Book Review | Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. 

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

***

"If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden," muses Haruki Murakami in the materials accompanying Men Without Women. He must, then, be something of a glutton for punishment, having immersed himself in metaphorical forestry for the decade and change since his last short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, allowed the World Fantasy Award-winning author to tend to his wending trellises.

Compared to the twenty four works of fiction featured in that last, Men Without Women is a strikingly slim volume, compiling only seven stories, six of which Murakami's legion of English-language fans may well have read already. And whilst I wish I could tell you their haunting quality makes up for their wanting quantity, so many of said struck me as uneventful retreads that I can only recommend this collection with a handful of caveats.

That being said, if you come to Murakami for the cats and the cars, the deep obeisance to The Beatles and the bars choked with smoke, then come! Men Without Women has all that jazz—and oh so many miserable men and mysterious women.

The day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you're already there. But by then there's no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called 'Men Without Women.' Always a relentlessly frigid plural.  

Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking it is to become one. (p.224)

That's as may be, but if this collection is about anything, it's about communicating that pain, that heartbreak, to the reader.

Book Review | Zero K by Don DeLillo

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”

These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”

Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”

***

"Everybody wants to own the end of the world," begins Don DeLillo's first new novel since Point Omega in 2010, and like the finest opening lines, Zero K's is soaked through with significance.

Fittingly for a work of fiction interested in "fathers and sons," this is a remark Ross Lockhart, a billionaire in his sixties, makes to Jeffrey—his aimless heir, and our narrator—as they stand in his opulent New York office, surrounded on all sides by abstract art and other markers of money: motifs readers will encounter repeatedly as they make their way through Zero K. It's important to note, furthermore, that this phrase is not spoken in the moment, but rather recalled by "a man propelled into obsessive reflection."

As to the words themselves... well. To own is to possess, yes, but these days, it also denotes domination, and this is what Ross wants: to use his dollars to dominate the end of the world. That's not to say the apocalypse, but the end of the world as we mere mortals perceive it, at the very end of our selves—in death.

Ross makes this startling statement, we learn a little later, because his second wife Artis Martineau is dying. But the owner and operator of the Lockhart fortune isn't a man so easily beaten. See, he's been led to believe that his riches might give her a future in the future, which is why he's flown her to the home of a clinical cult called Convergence, where—in exchange for substantial donation, I dare say—she'll be frozen at a temperature approaching absolute zero in her last moments, to be re-awoken one day, decades or centuries or millennia hence, when medicine is in a position to correct her condition.

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 | The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for asylum. Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking...

The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly's life from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast as Europe's oil supply dries up—a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes—daughter, sister, mother, guardian—is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.

***

An exquisite exploration of the beauty and the tragedy of mortality, The Bone Clocks is a soaring supernatural sextet split into sections carefully arranged around the novel's initial narrator.

A baby-faced runaway when we meet in the mid-eighties, Holly Sykes has become a wistful old woman by the book's conclusion in the year 2043. Between times David Mitchell depicts her diversely: as a friend and a lover; a wife and a mother; a victim and a survivor; and more, of course, as the decades prance past. The Bone Clocks is, in short, the story of Holly Sykes' life: a life less ordinary that leads her—as if by the whims of some Script—into the midst of a macabre conflict between eternal enemies fought in the farthest fringes of existence.

But that doesn't happen until the last act. In the beginning, Holly is no more and no less than a normal girl in a normal world with normal problems—like the backstabbing boyfriend she left the nest to take up with. Too proud to crawl back to her family after a screaming match with her Mam, Holly hightails it as far away from home as her aching feet can take her—pretty much to prove a point:

Six days should do it. The police only get interested in missing teenagers once a week's up. Six days'll show Mam I can look after myself in the big bad world. I'll be in a stronger, whatchercallit, a stronger negotiating position. And I'll do it on my own, without a Brubeck to get all boyfriendish on me. (p.40)

Even as a teenager, Holly's pretty together, so she manages to make ends meet in the interim. Furthermore, she finds a few ways to extend her experimental independence... if not indefinitely, since the Script we learn about later has other plans for our protagonist.

Book Review | J by Howard Jacobson

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. Kevern doesn't know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a world starting with a J. It wasn't then, and isn't now, the time or place to be asking questions.

Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn't ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren't sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a momentous catastrophe—a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.

J is a novel to be talked about in the same breath as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, thought-provoking and life-changing. It is like no other novel that Howard Jacobson has written.

***

Alongside Us, The Bone Clocks, and How To Be Both, J by Howard Jacobson was one of a number of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in advance of its publication date. A source of frustration for some, I'm sure—though this has ever been the panel's habit—but for others it represents a reason to update reading radars.

