Books Received | The Last Four Things At Last

A shadow has fallen on this house since the mailman came the other day, bearing a gift, and a woeful burden.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

That's right.

If you haven't been reading The Speculative Scotsman the whole time I've been at it, this one time I'll forgive you - just so long as you click through to peruse my review of The Left Hand of God from March last year. And then maybe one of the opinion pieces that came in the fallout from the review, too.

Still among the most trafficked articles on TSS entire, those.

So it was with hope and no small amount of trepidation that I took possession of a review copy of The Last Four Things a few days ago. Of course I remember how very wrongly The Left Hand of God rubbed me, yet I found myself wishing that this sequel has learned where there was learning to be done. Because many other reviewers - like Liviu and Robert Thompson - really did enjoy it. And I'd like to have a nice thing or two to say about Paul Hoffman's work this time out. Things can't get much worse, can they?

Well, I've since read the first chapter - I couldn't resist, though I was and I am in the midst of another book - and I can confirm that no, things haven't gotten any worse. Which isn't to say they've necessarily gotten any better...

I should have a full review up within the next ten days. You may stay tuned.

###

Just a quick PS to say, since from time to time there's chatter about whether publishers and publicists get sore about negative publicity, Penguin and Michael Joseph were as polite and as professional as ever when I discussed coverage of The Last Four Things with one of their many, many representatives.

So kudos to them. Seriously.

Would that I could say the same about certain other... ah, but that'd be giving the game away, wouldn't it? You'll have to wait for my tell-all autobiography, The Rise and Fall of a Speculative Scotsman, due out this October, to hear about those. :)

The Other Right Hand of God

So guess what I just came across?

No, it wasn't porn. Cheeky lot, aren't you? It was - cue an ominous roll on the snare drum - the sequel to none other than... The Left Hand of God. By Paul Hoffman.

Well. It was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn't it?

The Last Four Things is coming in April 2011 from Michael Joseph, a division of Penguin Press. At approximately 512 pages, it's significantly longer than the first book in this would-be series. And I'm going to have to read it, aren't I? Believe it or not, my review of The Left Hand of God - my rather vitriolic review of The Left Hand of God - is one of the most highly trafficked articles I've published here on TSS.

Which is rather confusing, really. Would you all prefer it if I hated on stuff? Is that what's going on here?

Any old way, here's the blurb for The Last Four Things:

"Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. These are the Last Four Things. Now there are Five.

"Meet Thomas Cale...

"Returning to the Sanctuary of the Redeemers, Cale is told by the Lord Militant that the destruction of mankind is necessary, the only way to undo God's greatest mistake.

"Cale seemingly accepts his role in the ending of the world; fate has painted him as the Left Hand of God, the Angel of Death. Absolute power is within his grasp, the terrifying zeal and military might of the Redeemers a weapon for him to handle as simply as he once used a knife.

"But perhaps not even the grim power that the Redeemers hold over Cale - the boy who turns from love to poisonous hatred in a heartbeat, the boy who switches between kindness and sheer violence in the blink of an eye - is enough. The annihilation that the Redeemers seek may well be in Cale's hands - but his soul is far stranger than they could ever know."

That lede-line is properly putting me in mind of another Michael Joseph publication, the similarly disappointing I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore. I confess, I'd rather read a sequel to that than another dismal Paul Hoffman novel.

But there you go. You want it; you got it.

*cries quietly*

Reviewing Reviewers' Reviews

I'm given to understand The Left Hand of God finally made its bow in the US. Now a whole other continent can get a copy of the year's worst fantasy that much more easily! To my American readers: I do not envy you the disproportionate hype that will inevitably accompany its release.

But hear ye, and hear ye well. I'm not going to gripe about The Left Hand of God today. Indescribably tempting though it is, at this point I must have dedicated more words to debating that book on The Speculative Scotsman than any other. Tigana might be the reason I started blogging in the first place. The Passage might be my favourite read of the year. It's The Left Hand of God that I keep coming back to, though. Time and again, it seems to resurrect itself in my mind as a springboard for interesting discussion. As in this case...

