Book Review | Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

***

In Salman Rushdie's first novel for older readers in something like seven years—an onion-skinned thing at once wise, wilful and winningly whimsical—a great storm signals the end of the world as we know it.

A state of strangeness reigns in the wake of this otherworldly weather. Lightning springs from fingers; a would-be graphic novelist dreams the superhero he conceived into being; an abandoned baby bestows "blemishes and boils" on those who tell tall tales in her pint-sized presence; meanwhile, an elderly gentleman who calls himself Geronimo wakes up one day able to levitate: which all sounds quite delightful, doesn't it?

Don't be fooled, folks. Many will perish in the next two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights. Wars will be fought and an awful lot—not least lives—will be lost. But every ending has a new beginning built in, and perhaps a better world will arise from the ashes of the last. Maybe Rushdie's plea for a future "ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint" will be accepted rather than outright rejected. Stranger things have happened.

The overarching narrative of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (hereafter just Two Years, if you please) is an encapsulation of exactly that argument—between the rational and the unreasonable. Representing these opposing perspectives are two long-dead men: the intellectual Idb Rushd and Ghazali of Tus, a sinister, fire-and-brimstone figure whose irrational rhetoric made a laughing stock of the aforementioned philosopher.

But Rushd's life was not all strife. For a little while, when he lived—a millennium or so ago, don't you know—he loved, and was loved by, a beautiful woman called Dunia who bore him many children.

Being a man of reason, he did not guess that she was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn, the jiniri: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Generations later, in the present day, their disparate descendants—all one thousand and one of them—are all that stands between humanity and the dark jinn that declare war on the world at the behest of the disgusted dust that was once Ghazali.

Book Review | The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards—some strange and other-worldly—but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.

***

Like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, Kazuo Ishiguro's first new novel since Never Let Me Go a decade ago appears to be another of those elderly odysseys we've seen with such zeitgeist-like regularity recently—albeit one with the trappings, and the characters, of a classical fantasy.

There be dragons in this book, to be sure—alongside sprites, ogres, wizards and warriors—and you can practically taste the magic in the air of its Arthurian England. But never mind that, or the fact that its narrative is arranged around an epic quest, because The Buried Giant is at its best when it's about Axl and Beatrice, a loving couple who leave their humble home ostensibly to travel to a village a few days walk away. There, the pair hope to renew their relationship with their estranged son.

A simple enough thing, you might think, but the kicker—the tragedy, in truth—is that they don't really remember him. They don't really remember much of anything.

Perhaps that's par for the course, as Axl—rifling through the impressions of memories that have of late escaped him whilst he waits for his ailing wife to awaken—reflects in the first chapter:

He was after all an ageing man and prone to occasional confusion. And yet, this instance of the red-haired woman had been merely one of a steady run of such puzzling episodes. Frustratingly, he could not at this moment think of so many examples, but they had been numerous, of that there was no doubt. (p.10)

As it happens, Axl and Beatrice are far from the only souls, young or old, laid low by this seeping sickness. This sort of thing has been happening all across the kingdom. A plague of forgetfulness seems to have spread by way of the strange mist that's moved in, affecting almost everyone.

Everyone except Winstan, that is...

Book Review | The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

"All I did was go to the library to borrow some books."

On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake.

Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands, for company. His mother will be worrying why he hasn't returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boys' brains. How will he escape?

***

A couple of months ago, a story about the closure of yet another local library caught my eye at the same time as I was searching for a subject for the sixty-some students I teach to tackle—a problem of sorts for them to set about solving. I had in my head an exercise which would require each pupil to suggest a selection of strategies that might make the local library relevant again. 

Quite quickly we hit a wall, as I recall. It wasn't that the kids didn't grasp the task at hand; if anything, they understood the problem too well. None of them, you see—not a one—had even been to a library, far less used its facilities. In short order I saw that I'd based the week's work on a false premise: that local libraries had ever been relevant to them.

They certainly were to me, once—as they are to the narrator of The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami: a nearly new novelette from the author of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Originally released in Japan in the lean years between After Dark and IQ84, The Strange Library, as translated by Ted Goosen, tells the tale of an anonymous boy who gets more than he bargained for when, on the way home from school one afternoon, he visits his local library to look through a textbook or two:

To tell the truth, I wasn't all that eager to learn about Ottoman tax collection—the topic had just popped into my head on the way home from school. As in, I wonder, how did the Ottomans collect taxes? Like that. And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don't know something, go to the library and look it up. (p.7)

To that end, The Strange Library's nameless narrator is directed to a room in the basement of the building, where "a little old man" with "tiny black spots [dotting] his face like a swarm of flies" (p.6) suggests several suitable books. The thing is, these books can't be borrowed—they have to be read in the reading room—and though the boy is already second-guessing himself, he's so obscenely obedient that he allows this apparent assistant to shepherd him still deeper into the library's lower levels.