This year, I found myself amongst the others above, because if not for the nod, I doubt I'd have looked twice at this book. When I did, additionally, it was with some scepticism; after all, Jacobson has won the Booker before, for The Finkler Question in 2010—the first comic novel to take the trophy home in 25 years—and pointedly acknowledging former nominees is another of the panel's practices.

Not today. J, I'm pleased to say, is in every sense deserving of its spot on the longlist. It's a literary revelation wrapped in understated dystopian clothing; a wonder of wit and whimsy that takes in the chilling and the ridiculous—the hilarious and the horrific. That said, it's a novel that requires rereading to appreciate completely.

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 | Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Boy Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman—craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

Snow is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished—exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When Bird is born, Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

***

As Granta magazine allowed last year, Helen Oyeyemi is unquestionably one of the best young British novelists in the business, and though her fiction is largely literary, she’s ever evidenced an interest in speculative elements. From the haunted house in White is for Witching to the magical realism of Mr Fox, Oyeyemi has incorporated her fascination with the fantastic into every novel to bear her name to date—up to and including her new book, Boy, Snow, Bird. Here, however, the uncanny is arrived at through character rather than narrative.

Boy, to begin with, is not your average protagonist. First things first: she’s a girl, born and raised in the Big Apple by her papa—or the rat catcher, as Boy calls him. He has “the cleanest hands you’ll ever see in your life. He’ll punch you in the kidneys, from behind, or he’ll thump the back of your head and walk away sniggering while you crawl around on the floor, stunned.” (p.6) Boy does her best to suffer the rat catcher’s casual violence in silence, but in time the usual abuse takes on a distressing tenor.

The unpredictability of his fist didn’t mean he was crazy. Far from it. Sometimes he got awfully drunk, but never to a point where he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was trying to train me. To do what, I don’t know. I never found out, because I ran away almost as soon as I turned twenty. (p.8)

The folks of Flax Hill, Massachusetts don’t go out of their way to welcome our girl into their tiny town, but Boy is undeterred by the cold shoulder they show her:

I found it easy to disregard the suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a genetic memory in me... after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be more specific, the town took on a strong flavour of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of course I knew better than to mention this to anybody. (pp.23-24)

Little by little, Boy wins the locals over. She makes a forever friend in Mia, the resident reporter, through whom she’s introduced to Arturo: a wayward widower with a gorgeous daughter. Snow is “an extraordinary-looking kid. A medieval swan maiden, only with the darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost. She was like a girl in a Technicolour tapestry,” (p.78) and though Boy eventually develop feelings for her father, she falls for the girl first.

Book Review | This River Awakens by Steven Erikson

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A time to escape.

Twelve-year-old Owen Brand and his family move to Middlecross, a riverside town in rural Canada, hoping to leave poverty and unhappiness behind.

A time for innocence.

Owen meets three local boys, and they soon form an inseparable band. Over the summer holidays they create their own world, a place apart from the adults who watch over them. Owen also grows close to Jennifer, a fascinating but deeply troubled girl.

And a time to grow up. Then the gang stumble across a body in the river — a discovery with unimaginable consequences for them and the town, from which there is no going back.

***

There are no gods in This River Awakens, only monsters — and the monsters of this novel are real as its readers. They are fathers, brothers and sons; they are sisters, mothers and lovers; and their lives, like ours, have little meaning. Their destinies are not manifest. Their actions, be they right or wrong, calculated or careless, kind or cruel, won't change the world. And the river around which Steven Erikson's indescribably dark debut revolves will run on regardless.

First published in 1998 under a cover bearing Erikson's other name, Steve Lundin, This River Awakens is far from the sort of narrative you might be inclined to expect from the Byzantine mind behind the ten volumes of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. That said, this novel could have been written by no other author. It bears many of the same traits that made Gardens of the Moon and its many successors such an immense and intense pleasure: the prose is painstaking; the characters incredibly complex; and though its themes lean towards the obscene, there's a real sweetness to them, equally.

What This River Awakens doesn't have is a whole lot of plot. Still, we've got to give it a shot.

It's 1971, and spring is in the air. Twelve year old Owen Brand and his family have just moved to Middlecross, a small town in the countryside of Canada. There, they hope to leave behind the hardships of the past, but over the course of the four seasons Erikson chronicles in this revised edition of his first novel, it becomes clear that real change must begin within.