Last week, over at Only the Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Seak read and reviewed Paul Hoffman's execrable fantasy. He didn't love it, nor did he hate it - but that's neither here nor there, really. When I read The Left Hand of God, I turned its first pages with great expectations. The publicity blitz - the millions of pounds spent on advertising, the iPhone app, the book trailer - had seen to that. There are an uncountable number of fantasies that I simply don't have time to read each year, but here was one, and at the very start of 2010, that I simply couldn't afford to miss. Or so I was led to believe.

Seak, on the other hand, as well as - going from the comments on his review - several other speculative fiction fans, has come at The Left Hand of God from an entirely different angle. I don't know that I was the first blogger to rail against Hoffman's book, but clearly enough of us did to effectively counterbalance the hype with negative expectations aplenty. Seak went into The Left Hand of God expecting it to be awful, and though he admits it was "not without its flaws, overall [he] enjoyed" it.

So Seak's experience with The Left Hand of God, and thus his review, was coloured by his expectations - not the expectations generated by the manufactured buzz, as in my case earlier in the year, but by actual reviews of Hoffman's novel. Like mine.

All of which brings up an interesting question, though I'm afraid this is mostly one for the other bloggers reading this pint-sized diatribe.

As reviewers, do you read other reviewers' reviews before composing your own?

For myself, I do everything in my power to ensure that I don't. Which isn't a slight on those bloggers who do - I intimately understand the temptation to check one's own opinion against the general consensus for fear you're way off base - it's only to say that I want the reviews I write to be reflections of my personal experiences, however against the grain they may be in some cases. I worry that my own opinions might subconsciously shift to more closely align with those others I've read or heard were I to read what Adam or Ken or Aidan or Larry or any of other bloggers whose judgment I respect were to say. I try so hard to maintain a sense of subjectivity, in fact, that I have an RSS reader which nearly chokes every time I load it because it's so backlogged full of reviews I won't let myself read - yet.

So what about you guys?

Blogging in the Year We Made Contact: Odyssey One (The Niche)

When I Iaunched The Speculative Scotsman in January, I'll admit: I had precious little understanding of exactly what variety of venture I'd begun. There wasn't a purpose in my mind more complex or carefully calculated than the vague notion of writing something about how much Tigana had moved me.

And yet, four months and more than a hundred posts in, here I remain. Blogging - and every day (though I fear that might change in the near future). And it's gone well; very, very well, by my own reckoning. Not to toot my own horn here, but TSS has attracted support from a wide array of publishers, professional authors and fellow bloggers that I hadn't dared hope might notice my humble scribblings. I couldn't be happier that that's the case. Their belief, their enthusiasm, lends credence to what I'm doing here - which, I should say, isn't churning out one review after another. There are reviews on the blog, certainly - and there always will be, never fear - but I have done, and will continue to do, whatever I'm able to delineate such articles with more diverse commentary and content.

In any case, the site's success has been a very pleasant surprise to me. One discerning colleague has even gone so far as to call me a Magical Scotsman. But I've a confession to make: this isn't the first time I've blogged.

I won't bore you or embarrass myself with the particulars, but yes, it's true. A few years ago, I kept another blog. And though that hardly moved the heavens and the earth, I didn't let its unfortunate failure discourage me. Between then and now, I kept writing. I reviewed video games for Ace Gamez. I was a blogless BlogCritic. I wrote articles for local newspapers and copy for a couple of adverts.

But all that's beside the point I mean to make today. Today, I'd like to make use of the perspective given me by the blogosphere's overwhelming reception of The Speculative Scotsman versus the veritable wet blanket which mercifully smothered The Other Site Which Must Not Be Named to underscore some of the more imperative differences between the blogosphere then and the blogosphere now. It's going to take a couple of posts, I'm afraid; I've a lot to say on this topic. And I'm certainly not alone in that.

Let's begin by considering the place of blogs in this enlightened era. From the entry dated March 12th in his tour journal on the wonderful Bright Weavings, Guy Gavriel Kay - author of the forthcoming Under Heaven, not to mention the very book that inspired The Speculative Scotsman - had this to say:

"One of the realities these days, and I had an email exchange with an entertainment editor for one major paper about this, is how brutally the space for books is being cut in newspapers and magazines – as in 70% in one case I just learned of yesterday.