Book Review | Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll

In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don’t. 

When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time “mechanics,” a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down—a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end. 

For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind...

***

Jonathan Carroll's first full-length work of fiction in six years is as rooted in the real as it is the surreal its synopsis suggests. Bathing the Lion is about a quintet of cosmic mechanics who can read minds and remake the mundane recovering their talents in advance of the arrival of a fearsome force called Chaos—which seems, I'm sure, like a properly science fictional plot. But it's not.

To wit, the World Fantasy Award-winning author evidences precious little interest in the ultimate result of this clash between... not good and evil, exactly, but order and its opposite. Rather, Carroll restrains his tale to the strictly small scale, in the process pointedly refusing the reader's needs.

Bathing the Lion is a lot of things, but one thing it isn't is exhilarating. In fact, there's very little actual action. Instead, expect a whole lot of talking, some potted philosophy and a dream sequence that lasts the entire first act...

Not that we're aware of its nature, initially. By all accounts, Bathing the Lion's first third appears to be an introduction to the five former mechanics we foresee facing off against the coming Chaos.

Book Review | The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker

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Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master, the husband who commissioned her, dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York in 1899.

Ahmad is a djinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop. Though he is no longer imprisoned, Ahmad is not entirely free – an unbreakable band of iron binds him to the physical world.

The Golem and the Djinni is their magical, unforgettable story; unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures – until the night a terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. But a powerful threat will soon bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.

***

We are all of us other in one way or another.

That is to say, there are things — many things — which set each and every one of us apart. Our origins and our circumstances aside, people are perfect storms of memories, emotions, beliefs, attitudes and ideals. Where we come from, not to mention when or into what world, is undoubtedly part of the puzzle, but who we are in the manifold moments our lives are made of is what matters.

The Golem and the Djinni is a sumptuous period piece about two brilliantly realised people — others... outsiders... aliens, I dare say, in every which way — who just so happen to be magical creatures. One is made of earth especially to serve at the pleasure of a master who perishes mere moments after awakening her; one is fashioned from fire and lived alone, untold aeons ago, in a magnificent invisible palace. He expects the best; she fears the worst. Both must make their way in a world that would not welcome them if it had the slightest clue what they were.

Welcome, one and all, to New York City at the advent of the 20th century: a fittingly fantastical setting for the incredible events ahead.

The city [...] rose up from the water's edge, the enormous square buildings that reached far into the heavens, their windows set with perfect panes of glass. As fantastical as cities like ash-Sham and al-Quds had seemed from the caravan men's tales, the Djinni doubted that they'd been half so wondrous or terrifying as this New York. If he must be marooned in an unknown land, surrounded by a deadly ocean, and constrained to one weak and imperfect form, at least he'd ended up somewhere worth exploring. (p.30)

This marks a rare moment of positivity for the Djinni, because the rest of the time, he's simply miserable. With good reason, too: he was trapped in a vase for centuries, at the hands of a wicked wizard who he can only imagine used him to do his despicable bidding. He can only imagine, I should stress, because the Djinni has no recollection of the circumstances surrounding his capture. He remembers the desert, then suddenly the shop of dear Boutros Arbeely, an unwitting tinsmith living in Little Syria who takes the Djinni in as an apprentice—for want of a better explanation for his unlikely presence—and names him Ahmad.

Ahmad, however, is far from pleased by the prospect of playing pretend:

"Imagine," he said to Arbeely, "that you are asleep, dreaming your human dreams. And then, when you wake, you find yourself in an unknown place. Your hands and bound, and your feet hobbled, and you're leashed to a stake in the ground. You have no idea who has done this to you, or how. You don't know if you'll ever escape. You are an unimaginable distance from home. And then, a strange creature finds you and says, 'An Arbeely! But I thought Arbeelys were only tales told to children. Quick, you must hide, and pretend to be one of us, for the people here would be frightened of you if they knew.'" (p.45)

Elsewhere in the city, the Golem keeps a similar secret. Creatures such as she are meant to serve, to satisfy certain commands, however Chava has no master. He died at sea, leaving her to plot out her own path... but she has no idea where to start.