Something of a serial new kid, Owen has little difficulty fitting in with the kids of Middlecross. He takes up with three other boys his age — Roland, an old-fashioned farmhand; a mean-spirited miscreant called Lynk; and Carl, the butt of every bad joke — and goes about insinuating himself into the dynamic they have established. They're a fearsome foursome before you know it. Of children, admittedly:

But it was our world and our time, when the earth loosed its secrets, staining our hands, our knees. The river birthed our cruel laughter, as it did our pensive silences. It carried pieces of the city half submerged past us, a barbaric pageant, a legion burdened with loot. Dead dogs and tree branches, tricycles frozen in bobbing ice, a water-filled wooden boat with pieces of dock still trailing from nylon ropes, a television casing — show endless scenes of flooding — and small, bedraggled clumps of feather. The booty of a strange war. 

The scene remains vivid in my mind. Four boys, aged twelve one and all. What lay before us was the river, remorseless like thought itself, in its season of madness. (pp.15-16)

These cryptic messengers hardly fill Owen with hope, however. He's merely making the best of a bad lot whilst waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's been here before, of course, so he struggles to see a possible tomorrow any different from today:

I did not imagine the future to be in any way different from the present. There would still be station wagons for the kids, washers and dryers in the basement, double beds and dens cluttered with the efforts of haphazard hobbies. And there would still be summers stained with motor oil and sweat. Nor did I think that we'd be any different: Lynch's quick grin and the stick in his hands; Carl fumbling behind us and wiping his nose on his sleeve; and Roland, silent and full of life, with dirt under his nails and calluses on his palms. And somewhere, there in the future, I'd still be the unknown with the darting eyes, his face an unreadable mask. (pp.136-137)

Owen does not think the river will touch him, but it will. It will affect all of the boys, because one day, in the course of their random rambling, they come across a bloated body on the shore: the rotting corpse of a giant man. For reasons none of the kids can articulate, they make a pact to keep this secret between them — and for a time, it binds them. It both preserves their innocence and promises a significant shift, as and when they are ready to accept certain adult realities.

In the interim, the thought of the body obsesses Owen especially:

He'd had a name once, and a life. He'd had dreams, fears, maybe even loves. Now, all that had been wiped away as completely as his own face. A man, a giant, a nobody. We owed him something — I wanted to give him back his face, his name, his history. I wanted to put him back in his rightful place. At the same time, he had come to exist only for us, and that made us more than what we'd been. He'd come to open our eyes, but they hadn't been opened enough. Not yet. He had more to give us. 

Even as I thought those thoughts, I felt uncertain, uneasy. We'd made a pact with a dead man — he could only speak to us with what he had left, and he now existed in each of us and life and infection he spread his silence through us, until we hardly ever spoke about him any more. Any yet, I sensed that we all felt the words piling up behind that silence. One day the dam would break, I suspected. (p. 249)

And one day it does.

All this unfolds at a pace I'm afraid many readers will call ponderous, to put it politely. "This was my first novel, and people said 'it's a bit long,'" (p.527) Erikson jokes in the acknowledgements, but though This River Awakens falls far short of the length of any of the author's massive Malazan novels, there's a whole lot less going on, and a problematic proportion of what we are treated to is of secondary interest at best.

The thing of it is, a surprisingly large cast of characters exist on the fringes of the fiction, and though some add to the scope of the story, offering alternative angles on Owen, Middlecross and more — particularly our precocious protagonist's love interest Jennifer, and Gribbs, the yacht club watchman who takes an unlikely interest in him — several other threads stand to contribute little more than mood. Fisk, for instance — a monstrous mink farmer who masturbates over the bodies of the wide-eyed beasts he breeds — is utterly repugnant, yet narratively redundant.

Which brings me neatly to another of This River Awakens' issues: as brilliantly written as it is, and it is — if the passages excerpted earlier haven't convinced you of this, I don't know what will — there's a discomfiting abundance of ugly in this novel. As such, readers of a sensitive disposition would be well advised to steer clear of Erikson's deeply disturbing debut. A lot of it is, in a word, disgusting. In addition to the aforementioned man and his mink — and the giant's rotting corpse, of course — a troubled girl is sodomised by her father in full view of the neighbourhood, one woman has her jaw destroyed by her drunken, hateful husband... and I could go on.

Indeed, I did; I kept reading, through all this awfulness and any number of other instances of trangressive violence and sexuality. In fact, that's a telling testament to the raw power of this novel — of Erikson's hypnotic prose in particular — for as sickening as it is, This River Awakens is bold, and indisputably beautiful, too.

In its way, I dare say. But Erikson's way is one Malazan fans will be familiar with. And in the same vein as the start of that series, this debut demands a lot of its readers early on. To be sure, it takes too long to get going, but as hard as This River Awakens is to get into, it's roughly twice as tough to get out of. So engrossing is this author's first fully-fledged work of fiction that the world itself feels unreal on the back of such a bleak and revealing dream.