"There's a serious fight among publishers and publicists for a diminishing amount of media real estate to 'cover' their books. (This is a reason for more of an online push.) Editors are ruefully aware that they are not doing an especially good job of covering what's being published, because they can't. And given that the size of any review is limited, the money paid is pretty trivial, and it takes time to read and carefully consider a book, the odds against (and this was the editor's point) thoughtful engagement with a novel and a well-written review are... extreme.

"In theory, online reviewers have no such space pressures or need to rush, but all sorts of other considerations come into play when you get to the book blogging world. Among others, it is widely noted that the Internet tends to steer us towards communities of the like-minded, and so you find a lot of online reviewing that is targeted to narrow genres or spheres of interest, and for many books, an appraisal that comes only from a specific perspective might be a problem.

"Having said that, it can also be an asset... someone targeting historical fiction or photography books or any other specific area is far more likely to alert people to titles in that field than any newspaper and to be well-grounded in that field. That's an upside. As I think I said earlier in this Journal, editors will speak, legitimately, of the role of the gatekeeper, the man or woman ensuring some measure of quality or appropriateness and credibility, and perhaps a push for revision or fine-tuning, to a review. But my sense is that credibility can arrive over time for some people online too, just from the craft and care they bring to their work.

"I have a general sense that the decline of newspapers is taking with it the importance of covering books, and it saddens me."

So Guy Gavriel Kay is taking us seriously. That's a hell of a start!

Moreover, his assertions regarding print media are of paramount importance. What with the collapse of the global economy and the increasingly less supplemental role of free, like-for-like internet resources, newspapers and magazines - which cost money to produce and must thus cost money to consume - are struggling to keep from going under. And in some, admittedly negligible, ways, it's our fault.

But there's no sense in crying over spilt milk. Except for a select few outlets, the print media is undeniably on the out. It's a sad fact; a fact nonetheless. And so the responsibility falls to us - amongst others of course - to bring news, views and reviews to those consumers who look now to the internet for such things, and by extension the blogosphere, where before they would buy a broadsheet or the latest glossy issue of SFX.

It was perhaps three years ago that I idled away my time with The Other Site Which Must Not Be Named, and then, though there were blogs - and no shortage of them - they catered, as Kay observes, to very narrow niches. In many respects, they still do. I would disagree, however, that "an appraisal that comes only from a specific perspective" is necessarily a problematic thing. Practically speaking, as amateur, not to mention unpaid writers, bloggers are only able to devote so much of their time to creating content for their blogs - by and large, they also have lives to lead, and must somehow, between blog posts, make enough money to pay for those lives.

However, such considerations aren't what interest me here. The most significant problem with my blog of yore was, I think, that I didn't delineate its concerns clearly enough; I had hoped that somehow, if I wrote a little about everything, people who wanted to read about any one of those things would somehow discover it. That, um... that didn't pan out. And it's easy, in retrospect, to see why. The internet is pretty huge, after all, and given that there's so very much of it - and so very much of it that doesn't interest you at all - in order to find those things you are interested in, you have to look for them. Surfing the internet is, I feel, an increasingly outdated notion. Perhaps it once had some relevance, when the web itself a more humble endeavour, but we are no longer carried along on a great wave: we drive that wave, whether by plugging a keyword into Google or following links and the like from sites we already know scratch our particular itches. Sometimes we come across something new, something that surprises us; an obscure alleyway that leads away from the thoroughfares we travel along each day in the unique online experience that we have each created for ourselves.

That bloggers tend to define the boundaries of their interests and address as thoroughly as possible those concerns is both practical and purposeful, then. And further, when you read a review of a fantasy novel written by an experienced fantasy reader, does that not lend the review that much more credibility? Certainly for those readers interested in a particular genre, criticism originating from like-minded perspectives must surely hit home more directly than any general review. An avowed fantasy reader understands first-hand the tropes of fantasy; a print journalist, meanwhile, whose purview is likely more encompassing - no-one hires, let's be a frank, different reviewers for each genre of literature - might well grasp the broad strokes, but miss the finer points of such fiction. To return, one last time, to that old chestnut, how many glowing reviews of The Left Hand of God did you see in the papers? Give that book to a blogger with any experience of such narratives, however, and... well, we all know how I feel about Paul Hoffman's first genre novel.

