Number 6 - Minotaur - Benjamin Tammuz

Managed to finish book number 6 with 2 minutes to go before midnight, so I've oficially just done 6 books in January alone. Not too shabby, and well on track now to beat last year's total.

I picked this up in Waterstone's late last year mainly for the title, read the blurb and decided it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot.

An Israeli secret agent, on his 41st birthday, sees ands falls in love with a girl slightly less than half his age.  He starts writing to her anonymously and a weird relationship forms between them.

This book has a very weird structure.  the opening chapter, details the first sighting, followed by a selection of the letters that he sends to her, and some of the replies that she writes back, whether she has a way of replying or not. This section covers nearly a decade and we learn of two other men in her life in this time.

A dramatic incident ends this chapter.

Chapter 2 then jumps back in time and follows the life of the first of the men in her life.  Chapter three jumps further back again and follows the second man in her life, and the final, longest chapter, follows the secrret agent, Alexander Abramov, through his whole life up to and including the events of chapter 1.

This means segments of the story are repeated two and even 3 times from differing viewpoints.  But despite knowing what's coming, the book stays compulsive and manages to raise tension impressively well.  The opening chapter is one of the most weirdly disturbing things I've read outside of the horror genre.

This is a novel about love, and hope, and dashed hopes and life and death, and it juggles these themes brilliantly.

The narration is cool and calm throughout. One of the reviews on the back compares this to Kafka (who is name checked a couple of times especially in chapter 1) and I can certainly see where that's coming from. The prose is a little clunky in places, one of the traits of most translated novels IMHO, but nothing that truly detracts from the power of the story being told.

I'm not entirely certain what, if any genre, this belongs in.  I have a feeling that the final chapter might have been more compelling to me if I knew more about Israel/Palestine history as it did slump ever so slightly in the middle of this section. However, it gave an interesting history lesson (although of limited scope) and some insights into a piece of history I confess to being mostly ignorant about.

This is another early contender for book of the year.  i will be picking up more work by this writer.  To write with this structure and still surprise the reader in the later chapters is a real talent.

easy 8.5/10.  This is a minor masterpiece.

Number 5 - Their Heads are Anonymous - Alistair Gentry

As you may have noticed, I occasionally choose books based on the covers alone. For reasons lost in the mists of time, that's why I bought this one.

Can it possibly live up to that cover?  If it lives up that cover is that a good thing? No i's not.  A book with a cover like this needs to exceed the promises the cover makes by a huge huge distance.

This sadly, doesn't even live up to that godawful picture.
This should be filed under "when will I ever learn".

It doesn't know what it's meant to be.  Is it a comedy?  A couple of wry smiles here and there doth not a comedy make.  Is it a horror novel?  It's never scary. it's never shocking. It tries too hard to go OTT in a couple of places that it fails entirely to shock.  Is it science fiction?  It has some sci-fi elements, but badly written, ill-explained and tedious.  And mostly nonsensical.

It starts in an ok fashion and deteriorates. I struggled to get to the end of this.  When you have 10 pages to go and you're wondering if you should bother, that's not a good sign.

Basic story - a huge amusement park (supposedly a satirical take on Disneyland) - our hero works as a giant bunny, his girlfriend plays a gnu. He's been hallucinating recently and seeing flying saucers. The boss of the camp is a snuff pornographer with a private army who decides to lock the park up tight and start playing his games with the guests, as you do. Of course, no outside agency intervenes at any point, except for a news helicopter which gets shot down.  At the time of the park's takeover, Parry, the guy in the bunny suit, has fallen down a shaft of some sort after passing out through an illness which is never mentioned again, and his girlfriend is locked in a tower somewhere after being sexually assaulted by her boss. There's also a "mystery guest" who comes in as a recurring character but who adds zero to the narrative. Lots of people are killed, no one from outside comes to help, it's up to Parry and Priscilla (the Gnu) with the help of the aliens to save the day.  Or should I say it's up to the omniscient aliens who can raise characters from the dead to save the day.

This should have been just my kind of thing.  It strives to be quirky, it tries to be shocking, it aims at some metafictional sci fi plot twists.  But the execution is bloody awful.  The writing style varies from bland to what-the-hell-am-I-reading-and-is-there-any-point-in-me-carrying-on. The characters are not even complex enough to warrant saying they're one dimensional.

The good guys do nothing of note for themselves.  Only the metaphysical creatures from the flying saucers allow them to actually participate in the story in an active way. The bad guy is just that.  He does bad things because he wants to because he's bad.  A good villain is still the hero of his own story.  Charles Bigger, the villain, is just evil and knows it. He knows he's the bad guy and doesn't care.  In the hands of a skilful writer, that can just about work...