Assuming, then, that you can get past the horrifying darkness at the heart of This River Awakens, a longing and lovingly lyrical coming of age tale awaits. A truly revelatory read, excepting the occasional digression.

***

This River Awakens
by Steven Erikson

UK Publication: January 2012, Bantam
US Publication: July 2013, Tor

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Climbers by M. John Harrison

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One of M. John Harrison's most acclaimed novels in a career of near universal acclaim, Climbers is, perhaps, the least fantastical of his novels. Yet it carries life-changing moments, descriptions of landscape bordering on the hallucinogenic and flights of pure fictive power that leave any notion of the divide between realistic and unrealistic fiction far behind. First published in 1989, Climbers has remained a strong favourite with fans and reviewers alike.

A young man seeks to get a grip on his life by taking up rock-climbing. He hopes that by engaging with the hard realities of the rock and the fall he can grasp what is important about life. But as he is drawn into the obsessive world of climbing he learns that taking things to the edge comes with its own price.

Retreating from his failed marriage to Pauline, Mike leaves London for the Yorkshire moors, where he meets Normal and his entourage, busy pursuing their own dreams of escape. Travelling from crag to crag throughout the country, they are searching for the unattainable: the perfect climb. Through rock-climbing, Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement - that obliterates the rest of his world. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he finds, for a time, a genuine escape. But it is gained at a price...

This dark, witty and poetic novel is full of the rugged beauty of nature, of the human drive to test oneself against extremes, and of the elation such escape can bring

***

I've often heard Climbers described as the least fantastical of M. John Harrison's novels, and so it is, looked at in a particularly literal light — I espied no spaceships, I'm afraid, and there isn't a single sentient bomb in sight — yet this reading is as wrong as it is right.

Climbers is certainly less overtly otherworldly than the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and it has none of The Centauri Device's spare spacefaring. Indeed, it takes place almost entirely in the north of England in the eighties, but do not be so easily deceived: Climbers is far from absent alien environs.

"The Andean landscapes [...] had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air." (p.34)

This is the work of a bona fide stylist, reminiscent of recent Christopher Priest, or China Mieville at his most memorable, and even here in his most mainstream text to date Harrison imbues his landscapes — though they are real rather than imagined — with such bizarre and startling qualities that you'd be forgiven for thinking Climbers is science fiction.

At bottom, it's about a man — readers, meet Mike — who leaves his life in London behind after the failure of his first marriage. Disillusioned and disconnected, he moves to the Yorkshire moors, falls in with a clique of climbers, and slowly but surely insinuates himself in their increasingly extreme endeavours.

"To climbers, climbing was less a sport than an obsession. It was a metaphor by which they hoped to demonstrate something to themselves. And if this something was only the scale of their emotional or social isolation, they needed — I believed then — nothing else. A growing familiarity with their language, which I had picked up by listening to them as they practised on the indoor wall in Holloway, and their litter, spread out on a Saturday afternoon like a glittering picnic in the deep soft sand at the foot of Harrison's Rocks, had already made me seem quite different to myself." (pp.77-78)

In climbing, Mike finds a way... not to escape, exactly, but to be a part of something greater. Something purer, or at least less muddy than the life he's lost. His pursuit of the present, of mastery over the moment — by way of puzzles and problems solved on chalky rock walls — is, I think, a fundamentally powerful thing, and in time it takes precedence over every other aspect of his existence.

He does, however, have cause to recall what brought him to this point: namely the end of something hardly begun — a death, yes — which we only ever glimpse in shattered fragments, reflected in shards of mirrored glass. It falls to us to put the pieces of Mike's memories together, and I dare say your willingness do this — to work towards a passing grasp of character and narrative that the author obfuscates at every stage — will determine what you ultimately take from this tale.


The story, such as it is, does not unfold chronologically. Though Climbers' structure implies a year in the life, from Winter through Spring to Summer followed by Fall, and there is a linear element — a single thread that wends its bewildering way through the text in toto — in truth Harrison's 1989 novel is more memoirish, replete with recollections and ramblings such that we only learn about Mike's separation from his wife and the circumstances of said perhaps halfway through the whole.


