Book Review | The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood

Mire House is dreary, dark, cold and infested with midges. But when Emma Dean inherits it from a distant relation, she immediately feels a sense of belonging.

It isn't long before Charlie Mitchell, grandson of the original owner, appears claiming that he wants to seek out his family. But Emma suspects he's more interested in the house than his long-lost relations. 

And when she starts seeing ghostly figures, Emma begins to wonder: is Charlie trying to scare her away, or are there darker secrets lurking in the corners of Mire House?

***

Five months since her parents passed away, the bereaved, Emma Dean, inherits a house in West Fulford. "It was run down and drab and unkempt and unclean, but even so, something in it called to her. She could easily imagine this place filled with life, with parties, the distant laughter of children. [...] It was a shame—wrong, even—that somewhere so lovely should be locked up and abandoned." (p.10)

Pleased to have a project to occupy her thoughts, she sets about renovating the place, but though Emma means to make Mire House magnificent once more, it seems the house has other plans for its mawkish new occupant. Days into her stay she ends up locked in a closet in an ordeal that takes its toll on the whole of Alison Littlewood's sinister new novel.

It's only thanks to the intervention of Charlie—a distant relative who really should have inherited the house—that Emma sees the light of day again. But has he come to help her? Or are his designs rather darker?

Forty years before Emma's story, Frank Watts and his friends play a dangerous game on the property, tormenting its terrifying tenant: an old man who moved into Mire House many moons ago in the hope of having a family, but whose beloved wife died before she could give him children. Mr Owens has been on his own ever since—growing stranger by the day, so they say—to wit, when he catches Frank sneaking about his home, our boy expects a beating at the least. Instead, a bond of friendship forms between him and the formerly horrid householder... a bond that is tested when Frank's perpetually distressed mother gets wind of it.

Book Review | A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick

I've chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait. Now I am only desperate for it to be finished.

In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterwards that worse things happen in wars.

Seven years later he returns to the city—and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follow...

***

I've often heard it said that the littlest things in life can have the biggest impact—an assertion evidenced by Charles Jackson, a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps whose subsequent career in the field of haemophilia springs from something seemingly insignificant. Celebrating the liberation of Paris from the hands of the Nazis, he hunkers down in a bunker, only to half-see something weird: someone gulping blood from the warm body of a woman.

A vampire? Perhaps. But more likely a mere madman. "It was ludicrous; it was, as I’ve said, something I should not have seen, something wrong. Not just violence, not just murder, but something even more depraved than those acts." (p.28) Absent any evidence that a crime has been committed, Charles does his level best to dismiss this wicked thing he's witnessed. But the damage is done, and the unsettling story told in A Love Like Blood begun.

A period of years later Charles' work brings him back to France, where he is surprised to find the focus of his all but forgotten fascination at lunch with a lovely lass hailing from the Hamptons. In the first, he follows her hoping she might tell him more about her benefactor—an Estonian Margrave, apparently, looking to learn the language—but before long Charles realises he has feelings for Marian... feelings she seems ready to return.

Alas, their chance at romance falls apart practically before it's started. When she suddenly stops replying to his regular letters, he asks after her at her former haunts, where he's made aware that Marian has a heart condition, and has had to head home to seek treatment. He never sees or hears from her again.

The Scotsman Abroad | The Great Geeky Debates

Maybe you'll have spotted it, maybe not... but guess what? I was in this morning's Mind Meld!

In case you weren't aware, the Mind Meld is a regular feature on the Hugo award-winning SF Signal which asks a bunch of genre fiction's best and brightest to put their heads together to answer a certain question. 

Truth be told I don't know what the Irregulars were doing, inviting yours truly to participate, but I wasn't going to miss it. Didn't hurt that the question was such a fun one. Let me hand it over to James Aquilone:

What was the first or most memorable geeky pop-culture debate you ever had? Or what’s that one thing you can’t stop ranting about? What was the outcome? Are you still on speaking terms with your opponent? Why are you so passionate about this?

