.

***

As a child I was pathologically drawn to things that looked like doors but weren’t: picture frames, fire places, bookcases, a rectangular pattern of cracks in a brick wall, or in the bark of a tree trunk. When I was eight, the first thing I used to do when I went into any room was try and discover the piece of furniture that was hiding the secret passage.

The thing that fascinated me most, though, was mirrors (which wasn’t, I hope wholly narcissism). A mirror was more than a potential hidden door, it was a doorway, a hermetically sealed world, teasing my delusional childish mind with the space sealed behind the glass.

Mirrors as portals onto fantasy worlds are nothing new. Lewis Carroll nailed it so hard that going "through the looking glass" has entered the lexicon as a euphemism for any strange situation.

So, when the time came to create London-Under-Glass, the city of the Mirrorstocracy, the inverted doppelganger of the fantastical London of The City’s Son, I knew I wanted the mirror to be more than a doorway. I wanted it to be founding principle of the entire world.

In London-Under-Glass, everything is built on reflections. The citizens are living reflections, laminates of the images of their doppelgangers in our London, built up layer after layer, day after day, until they become conscious. The buildings are warped and distended the way we see sometimes see them in our mirrors, swollen in odd places by clots of the precipitecture than falls from the sky.

In London-Under-Glass it snows brick dust, and hails slate. It literally rains cats and dogs because all of these things are caught in the river’s reflection, churned and broken by the tide and eventually evaporated and rained back down on the city. The citizens of the mirror city are used to this, but even they are occasionally unnerved when the droplets coalesce into whole faces in the puddles who try in vain to whisper secrets to them before the tyre of a passing car dashes them away.

All of that was fun, worldbuilding-wise. But the thing that really helped me with the story was the trial that such a world presented to my lead character, Pen.

In the first book, Pen was possessed by a parasitic creature made of barbed wire (work with me). She’s still bearing the scars of that attack, on both her face and her heart. Now she has to enter a city where how you look is everything, where image is substance. "Into that world inverted" she goes, and to survive she has to turn her scars into tools, her wounds into weapons. In a book about mirrors, it had some symmetry.  

***

Thank you a thousand times, Tom, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman to share a bit about how the Mirrorstocracy came to be.

Now get back to work on Our Lady of the Streets! :)

Book Review | The Glass Republic by Tom Pollock

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Pen's life is all about secrets: the secret of the city's spirits, deities and monsters her best friend Beth discovered, living just beyond the notice of modern Londoners; the secret of how she got the intricate scars that disfigure her so cruelly - and the most closely guarded secret of all: Parva, her mirror-sister, forged from her reflections in a school bathroom mirror. Pen's reflected twin is the only girl who really understands her.

Then Parva is abducted and Pen makes a terrible bargain for the means to track her down. In London-Under-Glass, looks are currency, and Pen's scars make her a rare and valuable commodity. But some in the reflected city will do anything to keep Pen from the secret of what happened to the sister who shared her face.

***

As a people, we are plainly preoccupied with the picture of perfection; obsessed, essentially, by being beautiful. But image isn't everything, much as it may look that way in the day to day. As the protagonist of Tom Pollock's striking second novel suggests, "This thing — beauty? — it's arbitrary. People just make it up." Then again, as Pen's new partner in thought-crime counters, "Just 'cause something's made up, doesn't mean it's not real." (p.255)

All too true. So what's a poor, disfigured girl to do? A girl whose trust in another — her best friend Beth, no less — led to her being embraced by the barbed wire arms of The City's Son's big bad? Whose scars, even after extensive reconstructive surgery, are "a dozen mocking, mirroring mouths" (p.7) which mark Pen out as other amongst her fearful peers? Why, travel to an alternate dimension where our preconceived ideas about beauty have been completely reconceived; where she's celebrated, instead, as the most gorgeous girl in all the world!

Welcome, one and all, to The Glass Republic.

