Number 100 - West of Rome - John Fante

 

Book 100 for the year!!

Last time I managed that would have been when I was a kid and most of what I read was about half the length of this.

I needed something good for book 100 - but also short because I wanted to actually finish it this year. So a John Fante book was a natural choice.

This is two novellas - more of a novella and a short story really - My Dog Stupid (which clocks in at 138 pages) and The Orgy (which clocks in at 40).

My Dog Stupid - a cantakerous old git adopts a stray dog and loses his kids, in ways at least tangentially related to said adoption of the eponymous canine. 

This is an interesting one because I really don't believe any publishing house would touch this with a bargepole if it was written by a contemporary writer.  The narrator,. Henry Molise, is a homophobic and more than slightly racist character.  Although he's called out on it more than once, he's unrepentant and has no redemption arc.

However, there is a technical name for people who conflate the opinions of a character in a book with the real life opinions of the author.  That technical phrase is IDIOT.

If the only characters we're allowed to read about are perfect people with no foibles or flaws, then literature will suffer massively as a result. 

Despite his faults, Henry Molise is a funny character. The world is an ugly place through his eyes, a place filled with cynicism and devoid of nearly all hope. He knows he loves the dog far more than he believes he loves his children. The gradual shrinking of his family unit gives scope for a glimpse at the real feelings of the man behind the harshness.It's not necessarily a pleasant sight, but is always entertaining. 

Some would try to excuse this story as a product of the time it was written.  I say no excuse is needed when the writing is this sharp and incisive and it's so damned good.  You can't possibly agree with him on most things and that seems to me to be very much the whole point of the character.

The Orgy - this is a short story about a boy who finds out too much about his father's weekend activities.  The title is a clue and slight spoiler. I was wondering if the title was a metaphor for a lot of the story, and in some ways it certainly is.  

The narrator's father is a builder who is gifted a gold mine by an ex employee (It's a lot more believable the way it's written in the story). He starts going there every weekend with his friend and workmate. The workmate is hated by his wife because of his atheism.  The narrator agrees vehemently with his mother. One weekend, the boy is forced to go along with them.

The ending of this story is quietly devastating and genuinely moving. 

All in all this was a great way to finish off this year in books.

Number 99 - Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

 This is a classic of pre-WWII literature that I've managed to somehow not read until now, despite having had this copy on my shelves for a good couple of years.

I wasn't sure what to expect from it. I know of the film, but haven't seen any more of the film than we see in the video for THAT Metallica song. KNowing its reputation as a classic and once banned anti-war novel, I was worried it could be a little too polemical for my tastes.

I needn't have worried.

Having read the book, I really need to see the film, just out of morbid curiosity about how to transfer this to the screen. It's written in the very close third person and follows Joe Bonham as he falls in and out of consciousness after sustaining horrific injuries on the front line in the first world war.  

As the pages fly past, the extent of his injuries becomes clear.  There's nothing left of him other than the absolute necessity to keep him alive.  He has no limbs, he's deaf and his face is also missing. This obviously leaves him as alone and as close to death as possible without actually dying - and totally unable to communicate with the world.

It's as close as a third person narrative can come to true stream of consciousness writing. He drifts in and out of fever dreams and reminiscences.  He tries to make sense of the world/ward around him based on the only senses he had left.

I started the year with a novel about a boy trapped inside his head (Patience - Toby Litt) and I've almost ended it with one too.  It's difficult to say which of the two is better as they are so different in their approach. This one is certainly the most devastating. In Patience, the narrator can celebrate his personal victories.  Joe doesn't have that option. He does have small victories, but the ending is

Slight spoiler - This was surpringly seasonal at the end, I accidentally chose the perfect time of year to coincide with the events.  In fact, this book could be seen as a perfect metaphor for 2020. Obviously, not intentional on the part of Mr Trumbo. but it's there nonetheless.

I raced through this in a couple of days.  The prose is spot on, colloquial enough to accurately depict the character, hallucinegenic in places and truly emotional.  I let out more than a few tears while reading this one.

Available in all good bookshops, I highly recommend this one to anyone.

Number 98 - Santa's Twin - Dean Koontz

 

A very quick festive read. That's the positives out of the way.

Dean Koontz is not a poet. This is written in bloody awful rhyming verses that don't scan.  I'd be more forgiving of the book if it didn't make such self aggrandizing claims in the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket.

"At the request of his fans, bestselling novellist Dean Koontz has created a contemporary masterpiece that is destined to take its place alongside "The Night Before Christmas" and A Christmas Carol as a perenniel yuletide favourite"

Someone somewhere thought this was worthy to be mentioned in the same sentence as A Christmas Carol?

The storyline is pants, but it's a Christmas story about Santa primarily written for kids, so that's to be expected. However, even writing for kids, write your verse so it scans, make some effort to make it fun. This is too wordy for younger children and too childish for older. It falls firmly between two stools.

The illustrations are very good.  I had quite a lot of fun playing "Where's the snowman" after I finished the book.  There's a snowman hidden in every picture somewhere, even in the picture on the front cover - see if you can spot it.