In response, I wrote about "the years a friend and I spent butting heads over a couple of comic books. He was a Marvel man; me, a DC devotee. He read The X-Men; I was an unabashed Batman fan. Matter of fact, I still am, and I’d bet my last penny he’s still got the hots for Emma Frost."

Be warned, though, that my piece, at least, takes a turn for the serious... because this friend is firmly former, unfortunately, and our different interests—up to and including the arguments we had about whether Batman and his entourage would be a match for Marvel’s supermutants—had a part to play in that:

As kids we were great mates, he and me. As adults, our friendship fell apart. So whether it’s Star Trek versus Star Wars or the merits of manga as opposed to anime, take heed, dear reader: at the end of the day these debates can be about the people as much as the particular properties.

Click on through, as you do, to read the rest of the Mind Meld in question, which also features Mur Lafferty, Maurice Broaddus, David Lomax and a whole load of other awesome authors. 

(I'm aware that I'm the only contributor without a short story or novel to my name, but I have no shame.)

Book Review | The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe

When the Blitz starts in London, Dominic Lancaster, injured out of service at the battle of Narvik, accompanies his 10 year old sister Octavia to the family house on the shores of Ullswater in the Lake District. Octavia is profoundly deaf but at night she can hear disturbing noises in the house. When questioned by Dominic as to what she can hear, she replies: "voices."

Two nights later she comes into his bedroom to tell him that the dead children in the house want them to leave. And then Octavia falls mysteriously ill... during her sickness she tells Dominic he must go to the attic. There, he releases an older, darker evil that threatens the lives of Olivia and himself.

***

When Dominic Lancaster goes to war as a gunner about the HMS Hotspur, it's a chance for him to show his family — who have dismissed him to date as a dreadful disappointment — that he may well be worthy of their legacy: a successful port importing business which Dominic stands to inherit after his father's passing.

Instead, he becomes one of the first casualties of the conflict when he loses his leg at the Battle of Narvik. His subsequent recovery is tough; tough enough that Dominic's parents dispatch him to Hallinhag House in the little village of Ullswater... ostensibly to give him a peaceful place to recuperate, but in truth, as Dominic determines, so that he isn't underfoot when the Blitz begins.

He's not alone in the Lancasters' holiday home. For one thing, his ten-year-old sister Octavia is with him. Profoundly deaf for the larger part of her little life, she's another distraction to be disdained at every stage by a pair of appalling parents, but somehow Hallinhag House seems to be improving her hearing. The sounds she starts to hear, however, are of nothing natural.

The house seems more than quiet. Downcast. Full of memories. No, that's wrong. It's full of forgettings. All the years that have gone, and I know so little of the men and women who spent time here, even though they were my ancestors. When I have been here before, the house has seemed filled with light; but that was always the summer and it is winter now. Perhaps the house has picked up on my mood, sensed by new vulnerability, and knows how useless I am. Can houses sense what we feel? Do they feed off all the emotions that have been experienced between their walls? Octavia says there are ghosts here. I admonish her, and I watch her when she comes to this room. She might be serious, but I doubt it. She has no names for these ghosts. Maybe they are silent, like her. (p.29)

Initially, Dominic has little time for such frivolousness, because he too has his sights set on getting better; on learning to walk once more, first and foremost. Assisting him in this is the district nurse, Rose, a beautiful young woman who treats him with care and kindness. It isn't long before Dominic falls for her, though there will be no flings in the future he foresees.

Book Review | The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

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For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.

But there must always be an account... and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.

Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism — a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields — to answer one last, impossible question: what makes a hero?

***

Lavie Tidhar has a theory about superheroes. About what they are and what they represent; about where they come from and why we hardly ever see any British ones. These are questions the author asks and answers on various occasions over the course of his indescribably demanding if accordingly rewarding new novel, though Tidhar's particular position is best encapsulated by the testimony given by a fictionalised version of Joseph Shuster — the co-creator of Superman alongside Jerry Siegel, who also appears — during the trial of Dr. Vomacht, the Nazi scientist whose cavalier prodding of probability resulted in The Violent Century's so-called Übermenschen.

Note that the following quote comes from near the end of the novel, but know, moreover, that The Violent Century plays so fast and loose with clarity and linearity that this is as fitting a fashion as any I can imagine to start talking about a book so bleak and mysterious that any resulting discussion of it is destined to be difficult.