We'll get back to the inverted landscape of London-Under-Glass in time, but before that, let's recap. The Glass Republic begins a couple of months after the unhappy ending of Pollock's phenomenal first novel. Pen — aka Parva "Pencil" Khan — was a standout supporting character in said who was butchered come its cruel and unusual conclusion. To wit, I was keen to see what fate awaited her in book two of The Skyscraper Throne, however I hadn't expected her to take Beth Bradley's place as protagonist.

Beth isn't absent the narrative, exactly, though her role is rather reduced, in part because she must come to terms with what she's become: something hardly human, she feeds "on the city around her with every step [...] drawing power and information through the bare soles of her concrete-grey feet." (p.27) She carries an iron railing around as an extension of the urban environment she represents, and speaks to streetlight spirits without sound. Beth, then, figures into the fiction from time to time, but her intermittent chapters are largely devoted to foreshadowing; setting up certain secondary story threads Pollock plans, I presume, to pay off in the concluding volume of his terrific trilogy, namely next year's Our Lady of the Streets.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves again. The Glass Republic is for its part about Pen's plight, primarily. At the outset, she's trying to immerse herself in the mundane, the better to forget the incredible events she was caught up in some four months ago. To that end, she's returned to school, but to ingratiate herself amongst a new group of friends, she's asked to explain her mutilated face. She does so honestly — not that anybody believes her. Cue the smoothest recap I've read in recent memory:

I was kidnapped by a living coil of barbed wire — the servant of a demolition god whose fingers were cranes. I was its host, and it sent me to kill Beth Bradley, but she freed me from it instead. I held the monster down with my body while she cut it off with a sharpened park railing. (p.5)

Well, quite.

Predictably, things between Pen and her new schoolfriends go from tolerable to terrible in short order. Seeking solace from their spite, she turns to a reflection of herself... yet Parva is no mere mirror image. She's an esteemed member of the mirrorstocracy:

The girl on the other side of the glass had come from [Pen] — she was composed of all the infinite reflections of her that had been caught between the two mirrors — but that was when their coexistence had ended. 

Pen and Parva had diverged from that moment in time like beams of refracted light; now Parva had her own feelings, her own life, built up in the weeks since she'd first stepped into whatever lay outside the bathroom door in the reflection. She drank wine, ate meat and swore like a squaddie with haemorrhoids. Much to Pen's chagrined envy, she'd even managed to land herself a job, although she wouldn't say doing what. (p.22)

After an upsetting incident, Pen escapes to the bathroom where she and Parva like to put the world to rights, but on this occasion, all she sees behind the mirror is a bloody handprint. It's apparent that Parva's in trouble, so Pen resolves to seek out the Chemical Synod — the same oily entities who helped Beth discover herself — praying that they may know a way for her to travel to London-Under-Glass.

They do. They possess "a compound fit to change sseeing into doing, a tincture to transform a window to a door: a portal primer, if you will, or a doorway drug." But the price of this prize is a painful prospect; no less than "a complete ssset of memoriess of a child, rendered from the mindss of her parentsss — not copiesss, you undersstand, but originalss." (p.65) Without telling Beth anything, Pen acquiesces — after all, this is her quest, to undertake on her terms — and into the mirror city she goes.

I've been banging on about being burned out on London as the backdrop for fantastic happenings for long enough now that I confess I did not relish the thought of another narrative set in the city, but The Glass Republic sidesteps that category smartly.

The larger part of the action takes place in London-Under-Glass, which, like Parva, is different enough from its original that it is independently interesting. The mirror city has its own aesthetics — asymmetry is valued highly, which is why Pen's scars make her the apple of everyone's eye — not to mention its own politics and media and economy and so on. Everything, right down to the weather, is similar, yet bizarrely set apart. As Pen observes, "it was as though the London she knew had run in the rain." (p.110)

She recognised the art deco horses of the Unilever building over her, and the old power station that housed the Tate Modern on the opposite bank, but they were taller here, and their shapes rippled as they rose into the sky, their familiar outlines bent by strange accretions of brick and stone. 

