Book Review | Babayaga by Toby Barlow

From the author of Sharp Teeth comes a novel of postwar Paris, of star-crossed love and Cold War espionage, of bloodthirsty witches and a police inspector turned into a flea... and that's just for starters! 

Toby Barlow's marvellous Babayaga may begin as little more than a love-letter to the City of Light, but it quickly grows into a daring, moving exploration of love, mortality, and responsibility.

***

Once upon a time, I went to Paris, France. I confess I expected it to be something special—a romantic getaway I'd remember forever—but to my dismay, what I found was a pretty city, and while I won't go so far as to say cities are all basically the same these days, they are (in my European experience at least) interchangeable in various ways.

In Babayaga, Toby Barlow peels away the years to reveal a markedly more appealing period, when people and places, ideas and indeed dreams, developed independently:

This city, it's been the eye of the hurricane for centuries, a firestorm of ideals, art, and philosophy, a place where fierce arguments became actual revolutions, which then exploded into bloody wars. Think about all that happened here, Pascal, Descartes, Voltaire, Napoleon, the barricades of the commune. This was it, the glistening pearl resting at the center of a grand transcendent battle for mankind's soul. [...] But now it's all over. (p.378)

Over, or almost—like Will van Wyck's sojourn in postwar Paris, where he's found some success at an advertising agency with ties to the intelligence sector. Alas, his client base has practically collapsed: his CIA liaison has better things to do, to be sure, and once the clown Guizot goes, Will will have nothing left to keep him here. He hardly relishes the prospect of returning home to the devastation of Detroit; in fact "he had thoroughly enjoyed, savoured and celebrated every single day he had spent in this city," (p.16-17) but when the time comes, what's to be done?

Why, become entangled in a complex Cold War plot involving a fellow ex-pat! Oliver is the editor of a struggling literary journal modelled on The Paris Review who goes above and beyond as a talkative operative caught up in altogether too many madcap shenanigans.

In the midst of these marvellous mishaps, our everyman falls for a beautiful young woman on the run from the crazy old lady she came to the country with. Elga is hell bent on destroying Zoya... and she could do it, too. After all, the two women are witches—if not of the sort we've become familiar with in our fantastic fiction...

Book Review | The Humans by Matt Haig

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's a beautiful thing, I think.

***

The Humans
by Matt Haig

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

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Book Review | Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

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All Joe Spork wants is a quiet life. He repairs clockwork and lives above his shop in a wet, unknown bit of London. The bills don't always get paid and he's single and has no prospects of improving his lot, but at least he's not trying to compete with the reputation of his infamous criminal dad, Mathew "Tommy Gun" Spork.

Meanwhile, Edie Banister lives quietly and wishes she didn't. She's nearly ninety and remembers when she wasn't. She's a former superspy and now she's... well... old. Worse yet, the things she fought to save don't seem to exist anymore, and she's beginning to wonder if they ever did.

When Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. The client? Unknown. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.

With Joe's once-quiet world now populated with mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realises that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she gave up years ago, and pick up his father's old gun.

***

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books, but then, it’s hard to put your finger on much of anything in Nick Harkaway's new novel, because it’s always in flux. One moment it’s animated urban fantasy, the next nostalgic sci-fi with geriatric spies, and it’s no slouch in the between times either. Angelmaker takes in biting black comedy, heart-warming romance, some light crime monkeyshines, an incisive commentary on the state of play of people in power and power in people — in government around the world, if particularly in Britain — and so very much more that I’d have to be “mad as a shaved cat” to even attempt an account of it all.

So quantity, yes, and in every sense: in character as well as narrative, in wit and impact and ambition. But also quality. As one right-thinking English critic asserted, The Gone-Away World was “a bubbling cosmic stew of a book, written with such exuberant imagination that you are left breathless by its sheer ingenuity,” but for all its wonders, Nick Harkaway’s extraordinary debut was not without its issues in addition — foremost amongst them its madcap, almost abstract construction, which too often left one wondering what in The Gone-Away World was going on, even as it was going, going, gone.

Angelmaker, however, is a book far better put than its predecessor. A markedly more crafted artefact. Though the author’s roving eye remains intact, and those subjects its alights upon feel as delightful and insightful as ever, Harkaway has honed this incomparable trick of his to a filigree so fine that it appears nearly invisible; a filament of woven gold — impossible, yet a fact for all that — which runs through Angelmaker from the fanciful first to the beloved last.