— I specialise in... in a form of dynamic portraiture. [...] Of the changed. Of Beyond-Men. And women. Of... for lack of a better word, Shuster says, I like to think my work focuses on heroes.

— But what's a hero? the counsellor says, again.

— It seems to me, Shuster says, it seems to me... you must understand, I think, yes, you need to first understand what it means to be a Jew.

— I think I have some experience in that, the counsellor for the defence says drily — which draws a few laughs from the audience. On the stand, Schuster coughs. His eyes, myopic behind the glasses, assume a dreamy look. Those of us who came out of that war, he says. And before that. From pogroms and persecution and to the New World. To a different kind of persecution, perhaps. But also hope. Our dreams of heroes come from that, I think. Our American heroes are the wish-fulfilment of immigrants, dazzled by the brashness and the colour of this new world, by its sheer size. We needed larger-than-life heroes, masked heroes to show us that they were the fantasy within each and every one of us. The Vomacht wave did not make them, it released them. Our shared hallucination, our faith. Our faith in heroes. This is why you see our American heroes but never their British counterpart. Our is the rise of Empire, theirs is the deline. Our seek the limelight, while theirs skulk in shadows. (pp.246-247)

In his afterword, the British and World Fantasy Award-winning author admits to modelling this and several of the surrounding sequences on the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, for war crimes: a tack which is typical of the way Tidhar reconfigures our own horrible history into a darkly fascinating narrative as ghastly as it is fantastical.

In the beginning, in any event, a glimpse of the end: namely the framing narrative by way of which we learn of the events of The Violent Century. In The Hole in the Wall, "a London pub, hidden under the railway arches" (p.8) of the South Bank, a man known only as Oblivion confronts a fellow called Fogg, insisting that they go together to meet the Old Man, the better to clear a couple of things up. "It's just routine," (p.14) one promises the other, but Fogg knows this is not so. He has his secrets, and he will give anything to keep them.

Thus they travel together to the Farm, where Fogg is interrogated at length by the Old Man, who has no other name. He's in charge, as he has ever been, indeed, of the Bureau for Superannuated Affairs, or the Retirement Service, if you will, which long ago promised Fogg and Oblivion — among a number of others we'll meet in a moment — the opportunity "to serve. To be something. Each of you unique. Every boy's secret dream." (p.64) Be that as it may, these dreams, as we'll see, are more like nightmares for most of the changed.

Following the probability wave which made them, or rather remade them, our heroes, such as they are, were taken to the selfsame farm where the framing conversation takes place in the present day, and trained. "It is a place in which the laws of what is real seem suspended, for just a moment. It was beautiful in the daytime, the bright primary colours of blue sky and yellow sun and green grass and white stone. At night it is more of a chiaroscuro, the play of light and shade." (p.71) There, then, under the guidance of a drill instructor and a doctor — none other than Alan Turing — the changed who hail from the UK learn, little by little, to control their abilities.

And so on a lazy sunny afternoon, the Lost Boys and Girls of Never Never Land. Oblivion, Fogg, Spit, Tank, Mr Blur and Mrs Tinkle. Some we know well, some, less well. it is only the nature of things. There are others, too, though many will die in the coming war and other wars and others still are vanished, missing, location unknown: perhaps gone to their own implausible palaces of ice or bat-filled caved, hidden volcanic peaks on jungle-covered South Sea Island, forbidding chrome-and-metal skyscrapers or remote Gothic castles. Or perhaps more prosaically a cottage in Wales. The records are sealed and obscured. (p.77)

This is the calm before the storm, of course. War is coming, and from the 1940s on, it does not seem to stop. Tirelessly, Tidhar takes us through World War II, Vietnam, the Cold War and Afghanistan. But "there was only ever one war to matter, to Oblivion, to the Red Sickle, to all of them. [...] Everything else is a shadow of that war." (p.248)

A shame, then, that so much of The Violent Century is devoted to these episodic digressions. As readers, we gain little insight from said scenes, except to see our secret service set against the superheroes of other countries, from the picture-perfect poster boys who represent the United States to the long-suffering symbols of the USSR and so on. This juxtaposition certainly serves to emphasise our impression of Great Britain's Übermenschen as shady sorts, though it adds little to the either the overall narrative or the larger arcs described by our central characters.