In this guy's hands... nope

Remember I read this so you don't have to.

It's on amazon if you really want to.  But don't.  This is the literary equivalent of unblocking drains.

Number 4 - Psycho - Robert Bloch

Despite having watched the film at least a dozen times and owning the book for well over a decade, I'd never actually read it.

I wish I could read/watch Psycho without knowing the secret buried in the heart of the story, but it's probably the single most well known twist to the tale in fiction.

Knowing the twist did mean that I could spot every time Bloch inserts another clue as to what's really going on, how innocuous all those little comments were, and how well hidden it all was in plain sight.

I know I would probably have reached part one of the reveal and would have been completely thrown. The way it's written is very clever indeed even if it's not particularly subtle.  I don't know if I would have figured out the grisly detail from part one of the reveal. It's possible the number of rip offs from this story would have made it easy to spot. On the other hand, it really hasn't dated badly like some of Bloch's other fiction and it might have been one shock on top of the other. Without a mind wipe and a reread, there is no way of knowing.

I envy those first readers to pick this up with no idea of what was happening.  The same goes for those first audiences for Hitch's great film.  Hitch does stay reasonably close to the book and there are no massive diversions.  I admit to still seeing Antony Perkins sat behind the counter despite Bloch describing Norman as fat, balding and quite pathetically middle-aged.

Which do I prefer? The book or the film?  I honestly couldn't say.  The film rightfully changed the way films are made, and set so many templates in place.  It's one of the single most important films in horror history.  The book has faded somewhat into obscurity which is a damnable shame. The book is every bit as cleverly done as the film. It's quite compulsivly readable and manages to build tension and shock despite how well known the story is.

I urge everyone reading this to check it out for yourself and read the origin of a piece of horror history.  You won't be disappointed.

Number 3 - Living with the Dead - Darrell Schweitzer

My first cheat read of the year at a mere 60 pages.

This rather handsome and very slim edition was sent to me in a mystery bundle from PS publishing (very good value way of getting lots of books cheap).  I'd kind of heard the author's name before but only peripherally.  I've never knowingly read anything he's written before.

After reading this, I need to rectify that situation.

This is a brilliant piece of writing.  The basic set up - a town called Corpsenburg where the unseen government send dead bodies to be stored on a regukar basis.  This has always happened and no one in the town will question it. After every shipment, the people of the town are assigned bodies which they give space to in their houses, on the chairs, round the walls, a baby in the breadbin.  The bodies don't seem to decay so most people are feeling rather crowded out but they don't object. This is their duty and the way things always were.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, starting with a local rep for the unseen government, the son of the last rep who was the son of the last rep etc. This is the way things have always been.

When he spots the most beautiful dead woman in the world in the  most recent shipment... it sets in place a sequence of events which start change in the town. 

This is one of the strangest and creepiest books I think I've read in a long long time.  It genuinely did send shivers down my spine as well as prompting several WTF's.  The prose is smooth and understated, full of symbolism and hidden meanings.  I will certainly be rereading this book to extract more from it.

Another early contender for best book of the year.

It might still be available through PS Publishing. Otherwise if you want a copy, try amazon or abebooks or whatever your favourite second hand book dealer might be.

2020 Number 2- Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin

Second book of the year and the first book group read.

I've heard of Ursula Le Guin but never read any of her novels before.  I know that some of my family really rate her so, despite this book having one of the most uninspiring covers I've ever seen, I was hopeful for this one.

The only thing I had ever actually read by Le Guin was a review she wrote of Toby Litt's Journey into Space, his generation starship novel.  In that review she seemed to constantly compare his book to her own generation starship novel and find his wanting in comparison to hers.  By the end of the review you probably knew slightly more about her book than his.  However as I disagreed with every negative point she made in her review, and at least one point she raised was directly dealt with in the narrative of his book, and so wasn't the plot ho;e she claimed, and almost demonstrated that she hadn't read his book properly in the first place, I was never inspired to track down her generation starship novel, or even to take note of its name.

So, after reading this, am I any more inclined to chase down her self praised novel?

This book tells of Lavinia, a minor, though crucial character from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid.  Lavinia was the inal bride of the central character of Aeneas. When Aeneas arrives on the shores of Italy, she is fighting  off the attentions of other suitors and when she is betrothed to the newcomer instead, a war breaks out.

Lavinia is given only a few stanzas of the poem and not fleshed out in any way.  Ursula here tries to remedy that and gives us her full story from childhood until turning into an owl randomly on the final page.