Confused and frustrated and afraid, the Golem is about to lash out, when in the nick of time, a kindly old Rabbi finds her, and agrees to to guide her. He teaches Chava how to pass for a person and gets her a job in a local bakery to boot.

These, though, are merely way stations for the Golem and the Djinni, like the Hebrew Sheltering House that plays a pivotal part in the plot later on, "where men fresh from the Old World could pause, and gather their wits, before jumping head-first into the gaping maw of the New." (p.89) This is also the lonesome road travelled by Ahmad and Chava, both of whom—once they have found their feet—move away from their guardians in the course of declaring their respective independence.

She rents a room in a respectable neighbourhood of ladies, for such is her nature... but there, because curiosity and intelligence is also in her nature, the Golem basically goes stir-crazy:

To lie still and silent in such an enclosed space was no easy task. Her fingers and legs would begin to twitch, regardless of how much she tried to relax. Meanwhile, a small army of wants and needs would make their way to her mind: from the boy and the Rabbi, both of whom would give anything for the clock to go faster; from the woman in the room below, who lived in a constant torment of pain from her hip; from the three young children next door, who were forced to share their few toys, and always coveted whatever they didn't have—and, at a more distant remove, from the rest of the tenement, a small city of strivings and lusts and heartaches. And at its centre lay the Golem, listening to it all. (p.51)

The Djinni is little happier in his hovel, until one evening he meets a woman unlike any other. Ahmad is absolutely fascinated by Chava. "He felt strangely buoyant, and more cheerful than he'd been in weeks. This women, this—golem?—was a puzzle waiting to be solved, a mystery better than any mere distraction. He would not leave their next meeting to chance." (p.175) Nor does he. Rather, he resorts to waiting at her window—rolling and smoking cigarettes in the awful woollen hat she insists he wear if they're to spend time together—until the Golem puts aside her proclivities towards certain sensibilities and agrees to explore the new world with him.

They are, of course, kindred spirits. Similar in many senses, and in one another they find something... let's say special, as opposed to romantic. In any case, till this point in the tale, one's narrative has very much mirrored the other's. Both the Golem and the Djinni come to the city in the first instance against their individual will; both become immersed, initially, in the mundanity of reality; both are fast approaching the end of his or her tether when their paths cross; both cause in their chance companions crises of faith; and both have pasts that ultimately catch up with them.

Despite said synchronicities, they are, as it happens, fundamentally different characters. Each fears the end result of the revelation that they are not who they appear to be, "yet she had submitted so meekly, accepting the very imprisonment he fought against. He pitied her; he wanted to push her away." (p.205) And indeed; he does.

But all the while, something wicked this way comes, and if the Golem and the Djinni are to survive the city, they will have to put aside their differences...

An indisputably moving masterpiece of magical realism complete with charismatic characters and a fabulous narrative, The Golem and the Djinni is Helene Wecker's debut, if you can credit it.

There are, I suppose, several ever-so-slight signs. Early on, I grew tired of Wecker's overbearing way of introducing new characters—central, supporting and essentially incidental alike. We're treated to a few purposeless paragraphs in the present, then an extended reminiscence about some crucial point in their pasts, followed by another paragraph or two as indifferent to questions of pace and plot as those with which we began. These brief tales are, to a one, engaging, but cumulatively they serve to slow down the core story.

500 pages later, the denouement proved a mite too tidy for my liking—the difference between gathering narrative threads together and tying every which one up in a contrivance of pretty ribbons seems lost on the author—and whilst Wecker mostly resists the irresistible romance, I wish she had wholly.

But never mind that, because the premise is impeccable—case in point: both the Golem and the Djinni, as others amongst others, come with conflict built-in—the central characters are distinct and comprehensively convincing, the overall plot is finely formed and near-perfectly paced, excepting the aforementioned digressions. And the setting? Simply exemplary. The New York City of The Golem and the Djinni is like a living, breathing creature. Its "trolleys and trains [..] seemed to form a giant, malevolent bellows, inhaling defenseless passengers from platforms and street corners and blowing them out again elsewhere." (p.339) It's as vast and vibrant and violent as any secondary world setting.

Helene Wecker is evidently staggeringly talented, and I can only hope she continues to channel her energies into the fiction of the fantastic. Like The Shadow of the Wind before it, or more recently Alif the Unseen, The Golem and the Djinni is a treasure of a debut that demands attention, and deserves to be spoken of with reverence. It's my pleasure to recommend it unreservedly, and yours, I'm sure, to read it immediately.

***

The Golem and the Djinni
by Helene Wecker

UK Publication: August 2013, Blue Door
US Publication: April 2013, Harper

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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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