Eventually, we do get back to what matters — the making and breaking of Fogg and Oblivion's friendship by the machinations of the Old Man — but other difficulties persist, first and foremost Tidhar's peculiar prose, moulded in the mode of Jeff VanderMeer's in Finch. The short, sharp sentences; the minimalist exposition; everything up to and including the dialogue is odd. "Words come out haltingly. Like he's forgotten speech." (p.35) It takes a lot of getting used to; progress through the book is so forth slow, leading to problems with pacing that the story's aforementioned sidesteps only exacerbate.

The Violent Century's fractured narrative does, however, have a heart, and when the author sets his sights on this, beauty both meets and beats the beast:

Through a Latin Quarter alive with revellers; Paris, City of Love, City of Lights, transforms into a magical place with one kiss, a Sleeping Beauty awakening, awash with light and love. Night transforms it into a carnival. Paris! Through open doors the smells of cooking waft out. [...] By a bakery, men queue patiently in their suits and their hats for baguette and demi-baguette; nearby they sell jambons, olives, brie and camembert; an old woman sells flowers on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michael and Henry buys a red rose and hands it to Klara, who laughs and tosses it in the air. (p.158-159)

The effect of the narrative's darkness and density, then, is the elevation of simple scenes like this, which are rendered with incredible resonance by dint of Tidhar's stylistic decisions. That they are purposeful doesn't make The Violent Century any easier a reading experience, but sometimes... sometimes you just have to work for your wonders.

At the last, Lavie Tidhar's latest is at once a love story, a tragedy, a spy novel, a memoir of a friendship, an exposé of the horrors of war, and a very serious study of the superhero: the origins of the concept as well as its relative relevance. The Violent Century is a difficult text, yes, but one that gives as good as it gets.

***

The Violent Century
by Lavie Tidhar

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Hodder & Stoughton

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Book Review | The Mouse Deer Kingdom by Chiew-Siah Tei

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The year is 1905 and Chai Mingzhi, an immigrant newly arrived in the port-town of Malacca, takes Engi, an indigenous boy from the tropical forest, to live with him. Trapped in a realm he doesn’t recognize and finding himself caught up in Chai Mingzhi’s bitter personal affairs, Engi quickly learns to take on the shape of the legendary mouse deer in order to survive in the outside world.

Twenty years later, Engi sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding Chai’s past, his tireless quest for the land where the grand Minang Villa is built, and the tragedy that destroyed him.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is a tale of love and betrayal against the backdrop of a troubled time when hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled poverty and the Qing Empire for Southeast Asia, where their arrival unsettled native life in their new home.

***

Home is where the heart is, so if you have no home, what happens to your heart?

This is a question Chai Mingzhi will ask himself again and again over the course of the nearly forty years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. "A run-away official from the Qing Court, which had supported the anti-foreigner rebels" (p.17) during the turn-of-the-century Boxer Rebellion, Chai uses the last tatters of his imperial influence to help his family and closest friends escape to the Malay Peninsula.

At the outset of Chiew-Siah Tei's long-awaited second novel, the travellers trade everything that is theirs to pay for passage on Captain Cochrane's cargo ship, but nothing in Chai's life comes easily, and the journey to Malacca is no exception. As gathering storms lay waste to a vessel never intended to carry passengers, we have, however, an opportunity to meet the Mingzhis.