Not unrelatedly, it’s just such a thing that sets our tentative young protagonist off at the outset: a filament of woven gold, glimpsed amidst “a Golgotha of armatures and sprockets” in an antique automaton, given to him by an crazy old crone to fix and finesse. After all, that’s what Joe Spork does for a living. He may be the only son of an infamous criminal, but Joe will be damned before he follows in his father’s hoosegow footsteps.

"He shies away from the idea that he is what a certain class of crime novel calls an habitué of the demi-monde, by which it is implied that he knows gamblers and crooks and the men and women who love them. For the moment, he is prepared to acknowledge that he still lives somewhat on the fringes of the demi-monde in exchange for not having to talk about it."

Then again, “the stricture of Joe Spork is indecision, [as] a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong,” and though he “tries not to reflect on the nature of a life whose high point is an adversarial relationship with an entity possessing the same approximate reasoning and emotional alertness as a milk bottle” — that being the stray cat that haunts his clockwork workshop — Joe is every inch an alumnus of the House of Spork. Once-mighty... now not so much. He’s smart and canny, connected and altogether too curious — bearing in mind what killed the kitty — so when several clients express an unhealthy interest in an objet d’art that has apparently passed through his hands, he simply can’t stop himself from looking into the thing.

The thing is, this doodah... it’s not just some high-value knickknack. It’s an apprehension apparatus; a vast and terrible truth-telling engine “whose shadow will be a block on the dreams of madmen; a weapon so awful that the world cannot survive its use, so that no one would use it save in the moment of their own inevitable destruction, and no one seek or allow the destruction of the one whose hand is on the hilt, lest they find the blade cuts every throat on Earth.” Long story short, it’s a doomsday device, and Joe isn’t the only person looking for it.

Meanwhile, “Edie Banister, ninety years of age and stalwart of the established order, has pushed the button on the revolution.” She’s the crazy old crone from before, of course, who set this whole show on the road, and she’s a side-splitting character in both concept and execution. In a stroke of sheer genius, Edie is also Angelmaker’s secondary narrator. Initially, the time we spend in her rambunctious company feels — however hilarious — perhaps a little beside the point, recalling the most meaningless moments of The Gone-Away World, but this is easy to forgive when the intrigue-rich life and times Harkaway treats us to begins to tie in with the sordid history of the House of Spork, and almost entirely forgotten thereafter, when these alternating perspectives converge in an unforgettable eruption of nuns, Tupperware and homemade explosive.

Angelmaker exudes such zany exuberance from its every pore, taking frequent “flights of trenchant fantasy” which will not be to everyone’s tastes, but I beg you: don’t let the arch tone dissuade you from the text. Harkaway’s latest may not be the most self-serious genre novel ever written, but it’s elegant in its inanity, masterful in its make-believe, and though it is — make no mistake — absolutely barking mad, it’s also truly beautiful. Like the MacGuffin it revolves around, it stands to “uproot so many old and rotted trees,” and one must bear in mind that “there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood. All the bows and arrows in the world are made of [these trees],” and Angelmaker, appreciated from a certain standpoint, is a stout shield set against them.

As I was saying, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books. Know this, though: it is. If the apprehension engine only existed, I’m almost certain it would confirm my suspicions. Of course then we’d all overdose horribly on unfettered knowledge, so perhaps it’s for the good that we go ignorant of the odd thing.

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

Angelmaker
by Nick Harkaway

UK PB Publication: February 2013, Windmill
US PB Publication: October 2012, Vintage

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Book Review | Redshirts by John Scalzi

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Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all the more to be assigned to the ship’s Xenobiology laboratory.

Life couldn’t be better... until Andrew begins to pick up on the fact that (1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations, and (3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.

Not surprisingly, a great deal of energy below decks is expended on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned to an Away Mission. Then Andrew stumbles on information that completely transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the Starship Intrepid really is... and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.

***

Now don't get me wrong: growing up, I adored Star Trek. Every week for years, come hell or high water, I would watch repeats of The Next Generation, and a little later, when Deep Space Nine and Voyager were on air, my fandom went further. I spent a truly terrifying amount of money collecting a magazine called the Star Trek Fact Files, and on the rare occasions I had pocket change to spare, I would buy the books, too.