To be sure, Climbers can seem inscrutable, but to a greater or lesser extent this is true of Harrison's entire oeuvre. As the similarly inclined nature writer Robert Macfarlane asserts in his insightful introduction to the new British edition:

"Harrison's [books] explore confusion without dispelling it, have no ambitions to clarification, and are characterised in their telling by arrhythmia and imbalance. Nothing in Climbers seems quite to signify in the way it ought to, events that should be crucial flit past in a few sentences, barely registered. The many deaths and injuries that occur are particularly shocking for the distracted scarcity of their narration." (p.xvii)

And so to the characters Mike meets: to Normal and Bob Almanac, Mick and Gaz and Sankey; isolated individuals who become comrades in climbing whilst flitting in and out of the fiction whenever real life intervenes. They come and go, and they're hard folks to know... but people aren't easy. We are complicated, contradictory creatures, and Mike's new mates struck me as more human than most. As right and as wrong as us all.

Its parts are undeniably abstracted, and there will be those who take issue with this, understandably perhaps, but cumulatively, Climbers is as complete and pristine as any of the SF classics Harrison has composed. Nor is it any less revelatory. Indeed, some say it is his piece de resistance. I don't know that I'd agree with that assessment — however mesmeric the landscapes, however impeccably crafted the narrative and characters are, I don't know that Climbers has the scope or the manifest imagination of Light and the like — nevertheless, Harrison imbues the ordinary of this novel with such extraordinary qualities that it is not, after all, so dissimilar in effect to the best of the speculative fiction this remarkable author has written.

***

Climbers
by M. John Harrison

UK Publication: May 2013, Gollancz

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Book Review | The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

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The extraordinary happens every day...

One night, George Duncan—a decent man, a good man—is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed.

The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for George, and one night she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story.

Wise, romantic, magical and funny, The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and redemptive power of love.

***

Like George Duncan's daughter Amanda, who once managed, amusingly, to do the entire Louvre in less than an hour, I am not typically the type to be "Moved By Art" (p.152), yet The Crane Wife truly touched me. Which is to say—sure—I laughed, and I cried... but before it was over, I also felt like I'd lived another life, and died a little inside.

That's how powerful Patrick Ness' new novel is. And it begins as brilliantly as it finishes, with a minor yet monumental moment: a pristine prologue wherein we glimpse something of ourselves, alongside something utterly other.

Keenly feeling his advancing years, George awakens in the wee hours one night, naked and needing to pee. Whilst attending to his business in the bathroom, however, he is startled by an unearthly sound: "a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt." (p.5) Curious, he follows this call to its point of origin, only to find that a crane has landed in his garden; a wounded one, with an arrow, of all things, shot through one of its wings.

Shocked and appalled, George—a good man through and through—attends as best he can to the bird's injured appendage... then, leaving a sense of unadulterated wonder in its wake, the crane flies away.

The next day, just as our amiable narrator is putting the finishing touches to a paper crane to commemorate, in his way, the dreamlike encounter from the previous evening, an enigmatic woman wearing "a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing" (p.67) walks into the small print shop George operates. He falls head over heels for Kumiko before she's even introduced herself.

So begins an uncharacteristically passionate affair between gentle George and this ageless, graceful lady. And when Kumiko sees the plain paper crane he has made, she demands that they collaborate on matters of art as well as the heart.

"On its own, her art was beautiful, but she wouldn't stop insisting that it was static. The cuttings of the feathers woven together, assembled in eye-bending combinations to suggest not only a picture (the watermill, the dragon, the profile) but often the absences in those pictures, too, the shadows they left, black feathers woven with dark purple ones to make surprising representations of voids. Or sometimes, there was just empty space, with a single dash of down to emphasise its emptiness. The eye was constantly fooled by them, happening upon shape when blankness was expected. They tantalised, they tricked. 

"'But they do not breathe, George.'" (p.89)

Oh, but they do when Kumiko starts incorporating George's occasional cuttings into her feathered flights of fancy! In a sense, then, she completes him, and he her, thus—as their star rises in certain circles—they embark on a sequence of 32 plates telling, in totality, the tale of "a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called." (p.250)

These the author relates as very short yet deeply surreal and equally endearing stories, which work to punctuate the chapters we spend in George's calming company and those in which we're with his rather more fraught daughter.

"Although he was the hero of his version of the story, naturally, he was also a supporting player in this same story when told by someone else. [...] There were as many truths—overlapping, stewed together—as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew." (p.42)

Undeniably, The Crane Wife is a greater, truer tale because of Amanda's part in it. She offers an alternate angle on certain events, yes, but her perspective also serves to enlarge and enrich the overall narrative. Via Amanda, the reader comes to realise that Ness' novel is so much more than just a witty twist on a tale as old as time—which, given its clarity and quality, I warrant would have been enough.