There's Meilian: a well-to-do second wife, once, before being abandoned by her heartless husband and his hateful father. Left to rot, in short... but she did not. Instead, Meilian and her dear daughter were welcomed back into Chai's foundling family, and though they still struggle, both have new hope for the future. Little Jiaxi fantasises about it, in fact:

Anything was possible in English tales (a frog could become a prince, a maid a princess), anything could be realised in the English-speaking far-off lands, she conjectured, silently harbouring the fantasy. Was that the reason Uncle Mingzhi insisted she should acquire the knowledge? So that she would have aspirations like his? Her mother's descriptions of a determined, diligent brother who worked his way up to shrug off their grandfather's grasp [...] had always fascinated her. The man who became a mandarin at twenty-one was a legend, her hero. (pp.39-40)

Meilian, meanwhile, has attracted another's eye. She and Chai's foreign friend Martin are to be married, in fact. A young British businessman whose know-how helped her benevolent brother through a difficult time, Martin is unfortunately at odds with Chai's other companion, Tiansheng.

A former opera apprentice, "sold to the Northern Opera Troupe as a child by his starving parents," (p.25) Tiansheng was disinherited again because of his formative friendship with Chai, then the heir to a mighty landlord. In the dark days afterward, he murdered a man. Only Chai has stood by him since.

Chai, for his part, "kept only to himself, staying away from his past, the place, the people; their stories were never recounted." (p.221) But though he's put a pin in the past, filed it away for future reference, the present is ever uncertain.

The trip with which the book begins is terrifying, but Chai and his family make it to Malacca at least in one piece. There, they move into a haunted house-on-stilts that the locals want nothing to do with, promising to "find a proper place soon." (p.54) But they do not. They are not wanted in the village, nor would the wilderness welcome them, so they make the most of this ramshackle shelter, turning it into a place they might take pride in with their own spit and sweat. "The way things progressed seemed natural, inevitable," (p.58) such that some months later, the Mingzhi massive are almost happy here.

Could it really be so easy?

I'm afraid not, no. Because one day, their home away from home is taken from them too. The house-on-stilts is burned to the ground by someone with a grudge, and a member of the family dies in the fire, searching hopelessly for the nugget of gold that was to pay for their future.

Torn apart by this tragedy, the survivors go their separate ways after the fire — though Chai stays, vowing that this land the locals will not allow him will be his one day, come what may. He and Tiansheng soon begin a business, with Chai pocketing his part of the profits to invest in an enterprise that will bring him riches. Riches enough to buy back the charred parcel where he lost the one he loved.

Playing this long game leads to loneliness, of course. Chai and his childhood friend become distant and distrustful of one another, thus the former adopts a child from the forest — not as a slave, but as a son of sorts. This is Engi, a boy who becomes a mouse deer of a man, at once quick and cunning, and it is he, as it happens, who narrates the entire tale.

I was born in the forest, so was my father. As was my father's father, and his father. How many forefathers were there before them when the first took his place on the land? That I'm not able to count, but Father told me: 

"It began from the day the world started. When the sun and the moon began to take their turns in the sky, and birds emerged from the horizon, flapping their wings, singing. When the soil spread over the barren land, and green trees and red flowers, animals and snakes, beetles and butterflies rose from the earth and found their territories. Then the land opened up, became a river, and fish and prawns squeezed themselves out from the riverbed and swam freely in the water. [...] There wasn't an outside world during those early days, there was only Our World, the forest that was, and the forest was everything on this land." (pp.2-3)

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is mostly Mingzhi's story, yet Engi attempts, albeit inexpertly, to enmesh his narrative with another's:

I'll let him surface, Parameswara; I'll let him punctuate episodes of the Chinaman's life. On my exercise book, two lines are drawn — one of Chai Mingzhi's life in the early twentieth century; the other, Parameswara's, from the late fourteenth century — with a five-hundred-year gap between them. Only by comparing the similarities between their journeys will the differences in the outcomes appear stark. (pp.8-9)

This is a stretch too far, sadly. The similarities between the pair are unsubtly stressed, and the differences add precious little to the larger narrative. It's a relief, then, that Parameswara's part dead-ends abruptly, just a hundred pages in. As does another potentially fascinating narrative, namely Jiaxi's:

It'd been exhausting, the many roles she played. Like a chameleon, she draped on immaculately tailored skins for the right occasions to perfect her performance, switching seamlessly between a model student, a good team player in the sport field, a patient friend to ignorant school girls, and a demure, well-behaved foster daughter. Rules after rules. What to do and what not to do. [...] What have I become? (p.164)

Sadly, Jiaxi simply disappears at a point. Another story for another day, if I may, for her tale damn-near demands to be told. One can only hope we don't have to wait another six years for it to finally unfold, as we did this sequel of sorts to Tei's multiple award-nominated first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom isn't its equal, I fear. It's episodic, dare I say disjointed. Inelegant in some spots, and in others all too obvious. "The awkwardness of it was equal to that of a forest child in an outsiders' world. Not here, not there. Not this, not that." (p.311) But like Engi, and to a greater or lesser extent the determined man who takes him in, it does discover its purpose before the story's over.