Even then, though, at the height of my fondness for all things Federation: an emerging awareness that Star Trek was... well. Far from perfect, to put it politely. If I were feeling less forgiving, I'd say it was pretty terrible at times. What with the bad writing, the clumsy characters and the awful effects; the mad science, the tired old tropes and an overabundance of filler. The failings of the episodic formula Star Trek rarely strayed from were many and various... and yet.

And yet, I'll buy the Blu-rays. I'll go to the cinema to see the rebooted movies. Then, whenever some nugget of not-news comes along to suggest there might be another weekly series in the offing, I get all kinds of excited. It's not just nostalgia... but it's that, for a start.

Redshirts, by John Scalzi, is probably smarter than Star Trek's ever been. It's certainly funnier, and markedly more self-aware:

It was a great story. It was great drama.

And it all rested upon him. And this moment. And this fate. This destiny of Ensign Davis.

Ensign Davis thought, Screw this, I want to live, and swerved to avoid the land worms.

But then he tripped and one of the land worms ate his face and he died anyway. (p.14)

Finally, for the moment, Redshirts is in every sense a product of the postmodern era, whereas its inspiration - in all its incarnations - was rather a throwback from the first.

The plot is difficult to talk about beyond what occurs in the blurb, but suffice it to say that the captain and his recurring crew are not, as Scalzi has it, our central characters. Instead, an assortment of Ensigns rule this roost—or should I say roast? In any event, we have Dahl, Duvall, Finn, Hester and Hanson, and for a fair while, it's tough to tell them all apart. I dare say Scalzi might be making a joke even here, but the lack of differentiation between Ensigns A through E is a legitimate issue in the early-going: it makes it hard to give a hoot when one or another of them meets a meaningless end, as per the manifest destiny of all the Redshirts riding the Starship Intrepid.

Luckily, this grim thinning leaves the reader with a more manageable cast of characters, and the initially pedestrian plot soon takes a fascinating recursive turn. By way of a planet of unlikely Ice Sharks, death by exploding head, and an incursion into the underbelly of the Dub U's most famous flagship, Scalzi finally takes our impromptu away team back in time, the better to finesse his familiar universe's very fabric. To admit any more of The Narrative than that would be to give the game away—but make no mistake: it's a great game.

The most remarkable thing about Redshirts, however, isn't its onionskin story, or its smart, snappy dialogue. Scalzi's witty exposition is winning, yes, and his observation-based sense of humour comes across as incisive as ever, if not quite cutting—and thanks be for that. But these aspects, each and every one, seem secondary to a far greater motivation, for the most remarkable thing about Redshirts is its honest-to-God warmth. This is a genuinely joyous celebration of a subject near and dear to almost all our hearts, and though it is not uncritical of the weekly TV series it spoofs, Scalzi's love of Star Trek - not to mention Stargate, Blake's 7, Babylon 5 and the original Battlestar Galactica - shines through, and brightly, at every stage.

Redshirts, then, is that rare thing: a story you wish wouldn't end. Alas, it does. Several times. In quick succession. Because following the conclusion of the novel proper, three codas - sidestories of a sort - which feel, I fear, awfully unnecessary. Attempts, one suspects, to fatten up what is otherwise a very slim volume. At a push, Redshirts represents two or three hours of reading, and come the conclusion - the first one, that is - you'll want more. Much more... if not of what Scalzi has in store.

Still, if you're anything like me, you'll be glad of what little of it there is. If you have any affection at all for Star Trek and its ilk, you're going to love Redshirts, at least for as long as it lasts.

Now let's take a lesson from the text in question and end on an aside: the reason I haven't mentioned Old Man's War or Fuzzy Nation or Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is because, for some reason - and more's the pity, methinks - I haven't yet read Old Man's War or Fuzzy Nation or Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. If, however, Redshirts is in the least indicative of this author's output... then beam me up, Scalzi!

(I know, I know... but this is what I've had to resort to, because Joe Hill, the Borgovian Land Worm that he is, nabbed all the best puns already. "Read on and prosper," indeed.)