But The Crane Wife is that, and then some. It functions, over and above, as a fable about family, friendship, memory, age and the ways in which we change, all of which subjects the authors approaches with disarming frankness, acute insight and such a wealth of warmth and compassion that each chapter made me feel like a more complete human being. Through character and narrative, Ness is able to evoke bona fide emotion—with such ease it has to be seen to be believed—such that from the fantastic first part through the beautiful denouement, The Crane Wife is a revelation for the reader.

It is a novel at its most transcendent, I would add, when the author engages in some way with the extraordinary... however it his devotion to more quotidian moments which makes these passages so commanding. Cannily, this is a contrast Ness makes much of over the course of The Crane Wife.

"If it wasn't a dream, it was one of those special corners of what's real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him, so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life. Like when he lost his virginity to the girl with the eczema in his Honours English Class and it had been intensely brief, so briefly intense, that it felt like both of them had left normal existence for an unleashed physical instant. [...] Or not the birth of his daughter, which had been a panting, red tumult, but the first night after, when his exhausted wife had fallen asleep and it was just him and the little, little being and she opened her eyes at him, astonished to find him there, astonished to find herself there, and perhaps a little outraged, too, a state which, he was forced to admit, hadn't changed much for Amanda." (pp.11-12)

Patrick Ness' profile has been growing slowly but surely since he debuted with The Crash of Hennington almost a decade ago. Having written awesome genre novels for an all ages audience ever since—excepting a single short story collection—he has earned a whole legion of younger readers... to whom I fear The Crane Wife may not immediately appeal. But those who don't demand that the world end endlessly are likely to find the supernatural normalcy of Ness' acutely observed new book as affecting as any apocalypse.

With finely, frankly crafted characters and a slight yet satisfying narrative, as well as wit, warmth, and oh, such wonder, The Crane Wife is simply sublime: a story as strange, ultimately, as it is true.

***

The Crane Wife

by Patrick Ness

UK Publication: March 2013, Canongate

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Book Review | The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw

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When Elsa's father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape - from New York, her job, her boyfriend - to somewhere new, anonymous, set apart.

For some years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. Thunderstown has received many a pilgrim, and young Elsa becomes its latest - drawn to this weather-ravaged backwater, this place rendered otherworldly by the superstitions of its denizens.

In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. For Finn has an incredible secret: he has a thunderstorm inside of him. Not everyone in town wants happiness for Elsa and Finn. As events turn against them, can they weather the tempest - can they survive at all? 

The Man Who Rained is a work of lyrical, mercurial magic and imagination, a modern-day fable about the elements of love.

*** 

Have you ever wanted to just... get away from it all? To take a time out from life, the universe and everything?

Of course you have. We all have. Most of us dream of the day. But sometimes, when circumstances knock you for six - after the loss of a loved one, for instance - sometimes getting away from it all is all you can do. To get back to the business of living, you have to learn to let go of some large or small part of you. You have to let the past pass -- and how much harder it must be to find that peace in the midst of a life which only ever reminds you of what it once was.

That's the position young Elsa Beletti finds herself in, in any event. Once upon a time, not so very long ago at all, she was in her early 20s, with a steady boyfriend and a good job at a magazine in New York, New York. But that fairy-tale ended when her father was "found in the wreckage a tornado had made from his car - his lungs collapsed, his femurs shattered - a hundred miles west of the windswept little ranch on which he had raised his only child." (p.5) Elsa has been reeling from the loss ever since, a broken leaf on life's boundless breeze.

"Her dad had raised her to love the elements with a passion second only to his, but life in [the city] had weatherproofed her. Only at her dad's funeral, as the spring winds wiped her tears dry and carried his ashes away into the air, did it feel as if that passion had been uncovered again. It was her inheritance, but it had knocked a hole through her as if through a glass pane. All summer long she had been dealing with the cracks it had spread through the rest of her being." (p.6)

In quick succession Elsa has given up her job and abandoned her boyfriend - not to mention her mother and everything else she stands to leave behind - all to escape to a place she once saw from thirty thousand feet, on a plane-ride to nowhere she cares to recall. In Thunderstown she's arranged to rent a room from a man called Kenneth, also recently bereaved. They've only ever chatted on the internet, but he seems a decent sort; decent enough, at the very least, to drive her to her new home, "away from the airport complex into the frenetic urban traffic and parades of street lamps, lights from bars, illuminated billboards. Then, slowly, they left these things behind." (p.8) 

This last perfectly encapsulates the premise of The Man Who Rained, the second novel from British Fantasy Award-nominated author Ali Shaw: this desire - nay, this need - to leave life behind, if only for a little while. It's an intensely powerful notion, and alongside some impeccable, image-rich prose, it sets the first act of Shaw's story soaring. Thereafter, however, I'm afraid it falters.