Time, I think, to tie a pretty little bow on this first installment of Blogging in the Year We Made Contact. But before we do, what have we learned? I'll start us off. Conclusion number one: the blogosphere has, at least in the three years I've been active (and inactive) in it, become an increasingly legimate source of criticism. And conclusion number two: though it's a fact that most blogs cater to niche audiences, their narrow focus need not be a cause for concern. Indeed, perhaps it's a cause for celebration.

For my own part, I don't know that The Speculative Scotsman would have reached nearly so many readers had I just been a Scotsman who blogged. That I am a blogging Scotsman with an interest in speculative fiction has introduced me to a wonderful, lively and thoughtful community of others with similar interests. You lot!

Readers, you really are the bee's knees.

Opinionated Speculations: Writers Reviewing Bloggers

You've all read 'Righting the Left Hand of God', right?

If not, go do that. You'll also want to read the review of Paul Hoffman's eagerly anticipated fantasy debut that preceded it. Don't worry; it's not too much to get through, and hey, what better way is there to spend another dreary Monday than by shirking more pressing responsibilities?

Let's push forward on the presumption that if you're here, however, you're already familiar with the two posts Google Analytics tell me now reign supreme on The Speculative Scotsman - although before we do, let me thank everyone who's read the article, as well as those who were moved enough to tweet about it, link to it, or follow it up on their own blog, with their own thoughts. In the end, it's all about the conversation - the power that arises from this speculative collective - and I'm chuffed to bits to have contributed something to the endlessly stimulating dialogue that's followed.

But let's get on with the show.

In 'Righting the Left Hand of God', I discussed how the reception to my negative review of said novel had left me feeling a little conflicted; or, at the least, I certainly meant to. One way or another, to cut a long story short, I didn't launch The Speculative Scotsman in order to bully readers into buying or not buying a book - any book - based solely on my say-so.

Now far be it from me to suggest that any of the readers who said in the comments section of said review that they would no longer be buying The Left Hand of God made that decision based on a single blogger's opinion. I'm sure that wasn't the case, but equally, it's not impossible that in some cases, my thoughts on Hoffman's much-hyped novel represented the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. And no wonder: that camel's got to be exhausted by now, trotting back and forth with all the world's expectations on its shoulders like the first man to set foot on the moon, albeit with humps. And straw.

So. Tome of the Undergates author and seemingly frequent TSS visitor Sam Sykes posted his thoughts on the questions raised in part in 'Righting The Left Hand of God' on his own site, which I'd advise you bookmark or add to your RSS readers right this second.

I don't want to repost his entire blog, so go read his response, 'Do Y'all Wanna Talk About Reviews?' - and then, dear reader, return to me, for I have things yet unsaid to say.

To surmise: Sam - perhaps a little nervous over the perception that if bloggers don't like his highly anticipated debut, people might be dissuaded from buying it - doesn't think that a single recommendation, or indeed a warning not to go near a certain novel, is worth overly much. I find myself agreeing with Sam disturbingly often, and this surely isn't the ideological crossroads at which we must part ways; he's right.

I'm not the magical Scotsman that has been suggested elsewhere, nor need my English degree be any sort of validation of the opinions I presented here on the blog; assuredly, the university I studied at is no universally renowned bastion of education, though I suppose it's a step up from the drive-through colleges you can buy diplomas a dime a piece from. That said, there's nothing more or less valid about my reactions to a novel than any other blogger's. TSS is but a single voice, and though I'm not afraid sing a different tune here than other writers and readers might, that's only because, at the end of the day - as they say - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What makes a book great to me isn't necessarily what would make a book great to you; my opinions are my own, and I promise you, I'll think no less of you if you do not share them.

Anyway, never one to say a little when I could say a lot, I've only really written all of the above to somehow justify with sheer verbosity my reposting of the lengthy comment I made on Sam's blog, as follows:

"Be it good press or bad, if people are talking about your book, if there's buzz of any sort surrounding its release, there's got to be a greater chance that the average Joe or Jane will recognise it when he or she is window-shopping in Waterstones or browsing in Borders. People aren't like lemmings - as Sam says, we can and should be making up our own minds about whether or not a particular thing appeals to us, be it a book, a film, new food or fashion. As far as books go, a review, whether positive or negative, serves firstly to give people who otherwise wouldn't look twice that first incentive to pick up, say, The Left Hand of God, or indeed, Tome of the Undergates, and make their own decisions according to their own criteria.