They look exactly like they look reflected in the river at home, Pen marvelled. Here, that's how they actually are. (p.102) 

Pen, in the interim, is an absorbing protagonist. She's reticent and introverted where Beth was ballsy and confident. She goes her own way rather than simply mirroring the development of our previous hero, which is especially refreshing. That said, I was as taken with Espel: a fierce steeplejill-cum-companion who both helps and hinders Pen throughout The Glass Republic. I can safely say that she balances out Pencil Khan's more passive aspects nicely; explaining much more than that would be to give what is a great game away.

Meanwhile, Pollock's monsters are awesome. I enjoyed the "sewermander" (p.35) — a bottle-sized dragon — particularly, but not all of the author's creations are so wonderfully whimsical. Be warned that there are also "nightmare things squatting fatly on heavy haunches with back-bent teeth and empty eye sockets." (p.54) And that's just for starters.

A year or so ago, I described The City's Son as "a tour-de-force in sophisticated urban fantasy — beautifully wrought, tightly plotted and fantastically finessed." Somewhat shockingly, it was also Tom Pollock's first novel. If anything, his second is better. Certainly, the prose is punchier, and it was pretty impressive to begin with. Add to that an awesome secondary world and a masterfully expanded cast of characters, and it's easy to see why this author is one of speculative fiction's most promising new voices.

The Glass Republic is not your garden variety urban fantasy. Instead, it's a text very much concerned with appearances, and indeed, what lies beneath these. In that sense — and many others, yes — it's such an unfettered success that the concluding volume of The Skyscraper Throne saga can't come soon enough.

***

The Glass Republic
by Tom Pollock

UK Publication: August 2013, Jo Fletcher Books

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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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Book Review | Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

***

If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

Because let's face it: failing is no great shakes. In life, we all make mistakes. If we're lucky, we learn from them as well. Perhaps they even help to make us who we are.

But say the failure state of whatever endeavour was more meaningful than a slight setback. What if you were to die trying?

That's what happens to poor Ursula Todd at the end of almost every section of Kate Atkinson's astonishing new novel: she expires. But there's something even weirder going on here, because after the end... the beginning again—and again and again—of life after life.

What, then, if you could simply travel back in time to give life another go... and another, and another, until you got it just so? Would you be the same person, if you made fundamentally different decisions? (Ursula isn't.)

Would the history books be written in much the same way, or would they, too, be changed? (Depends on the decision.)

And if you were just going to die again anyway, and start the cycle anew, what difference, if any, might it make? (All the difference, I dare say. Every last blasted whit of it.)

Now I know what you're thinking. I thought the same thing myself before beginning Life After Life. But whatever you do, don't mistake this beautiful book for some sort of wartime take on Groundhog Day. The premise bears a certain resemblance, yet in terms of structure, setting, tone and intent, Kate Atkinson's eighth novel is so very far from the tragic farce of that comedy classic that they feel worlds apart.

Life After Life begins with... well, what else but a double helping of death? In the prologue, which takes place in November 1930, Ursula walks into a cafe and finishes the Führer with her father's former service revolver, putting paid to that oft-pondered moral quandary... though the author reiterates it a little later:

"'Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don't know, say, a Quaker household—surely things would be different.' 

'Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?' Ralph asked mildly. 

'Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.' 

'But nobody knows what's going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.'

If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. (p.261)

Beyond this brutal demonstration, Atkinson takes us back. Back to the very beginning of Ursula's existence, in fact: to her birth on the night of February 11th, 1910, which we return to repeatedly. Back, indeed, to her first death, because she's stillborn, initially; strangled by the umbilical cord connecting Ursula to her mother—a connection that is severed in every subsequent section of this harrowing narrative—simply because the doctor got stuck in the snow.