In Thunderstown, Elsa meets a man who is not a man... not exactly. On her first sight of Finn, whilst exploring the ruins of a windmill on one of the four massive mountains that stand at each of the cardinal points around the town, she watches on in voyeuristic awe as he steps out of his clothes, and becomes one with the weather. When Elsa calls out to him, he comes back - as if from an abyss - and inevitably the two soon become inseparable.

But there's more to Finn than a neat trick, if only marginally more. Being half human, half thunderhead, he's hurt those he cared about before, and lived a life of seclusion in the hills since, for fear of doing any more irreparable damage. The townsfolk are terrified of him -- and with good reason, surely, as Elsa herself muses:

"Once upon a time, people had equated storms with gods. The first time she saw a town that had been sucked up and spat out by a tornado, it broke her heart and made her question the immense indifference of the universe, just as others might question the indifference of a deity. That was what storms were: they behaved with all the splendour and barbarity of ancient deities. Clouds were not just an ornament of godly imagery, clouds were the inspiration for pantheons, awesomely real and intangible at the same time. There were thousands of them swarming across the planet at any given moment, and yet under the shelters of roofs and ceilings it was so easy to forget their existence." (p.103)

In that sense, then, Finn is an interesting take on the archetypal bad boy character; considering that he's apt to explode into lightning at a moment's notice, there's a real sense of jeopardy to his scenes from the start. Alas, Elsa - and Elsa alone - seems stubbornly ignorant of this. Brash and impulsive, she refuses to listen to reason, whether well-meant or otherwise, and when she finally does realise that even good weather can go bad, she falls immediately to hysterics.

Truth be told, I was expecting a more sophisticated romance than this from the author of The Girl With The Glass Feet, an astonishing debut which rightly impressed a great many critics, and made a mark on the bestseller lists as well. But presumably your second novel is the first you have to write on a timetable, and in The Man Who Rained - specifically in its overlong and mostly meaningless middle act - it shows. Like candy from the skies, Shaw dangles an assortment of potentially interesting narrative threads that go all of nowhere in the end, which it bears saying is never far off in this short novel, and there's some truly meandering characterisation in the interim; as if the author doesn't know quite what to do with his storm-cross'd couple, now that they've gone and gotten it on. 

The Man Who Rained starts with all the promise and assurance of a worthy successor to The Girl With The Glass Feet, but sadly the sagging middle section is enough of a mess to put that kindly comparison to pasture. The conclusion does recover some of the elemental strength of the excellent outset, and the shift to a second perspective - that of Finn's caretaker, a culler of all things - proves particularly diverting when Elsa's is at its lowest ebb.

Ali Shaw is clearly tremendously talented, and even given its issues, you should certainly spend an evening with this, his second novel. Alas, by and large, The Man Who Rained does not resound with the almighty power of its predecessor so much as it fizzles, like a damp firecracker.

***

The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

UK Publication: January 2012, Atlantic Books

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But I Digress | Horror Lives Again! But When Was It Dead?

It's been a while since I went off on one in a public forum, and I don't know that that's quite what I aim to do here today, but a couple of comments about a certain genre of fiction - one particularly near and dear to my heart - have rubbed me the wrong way in recent weeks, and I thought the sensible thing to do before I disappear off to Bratislava the day after tomorrow was to have a good old fashioned moan.

The first insult came by way of The Guardian's Alison Flood, whose articles I usually admire. It begins:

"Helen Dunmore, Jeanette Winterson and Melvin Burgess: not the first people you'd imagine signing up to write for publishing imprint Hammer Horror, home to bloodcurdling shrieks and helpless virgins. But sign up they have, and Dunmore, whose ghost story The Greatcoat is out in February, couldn't be prouder. Horror, it seems, is going literary."

I can't very well excerpt the entire article, but take twenty seconds and read it yourself. It's mercifully short... a puff piece, really, about this new fiction imprint. As to that, what gives, The Guardian?

In any event, that's not what really rankled. And that single quote, though it starts us down the right track, doesn't completely communicate the laziness of Flood's commentary. The overpowering stink of snobbery about it. Because if horror is going literary - whatever that might mean - it couldn't very well have been literary before, now could it?

What absolute poppycock.

 

Meanwhile, the folks at SFX interviewed Jo Fletcher out of Jo Fletcher Books, the new genre fiction imprint which just put out A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood, which is to say a horror novel, and a good 'un, too. Now Jo's comments are a lot less injurious than Flood's - essentially all she's saying is that "horror is making a bit of a comeback," and perhaps it is - but her words got me wondering: what exactly is horror coming back from? What low had it sunk to, and in whose eyes, that it's in need of such renewal?