Largely this is thanks to Tei's knack with characters — Chai and Engi, Martin and Tiansheng, Meilian and Jiaxi... all come to life like few figures in fiction do, and develop dramatically over the years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. The narrative is no slouch either, aside some structural strangeness and an intermittent pacing problem. Indeed, the cruel and unusual denouement squeezed a tear or two out of yours truly.

This is a beautiful little book, to be sure; a tragic family saga along the lines of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life about outsiders in a land that seems set on smiting them. The Mouse Deer Kingdom may be less affecting overall than Chiew-Siah Tei's debut, but it has its heart in the right place: at home with Chai and his fantastic family.

***

The Mouse Deer Kingdom
by Chiew-Siah Tei

UK Publication: October 2013, Picador

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Book Review | Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

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

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Admitting Defeat | Me and All Clear

I'm sure some of you were wondering what prompted me to post a belated review [link] of Blackout yesterday. Well, there's the short answer, and the long answer.

The short answer is, I've been sitting on it for something like two years to date, and I didn't want the week to begin without blogging about something on The Speculative Scotsman. I dare say it would have otherwise: I'm covering another tutor's classes at the education centre I work at this week, plus I have a few deadlines to attend to in the meagre remains of my free time.

Oh, and it's my birthday today... but hey, who wants to celebrate being older?

But why Blackout? Why in the world has it taken me so long to publish this particular piece?

Well, because I always planned to review All Clear right alongside the first part of Connie Willis' wartime tome. It only seemed decent, considering they form a single story.

To do that, though, I'd have to read All Clear, and though I did indeed begin it immediately after finishing Blackout, I put it down soon afterwards. To the best of my recollection, I did this to remind myself that books could be good—

—but no, that's not fair. Blackout wasn't that bad. What I mean to say is that I started in on something else to remind myself that books could be enjoyable, as well as academic.

Anyway, All Clear has sat heavily in the bedside cabinet wherein I keep all the books I should really read ever since, and I realised, quite recently—whilst reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson for review at a later date on Tor.com—that there's no reason a serious novel about the war couldn't be objectively entertaining, which Blackout (to my mind) simply wasn't.

So what happened was, I admitted defeat. I said to myself: Niall, you clearly don't want to read this book right now, and you certainly won't for a while after the lovely likes of Life After Life, so why not just file it away for the time being?

Well, dear reader... I did. And I immediately felt like a great weight had been sitting on me for years. A weight of words that I'm now without.

Happy birthday to me! :)

Book Review | Blackout by Connie Willis

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In Oxford, in England, in the year 2060, a trio of time traveling scholars prepare to depart for various corners of the Second World War.

Their mission: to observe, from a safe distance, the day-to-day nature of life during this critical historical moment. As the action ranges from the evacuation of Dunkirk to the manor houses of rural England to the quotidian horrors of London during the Blitz, the objective nature of their roles gradually changes.

Then, cut off from the safety net of the future and caught up in the chaotic events that make up history, they are forced to participate, in unexpected ways, in the defining events of the era. 

***

Blackout is a huge book.

Or rather - scratch that - it's one half, indeed the shorter half, of a book more than twice the size of this vast first part. You see, All Clear picks up immediately where Blackout leaves off, essentially mid-sentence. Stopping at that stage would be akin to giving up on a quest when you've only just discovered your objective.

Admittedly I have a bit of a problem insofar as I finish almost everything I start. Simply put, I have a hard time giving up on any story, whatever its demerits. Oftentimes I wish I could just say thank you and good night... that enough is enough.

And halfway through Blackout, let me tell you: I had had enough.