"And though a part of me rebels against it, there is that other point that no-one's quite making. The Speculative Scotsman may only be a month and change old, but I've been lurking amongst the community for years, and as such I don't think I would be far off-base to say that a negative review on a blog, any blog really, seems to be an uncommon thing. It's not like there's a chance Orbit or Gollancz would stop sending ARCs to The Guardian or The Times if either made a habit of ripping their publications to shreds - the exposure is just too valuable - but as far as blogs go, I imagine things are quite different.

"Bloggers are in the unenviable position of either buying just the books they want to read, and therefore leaning necessarily towards covering only those novels that they're likely to react positively to, or relying on publishers to send them a selection of the good, the bad and the ugly alike. In that latter case, the bloggers in question must then decide how important the relationships he or she has with those publishers are before publicly savaging a book they've particularly disliked. There's certainly bad press to be had in the blogs, but largely I think it's a case of good press to be lost.

"Now I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that blogs which rely on ARCs and the like are dishonest - I'd only be shooting myself in the foot, let's be frank - but I feel there's an important point to be made in amongst all that thinking-out-loud. At the end of the day, I don't necessarily trust a good review in the way that I do a negative perspective; a reviewer has nothing to lose by saying nice things about something, and much to gain. A bad review, on the other hand, will do him or her no favours - it's akin to biting the hand that feeds. Suffice it to say I don't imagine any attempts I make to establish a working relationship with Michael Joseph, the UK publishers of The Left Hand of God, will meet with much success. For a book to be met with indifference or outright negativity, therefore, there have got to be some real problems for a blogger to take that chance.

"Of course, none of that changes the fact that ultimately, readers must make their decisions for themselves. Better that they're informed decisions, though, and better still that they're decisions made bearing in mind the advice of bloggers whose reactions in the past have been similar to your own.

"But for me, for the reasons outlined above, when I'm looking to add to my collection of books, a single bad review carries substantially more weight than a single good review."

Of course, the larger part of that comment is a story for another time, and that time is not now. I've burbled enough for one day.

But do, dear readers, let me know what your thoughts are on these issues in the comments. Are bad reviews bad things? Do they impact your perception of a book more than a good review might? Can bloggers be considered a source of legitimate criticism if there's anything to the above-mooted opinion? At that, is there anything to it?

Discuss!

Book Review: The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman

[Buy this book from Amazon

in the UK / in the US]

"Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie, for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary.

"The Sanctuary of the Redeemers is a vast and desolate place – a place without joy or hope. Most of its occupants were taken there as boys and for years have endured the brutal regime of the Lord Redeemers whose cruelty and violence have one singular purpose – to serve in the name of the One True Faith. In one of the Sanctuary’s vast and twisting maze of corridors stands a boy. He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old – he is not sure and neither is anyone else. He has long-forgotten his real name, but now they call him Thomas Cale.

"He is strange and secretive, witty and charming, violent and profoundly bloody-minded. He is so used to the cruelty that he seems immune, but soon he will open the wrong door at the wrong time and witness an act so terrible that he will have to leave this place, or die. His only hope of survival is to escape across the arid Scablands to Memphis, a city the opposite of the Sanctuary in every way: breathtakingly beautiful, infinitely Godless, and deeply corrupt.

"But the Redeemers want Cale back at any price... not because of the secret he now knows, but because of a much more terrifying secret he does not."

***

Expectations are high for The Left Hand of God, almost unbearably so. Some have tipped it as among the most anticipated new fantasy novels of 2010, and from the outside looking in, it's not difficult to see why. Here in the UK, Penguin Books have embarked on what is reportedly the single biggest and most expensive publicity drive in the publisher's long history, taking in the most mainstream ad campaign I've ever seen employed for a piece of speculative fiction short of a new Stephen King; not to mention a series of viral trailers you'll find infecting the likes of YouTube and DailyMotion and even, bafflingly, a iPhone app.