Perhaps I'm simply too close to this thing to see it clearly, but I've been paying close attention to horror fiction in recent years - specifically since I launched The Speculative Scotsman - and it hadn't occurred to me that we were in the midst of some sinister slump, in either critical or commercial terms. Clearly it hadn't occurred to any of Joe Hill, Alden Bell, Adam Neville, Justin Cronin, Tom Fletcher, Robert Jackson Bennett or Gary McMahon either, and at the moment I'm blanking on I don't know how many novel new voices that have helped make the case for horror's continuing popularity and relevancy.

Pray tell me, then: when exactly was this watershed? When was horror in such dire straits that it needed Jo Fletcher to declare a renaissance, or Hammer goddamn Horror to endeavour to make the genre more literary, of all things? It doesn't take an acute observer to intuit the the underlying subtext of all this opinion... that there is, or there was, some fundamental problem with horror.

For my part, predictably, I think the genre has being getting along just fine, please and thank you. But I couldn't possibly pretend to be objective about this, so I turn to you fine folks.

Am I very much mistaken? Am I barking up the wrong tree entirely here?

Or is there something rotten going on in the industry, or the establishment, in terms of this professed negative perception?

Book Review | Room by Emma Donoghue

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It’s Jack’s birthday, and he’s excited about turning five.

Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside . . .

Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.

***

In the first half of Room, Room is all there is. Just Ma and Jack and meltedy spoon in Room.

They make the very most of it they can. They read to one another from their five books; they sing songs and watch Dora the Explorer; they add to Eggsnake who lives on Floor under Bed, and play games like Dead.

Though Ma remembers a time and a place before Room, from which she was taken seven whole years ago, by a man who pretended to need her help, Room is all Jack's ever known. He's "five and one day. Silly Penis is always standing up in the morning. I push him down."

It's only eleven square feet of space but it's his whole world, and he's happy enough with it. Happy enough, except when Old Nick comes to visit - with Sundaytreat one day a week - and Jack has to hide in the cupboard while Ma entertains Old Nick in bed. At all other times, it's just Ma and Jack and meltedy spoon in Room.

Emma Donoghue has made a career out of fictionalising history; cannily reshaping real cold cases into stories like Slammerkin and The Sealed Letter. In Room she sets her sights on a rather more recent and repulsive crime: the Josef Fritzl case which broke in Austria in 2008. You must remember it. Fritzl locked his daughter Elisabeth in a basement for fully 24 years, raping her repeatedly and fathering, sickeningly, seven children by his own flesh and blood before the police finally cottoned on to his horrendous offenses.

Preempting a predictable public outcry before Room's publication last Summer, Donoghue went on record to say that her latest wasn't so much based on the Fritzl case as triggered by it: "The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl, aged five, emerging into a world he didn't know about, put the idea into my head. That notion of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world like a Martian coming to Earth: it seized me."

So it comes as no surprise that around the halfway point of Room, Ma and Jack escape the clutches of Old Nick, to allow Donoghue to explore "the sensory overload of modernity" - as a pundit discussing Jack's case puts it - on this human alien. In Donoghue's hands, the rush of such revelation is truly remarkable, but after their initial reorientation - for neither Jack nor Ma find their new-found freedom easy - I dare say Room rather loses its way, digressing into precious observations along the lines of "In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time" and "When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I'm in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn't real at all."

It's not exactly heavy-handed, but hot on the heels of such shining insight as there is in the first half of Room, much of this second section feels appallingly obvious.

Stylistically, however, Room is stunning from word one on out. Donoghue opts to tell the tale entirely from Jack's perspective: Jack who has but an elementary grasp of the English language... who confuses meltedly spoon for a friend and refuses to believe anything outside of Room is real, even after he escapes it. His inimitable voice can seem impenetrable to begin with, but give it a minute; that's all it takes for everything to fall into place, quick as you like. And when it does, it's actually hard to go back. So natural and pointed are his inquiries that they reveal the artifice of communication as we understand it, the pointlessness of so much of what we say, not to mention the uselessness of all that we think we want.

Everything is up for grabs in the first part of Room. It's a breath of fresh air, a rare and refreshing glimpse into a mindset so other from our own - yet so very like it - and though the circumstances of their captivity are excruciating, the bond between Ma and Jack is a beautiful thing to behold. For that alone Room deserved to take home the Booker prize last year, and failing that, I take heart in its dominance of the bestseller lists since.

Never mind the conspicuous-by-comparison second half: Room is otherwise so absolutely extraordinary as to make such oversight easy.

***

Room

by Emma Donoghue

UK Publication: July 2010, Picador

US Publication: May 2011, Back Bay Books

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