It does, in its defence, get a good deal better thereafter. If it hadn't, I don't think I'd have started All Clear immediately after it stopped short, even given my aforementioned foibles. But three or four hundred pages of faffing later - and that's the politest way I can put it - things do begin to come together. Some of our characters even meet! 

Wait, are we getting ahead of ourselves already? 

Well, that's what time travel's all about, isn't it? And Blackout is all about the time travel, ostensibly. About a future, half a century on from where we are, in which the historians of Oxford University have quite cracked the past. If there's something they're not sure about, or some significant event they simply want to see for themselves, all these people need do is nip in and out of a neat machine.

Actually, I'm overselling it a bit. Is life ever so straightforward? It's certainly not for prospective time travellers, who have to cut through a whole ream of red tape before they can take to days gone by, and even then, things have gotten kinda crazy. As one historian observes:

"Linna says they're simply swamped over there. Ten drops and retrievals a day. If you ask me, there are entirely too many historians going to the past. We'll be crashing into each other soon." (p.25)

Little does Chris know that's exactly what's about to happen. In... oh, four hundred pages or so—and this is a generous estimation.

In advance of that, alas: a whole lot of nothing. In the future, where a murder of history majors are readying themselves to travel to London in the early stages of the Second World War—to the time of the Blitz, specifically—everyone's up in arms about their dates of departure to the past being shuffled around, seemingly willy-nilly, and no-one can get in to plead their particular case with the man in charge.

Not before time, Michael, Merope and Polly gather that there's nothing to be done, so they set off for the past, exceedingly ill-prepared for the hardships ahead, and woefully unaware—until, again, a very late stage—that something, somewhere, has gone very wrong. Months into their respective assignments they discover, to their horror, that the drops which deposited them in the past, and which they must also use to return to their present, more than a century hence, have summarily stopped working. And that's when Blackout finally kicks off.

Till then, the whole time travel aspect of Connie Willis' latest trip down memory lane seems, well... peripheral at best. There are a few rudimentary rules, foremost amongst them the laws of divergence:

"History is full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near - from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable - such as a time traveller - could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history." (p.47)

Beyond this, though, and the hateful bureaucratic nonsense with which Blackout begins, the business of travelling to the past is pretty much plain sailing - and deathly dull - until our characters realise that they've been misplaced. From bad to worse, it dawns on Polly that "this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning." (p.437)

In other words, they're trapped. Something must have gone horribly wrong in the future because of their presence in the past. Or is it so simple? Are they merely over-thinking things?

As of the impromptu conclusion of Blackout, Michael, Merope and Polly each have their secrets and suspicions, but none of the three can be certain about what's truly going on.

Nor, indeed, are we. Assuredly I was unsure what to make of all this... this interminable scene-setting. Because that almost the entirety of what Blackout amounts to, ultimately: an excruciatingly detail-oriented introduction to some presumably bigger and you'd-best-hope better thing.

For starters, there's little to no character development at all. Our trio spend so long pretending to be period-appropriate people that we don't get a sense of who they actually are, so when they at least they catch up with one another, and drop the act, they seem like different characters entirely. Characters we know next to nothing about, here at the end of ten to twelve hours in their company; even less engaging characters than those we've spent so long getting to know, I would add.

And whilst Willis' evocation of wartime London is especially authentic—rife with odds and sods of information as interesting as they are incidental—there's simply no momentum to the narrative, and not until the very end (which is to say at approximately the midpoint of the duology, were we to consider it as a single thing, as I gather the author intended) is there much more than the vaguest suggestion of jeopardy. 

Splitting this story into two parts has done it no favours, I'm afraid. Now that all the players are arrayed about the stage, and the props are in proper order, I have reason to believe that All Clear will be a more satisfying experience than this never-ending fragment of a thing, but on its own, I'm sorry: never mind all the awards that the author has won for it—or so an assortment of committees insist—Blackout is a huge disappointment. Not an absolute nothing of a novel, no... but surely far too close for comfort.

***

Blackout

by Connie Willis

UK Publication: June 2011, Gollancz

US Publication: February 2010, Spectra

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