***

Redshirts
by John Scalzi

UK Publication: November 2012, Gollancz
US Publication: June 2012, Tor

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The Scotsman Abroad | Up, Angelmaker, And Away!

Today, for the first time, and perhaps the last time, your Scotsman's abroad in both senses of the phrase: at this very second I'm in an airplane, jetting off to international pastures, if not arrived upon them already, and popping Reese's Pieces.

Not only, but also, tor.com have published a review I wrote a little in advance of my departure, and it just so happens to be of one of the best books I've read all year. The only other novel of 2012 to date that even comes close to rivaling my time spent with the new Nick Harkaway was The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan, which I'm afraid we'll have to wait till the other end of my long holiday to talk about at any length.

But back to Angelmaker. It's baffling. It's bold. It's brilliant:

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books, but then, it’s hard to put your finger on much of anything in Angelmaker, because it’s always in flux. One moment it’s an animated urban fantasy, the next nostalgic sci-fi with geriatric spies, and it’s no slouch in the between times either. Angelmaker takes in biting black comedy, heart-warming romance, some light crime monkeyshines, an incisive commentary on the state of play of people in power and power in people – in government around the world, if particularly in Britain – and so very much more that I’d have to be "mad as a shaved cat" to even attempt an account of it all.

So quantity, yes, and in every sense: in character as well as narrative, in wit and impact and ambition. But also quality. As one right-thinking English critic asserted, The Gone-Away World was "a bubbling cosmic stew of a book, written with such exuberant imagination that you are left breathless by its sheer ingenuity," but for all its wonders, Nick Harkaway’s extraordinary debut was not without its issues in addition – foremost amongst them its madcap, almost abstract construction, which too often left one wondering what in The Gone-Away World was going on, even as it was going, going, gone.

Angelmaker, however, is a book far better put than its predecessor. A markedly more crafted artifact. Though the author’s roving eye remains intact, and those subjects its alights upon feel as delightful and insightful as ever, Harkaway has honed this incomparable trick of his to a filigree so fine that it appears nearly invisible; a filament of woven gold – impossible, yet a fact for all that – which runs through Angelmaker from the fanciful first to the beloved last.

(continue reading)

Please do follow the link through to tor.com to read the rest of the piece.

And then, if you haven't already, buy this book! Because it's exactly that awesome.

Wish me a happy landing! :/

Book Review | Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

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The song. That’s what London constable and sorcerer’s apprentice Peter Grant first notices when he examines the corpse of Cyrus Wilkins, part-time jazz drummer and full-time accountant, who dropped dead of a heart attack while playing a gig at Soho’s 606 Club. The notes of the old jazz standard are rising from the body — a sure sign that something about the man’s death was not at all natural but instead supernatural.

Peter will risk body and soul as he investigates a pattern of similar deaths in and around Soho. With the help of his superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last registered wizard in England, and the assistance of beautiful jazz aficionado Simone Fitzwilliam, Peter will uncover a deadly magical menace — one that leads right to his own doorstep and to the squandered promise of a young jazz musician: a talented trumpet player named Richard "Lord" Grant — otherwise known as Peter’s dear old dad.

***

I don't have an iPod, but if I did, there'd be all sorts of funny business on it. Folk, metal, industrial, orchestral, electronica, alt. rock, dubstep... I could go on - some of the music I love most does - but let's just say I'm not particularly particular about what I shake my tush to. I'll give most every genre of music a fair shake, and in my experience, however outwardly unappealing a certain sound might seem, there's usually something about it I can learn to love.

But not jazz.

And I've tried! Hand on heart I have, because I really rather like the idea of liking jazz. That probably says a whole lot about me that I'd sooner not say, but there's something intensely appealing about the prospect of whiling away a Friday night in a bar somewhere in the city, sharing a bottle of red with the other half while the music soars and swings and ripples around us.

Sadly, jazz is a genre I just can't get my head around. I struggle to pick out the rhythms, the melodies all a-muddle. In fact, the free-form, find your own fun of jazz leaves me feeling ignorant, exhausted and utterly uncultured.