The premise, too, sounds appealing. Tailor-made, one might go so far as to say, to hit home with fans of speculative fiction; Hoffman has a check-mark in all the right boxes. There's a chosen one with an impossible love interest and a pair of unwilling allies caught in the middle of an epic battle between powerful opposing forces set against one another; there's a touch of alternate-history about the world Cale must navigate, yet a whiff of the real world rendered unreal in the mode of so many superior narratives.

In short, The Left Hand of God arrives carried aloft by a wave of high hopes and great expectations, but it is far from the equal of either. The Guardian observes that "it might have been planned by a focus group," and reviewer Patrick Ness is right on the money; everything about Hoffman's highly-anticipated genre debut seems calculated to win over fans of speculative fiction, and perhaps it may have, had it not a myriad of other, more commercially viable target markets in mind. Penguin Books only stands a chance of recouping the massive financial investment they've made on The Left Hand of God if it sells fantasy to the masses in the same way they bought into the horror genre via the likes of True Blood and Twilight. This is that book.

None of which, come right down to it, is really Hoffman's problem, but that his publishers have pitched The Left Hand of God far too hard is only the tip of the iceberg. As the action shifts from the sickening training camp at Shotover Scarp to the burlesque streets and alleyways of Memphis where Cale finds refuge from the Redeemers, Hoffman seems to lose sight of the sliver of promise that had speckled the narrative's first act. The pace set by his protagonist's attempts to escape chokes at the sight of the city and soon stalls entirely

For the larger part of The Left Hand of God, in fact, Cale and his companions do... nothing. They wait. Sometimes they talk about not waiting, but decide, invariably, to wait a while longer. The days, weeks and months wasted away in Memphis only serve to pad out the first volume of a fantasy series of indeterminate length; without them, Hoffman's novel would be comparable to a YA effort, and a slim one at that. Perhaps Penguin, seeing some potential in the draft presented them, had its author divide The Left Hand of God down the middle and demanded that Hoffman fatten up the remainder for fear of putting off fantasy fans whose eyes light up at tomes fit to work as well as doorstops as narratives. But I digress - speculating about where it all went awry will do little good.

Hoffman's prose is rarely more than competent. It chugs along like a train-ride to nowhere; eventually, it gets you where you're going, but the awkward stops and starts that punctuate the journey are infinitely more memorable than the supposedly striking vistas glimpsed along the way. His idea of character development never amounts to anything greater than a bit of clumsy exposition that states how and why Cale or one of the forgettable supporting players have changed their outlook. And the worst is yet to come.

As I've said, The Left Hand of God meanders woefully on its way to the inevitable battle between the legions of Redeemers and the armoured Materazzi of Memphis who Cale has inexplicably taken to advising, but when that climactic encounter finally arrives, the pay-off is unspeakably disappointing. Hoffman's clumsy narration during this sequence shifts to an equally ineffective eagle's-eye perspective; he recounts the clash as if it were an historical event occurring in the far distance of time and space.

Still more distracting is the way in which the author's numeric obsession, heretofore only an occasional obstacle, wins out as the irresistible force of the Redeemers meets the Materazzi's immovable object. After building up to this battle for so long, when it comes to the actual article Hoffman seems content to simply relate the mathematical composition of each army; the referential number of each regiment; even the ages of each soldier. Once you've noticed the author falling back upon the presumed safety of the numbers that were so pivotal in his previous work - a book which apparently "predicted the collapse of the world financial system" - the numbers here, there and everywhere become impossible to ignore.

There are occasional glimmers of something worthwhile in The Left Hand of God, but for the most part, Hoffman's first genre novel is derivative, distracted and downright dull. This early in the year, readers are no doubt keen to latch onto the next great fantasy; assuredly, however, this literary identity crisis falls far short of that high watermark. In all likelihood Penguin's disproportionate publicity campaign will persuade enough readers to buy The Left Hand of God that sequels will come along to resolve the many plot threads left unresolved by this disappointing volume's abrupt conclusion, but unless Hoffman hones the scattershot craft he exhibits herein, I truly don't think I'll care enough to find out.

***

The Left Hand of God

by Paul Hoffman

January 2010, Michael Joseph: London

[Buy this book from Amazon

in the UK / in the US]

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