"The snow the day she was born was a legend in the family. She had heard the story so often that she thought she could remember it." (p.180) And perhaps she can; though Ursula is still far from cognisant of the situation she's stuck in, she has lived many, many lives by the time she thinks this.

But in living life after life, inevitably, Ursula has had to die death after death. As is literally the case later, "death and decay were on her skin, in her hair, in her nostrils, her lungs, beneath her fingernails, all the time. They had become part of her." (p.352)

She has, for example, drowned off the coast of Cornwall, only to be saved in a later take courtesy the kindness of a passing stranger. She has fallen headlong from the roof of her family home and split her skull on the stones below, only to abandon the dear doll she had chased into thin air the next time this icy night rolls around. A particularly virulent strain of influenza proves more difficult to outmanoeuvre. This kills Ursula in chapter after chapter, until the phrase Atkinson tends to end these brief sequences with has become a disarming parody: we go from "darkness fell" (p.103) to "darkness soon fell again" (p.112) to "darkness, and so on," (p.119) all in the space of twenty unbearably painful pages.

Thankfully, Ursula's ignorance diminishes—as does her innocence—in the later stages of Life After Life. She begins to have inexplicable premonitions. A strong sense of déjà vu often overpowers her:

"It had been nothing, just something fluttering and tugging at a memory. A silly thing—it always was—a kipper on a pantry shelf, a room with green linoleum, an old-fashioned hoop bowling silently along. Vaporous moments, impossible to hold on to." (p.378)

But hold on to them Ursula must, somehow, if the cycle is ever to cease repeating.

Life After Life is an elaboration of the serenity prayer, essentially, in which Ursula finds the courage to change the things she can, and the grace to accept those things she can't. As torturous a process as this is for her, it's utterly wonderful for us. Let's waste no time wondering what if—what if, for instance, I could reach into the fiction and fix it, after a fashion—because at the end of the day, I would change nothing about this haunting novel. It's exemplary in every which way.

It is structurally superb, and perfectly paced, as the isolated snapshots we see at the outset cohere into a series of living, breathing pictures—portraits of a family in the good times and the bad, the happy times and the sad—before dissolving again at the end.

And that family figures in to Life After Life in a major way. We've hardly touched on them here—there's just so much else to discuss—but Teddy, Izzie, Hugh, Sylvie... even the monstrous Maurice: every one of Ursula's relatives feels fully formed, and though this is first and foremost a family saga—along the lines of several of the author's earlier efforts—her friends as well are redolently realised. Be they central or supporting, Atkinson's characters are among the most memorable and affecting I've encountered in all my years of reading.

The narrative, though harder to get a handle on, is equally appealing. It takes us, broadly chronologically, through some of the most significant events of the 20th century—from the Great War through the protracted Armistice afterwards to the blackout and beyond—but Life After Life does not overstay its welcome in any one period, though each is so expertly and eloquently rendered I'd have happily seen every era extended.

Additionally, Atkinson has occasion to explore the small scale as well as the great: one of the novel's most affecting sections takes place primarily in 1926, and it chronicles nothing so earth-shaking as an affair... albeit an agonising one. Yet the author finds warmth in even the coldest spots. Honesty and generosity enough to carry readers to the book's bittersweet conclusion, which wrought tears from me. Not just because I was glad, or sad—I'll never tell which it was—but because this phenomenal novel was almost over.

At the end of the day, Kate Atkinson's latest is her very greatest by a way, reminiscent of nothing so much as her Whitbread Award-winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Likewise, Life After Life is a first for the esteemed author, marking her first flirtation with speculative elements. I can only hope Atkinson returns to our genre someday soon, because her inaugural attempt at bringing the fantastic into the field of literary fiction is clearly one of the best books of the year.

***

Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

UK Publication: March 2013, Doubleday
US Publication: April 2013, Reagan Arthur Books

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