 The prose is workmanlike at best with no real passages that ever stand out.  Virgil apparrently would switch around in his timelines, so Ursula chooses to do this as well.  The book opens when she's 19 and sees the ships sailing in that carry her husband to be.  It then jumps back to her childhood and it's page 90 something before the ships reappear.  In the preceding seven dozen pages we are treated to her meetings at a local shrine with the poet Virgil himself from the future, tellinig her that he created her and detailing her future up until the end of the war - all very meta.

Once she's met Aeneas formally, but before the war, we get a flash forward to her married life with him, discussing points of what happened in the war.  It then goes back to her regular timeline and tells us of the same events but spread over lots more pages.  It does this two or three times and completely robs the narrative of any form of tension.

The main issue I have with this book is that Lavinia does very very little, especially in the first three quarters of the book up until the end of the war. She tells her dad to wait for a few days to allow her to choose her husband.... and that's it.  Everything just happens around her after that and she plays no active part in the story until the final quarter - where the war is over and it's now Ursula's imagination at work and not Virgil's. Sadly, once let off the leash to do her own thing with the characters we get some very par for the course politics with no real oomph.

In any book where the characters are fated to do certain things, it's really pretty disappointing if, after being told that their fate involves a war in which thousands will die because of you, the character then sits back and does nothing about it, makes no effort to change the written course.  And this is Lavinia's biggest fault. She just kind of says "yeah whatever, that sounds cool" and lets all her friends and neighbours go out and die rather than just trying for a peaceful solution over the minor misunderstanding that started the fighting. If she'd tried to do something but in vain, it would have added so much more to her character.

Life in pre Rome Italy is fairly well drawn but not amazing.  This particular sub-genre of historical fantasy mixed with myth is a well ploughed furrow.  Guy Kay is a particular proponent of this sub-genre and this effort from Ursula pales in comparisoin to even his weakest book.

There's nothing spectacularly wrong with this, it's just a bit meh in comparison to my other reading in this field. No wow factor in the slightest.

I'll be generous and award it a six out of ten.

2020 - Number 1 - Patience - Toby Litt

My first book of 2020, and it's a good one I'm pleased to announce.

I've been reading Toby Litt ever since I needed a third book to round off a threee for two and picked up a copy of Corpsing at semi-random in Waterstones way back in the year 2000.  It's safe to say I'll give anything he writes a try.  He's a very very talented author and not scared to take risks.

He has an ongoing project to work his way through the alphanet with his book titles.  O seems to be conspicuous by its absence sadly, but P is here in a simplistically beautiful bound edition from Galley Beggar Press.  Even the packaging this came in was extraordinary. Inside the box it was wrapped in black crepe paper and felt like a  real luxury item to open. GBP are certainly a good press to order from - they really take pride in their products.

Which means the quality of the writing is more than likely to be very good indeed.  Why go to that sort of effort for anything less than sublime writing.

And that's what we have in this book.  Toby Litt has excelled himself with thia one.

It tells the story of Elliott - a young boy confined to a wheelchair and unable to communicate except though grunts, gestures with his eyes and slight nods. He spends most of his days either parked in front of a window or in front of a white wall. He lives in a home run by nuns, his only contact with his parents is Christmas and birthday cards which are his main method for marking the passage of time.

Despite being stuck in his chair and unable to communicate, he is astoundingly intelligent.  He notices everything. He knows how one of his fellow patients is feeling by the colour of her knees. There's a desperate loneliness inside him though. When a new patient arrives, Jim, he feels he's found his soulmate.  Jim is blind and dumb though.  How can they learn to communiate? How can they ever
be friends and have fun?

The style of writing in this book is adventurous to say the least and grammar takes a back seat and every paragraph is one very long continuous sentence often run on into each other with no punctuation marks in sight not a comma not a full stop or colon or semi colon or anything just a blinding whirl of words where we the readers have to pick and choose our own rhythm and rhyme and reason and follow his stream of consiousness which helps place us squarely inside the head of young Elliott as he tells us of his days and his feelings and his hopes and fears.

And it works.  It works amazingly well.  It needs concentration, but I found i would hit the flow and internal rhythms of the language inside of a page and then I found it almost impossible to put down.

Elliott is a truly sympatheitic creation.  I found myself laughing and crying in equal amounts in this book. I won't reveal how a boy with cystic fybrosis, unable to do anything but grunt manages to communiacte and befriend a blind and dumb friend, but it is genius.  I nearly cheered when they worked out their communication method, as well as wiping a small tear away.

Despite the fact that you could argue very little happensd in this book (it starts with a multi page description of a whitewashed wall)  this is a compelling read, truly emotional and life affirming. 

As much as I've loved the rest of Litt's books, and three of his have hovered in my top ten for many years now - Hospital, Journey into Space and deadkidsongs - I may now have a new favourite.

easy 9/10 maybe more...