Odd, then, that I adored Moon Over Soho so. After all, the second book of The Folly by Ben Aaronovitch is all about jazz: its plot revolves around the serial slaying - perhaps I need not add by magical means, but I shall - of several jazz icons and up-and-comers in an assortment of dingy London pubs and clubs, meanwhile it features a number of lengthy digressions into the history and heritage of jazz, as well as its place in our era. Moon Over Soho is, finally, something of a musical fusion in and of itself; it is equal parts police procedural - in other words, it's all about "maintaining the Queen's Peace," (p.23) - and magical mystery tour, a la Harry Potter.

Most distinctively, it's as funny as it is fantastic. See here:

"Murder investigations start with the victim, because usually in the first instance that's all you've got. The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with an 'ology' tacked on the end. To make sure you make a proper fist of this, the police have developed the world's most useless mnemonic - 5 x W H & H - otherwise known as Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? Next time you watch a real murder investigation on the TV, and you see a group of serious-looking detectives standing around talking, remember what they're actually doing is trying to work out what sodding order the mnemonic is supposed to go in. Once they've sorted that out, the exhausted officers will retire to the nearest watering hole for a drink and a bit of a breather." (p.108)

Aaronovitch's sly, dry, sharply satiristic sense of humour is in full effect in Moon Over Soho, at least as much as it was in predecessor -- if not more, because this sequel occurs in a world in solid working order already: namely the magical kingdom of London. Mayhap you've heard of it?

Add to that the fact that the author spends precious little time explaining what happened last time in Rivers of London... to Constable Peter Grant and his partner and sometime love interest Lesley May, both rather the worse for wear after the magical calamity with which the previous volume concluded; nor to the gang-gods of the Thames, never mind their many, various and nefarious wains. A quick reference here and there is the extent of it, and while some readers are likely to find this a bit baffling, I was alright with the oversight, because Moon Over Soho wastes so little energy recapping and worldbuilding that Aaaronovitch can hone in on what made our last visit to The Folly such a treat: on the fun, and the funny, which comes thick and fast. Rarely does a page of Aaaronovitch's neat sequel pass without there being something to elicit a grin, or a knowing eyebrow.


The narrative's not to be sniffed at either. It's perhaps a notch less substantial, and certainly a lot less surprising, than the whimsical watery warfare of Rivers of London, but it hops along happily to a toe-tapping time signature, with a sweet solo here and an awesome cacophony of noise there. In the erstwhile, the underground jazz scene makes for a fascinating and fittingly multicultural motif to set this somewhat throwaway story against -- plus it serves to bring Peter's family into the picture again, and it was great to meet the Grants again.

Moon Over Soho's characters are wonderful to a one, come to that. Invariably warm and witty, smart and sensible, there are only a few new additions - most return, disfigured or merely disheartened, from the events of book one of The Folly - but of these, Stephanopolis specifically is terrific. "She was a short, terrifying woman whose legendary capacity for revenge had earned her the title of the lesbian officer least likely to have a flippant remark made about her sexual orientation," (p.76) and I dearly hope to see more of her in Whispers Under Ground.


If one absolutely must append a single category to Moon Over Soho, I suppose it'd be urban fantasy - like jazz, a genre I'm not terribly interested in, I'll be the first to admit - but any number of things put Aaronovitch's fiction ahead of the pack, not least its fearless engagement with the now, and our generation - which is to say both mine and yours, given where and how you're reading this review - above all others.

And Moon Over Soho is both superficially modern - as above, so below - and engaged more meaningfully with the contemporary climate: on the one hand Aaronovitch easily strikes a similar chord as Ernest Cline did in Ready Player One - name-checking Street Fighter II and Logan's Run in a single paragraph, say (see. p.284) - while on the other the author applies a relatable and revealing perspective to the content of his novel, what with our worldly-wise-but-somewhat-bumbling hero's attempts to explain the inexplicable that is the bread and butter of this book. Which is to say magic... with science. You can imagine how that works out.

London is a bit much for a country mouse like me, but Moon Over Soho paints such a frantic, fantastic picture of the place and the people who call it home that I'm suddenly itching to visit. As aforementioned, it's not at all standalone, and the story is somewhat on the slight side, but all that jazz - up to and including all the jazz - be damned: I had vast amounts of fun reading Moon Over Soho, and if you're in the least inclined towards the light side of genre fiction, you surely will too.

***

Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

UK Publication: April 2011, Gollancz

US Publication: March 2011, Del Rey

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