I wish the story/poem was that much fun.

  

Numbers 96 & 97 - Walking dead volumes 27&28

 The most unexpected redemption arc of any character since Merle came good in season 3 and the single most emotional death in the comic series to date both feature in this pair of volumes.  Alongside a war with the whisperers and the biggest zombie horde yet. 

Action packed and emotional are the best words I can think of to describe these.  I was so glad I had vol 28 on hand when I finished vol 27 at lunchtime.  I con't imagine how I would have felt if I'd been collecting the original comics and I got to that point and knew I had a month before they would even start to resolve that cliffhanger.

I know it's winding rapidly towards the final volume and the standard has never slacked in the whole collection so far.  brilliant stuff.  I hope to finish it all this year.

Number 95 - Skitter - Ezekiel Boone

 Those people who pay attention to my ramblings may remember I reviewed a book with a very similar cover to this a few months ago. That book was The Hatching, and this is of course the promised sequel.

It's a great feat of marketing on the part of Mr Boone.  I would never have taken the chance at reading a 1000 page novel about killer spiders by an unknown author.  However, splitting that down into what I now find is a trilogy means that people like me picked up the first one on the off chance and found ourselves compelled to buy the second, and from the way this one finished, the third book will soon also make its way to my groaning bookshelves.

These are not great works of literature.  There's no bon mots or hidden deeper  meaning tp these books - although this one serves as unintentional metaphor for people's behavior in the pandemic. They are very smoothly written though.  It might not be stylish, but damn is it fun to read.

 It picks up about a week after the first one ended.  As it says on the cover, the first wave of spiders is dead.  They've left behind lots and lots of egg sacs.  Some of them traditional externally visible egg sacs attached to walls etc, but a lot more inside the bite and sting victims left alive from the first book. 

These spiders are the reason that mankind is scared of spiders to this day.  Their last appearance on the planet, before recorded human history, was enough to leave a psychic scar on evolution. They're back now and making a similar impact.

Once again the pace is frenetic, bouncing around from location to location, building up the tension in carefully calculated bursts. We don't have quite as much shreddie action in this book as there was in the first. He's building up information about the spiders and how they operate. We know all hell is about to break out and the majority of the book is building up to that... There are some new spiders in town and they have more horrific tricks up their webbing than just skeletonising their victims in under a minute.

There are a few genuinely horrible (in a good way) chapters where the true threat levels shine through. A scene in a hotel sub-basement is a particular highlight and genuinely made me shudder. Elsewhere it's gloriously trashy nonsense. Again, in a good way. All the characters are brilliant and good looking, mostly rich and powerful, and the dialogue can be hilariously over the top.  However this does match the ever escalating state of emergency so it's easily forgivable.  

The scene where the first female POTUS takes her chief of staff aside for a quick half hour roll on the sack for some stress relief possibly stretches things a tad too far but the rest of the book stays within acceptable limits.

Don't expect a satisfying ending to the story this volume.  In typical part two of the trilogy style, this finishes on a cliffhanger, when all the hell does break loose as we've been promised for the past 300 pages. Book three should be a humdinger.

For a book with more plot than action sequences it truly does read enormously quickly and easily. This is assisted by the very short chapters and jumping from one side of the world to the other.  

The characters are broadly drawn and just about on the right side of believable.There is still one set of characters who haven't really impacted on the central storyline.  The last time we saw them they'd worked something out and phoned someone in the security forces, but we still don't know the detail. Hopefully, we'll find out how they tie in in book three. Which I will definitely be buying.

I could see this being a very successful series of films or tv show if anyone optioned it.  Enormous cast, exotic locations, flesh eating spiders, it's got everything.

Number 94 - Another Avatar - SP Somtow

 

SP Somtow is always a reliable source for an enjoyable cheat read.  And an enjoyable full length novel as well - obviously - but this one is a cheat.  A really good fun short read, picked partly just to get the numbers up for the year.

This one is very squarely in the YA category of Somtow's output. That doesn't reduce the enjoyment, it just increases the speed of the read.

It follows the story of Kris (Krit), a young orphan boy living in a catholic orphanage on the edge of the the slums of Bangkok. One morning he wakes to find the God Ganesha stealing bananas from the orphanage kitchen.  After that, things get weird.

It turns out that Kris is not all he appears to be. The plot becomes very cosmic very quickly with all the gods of all major religions thrown into the mix. In a serious adult novel, maybe this would feel a bit silly, but given that this is a very short YA novella, it's perfectly fine, and Somtow's sheer energy of storytelling pulls you through with a minimum of questioning. 

Like Miriam, (see my October reviews) this is also part one of a longer work, although this one has a much better cut off point and feels like the end of part one rather than just stopping dead mid story. Also like Miriam, it offers a very different view on comparitive religions in a very easily digestible form. 

Between this and the Stone Buddha's Tears (see my September reviews), I feel I have a fairly accurate picture of the city of Bangkok. Despite the fantastical elements, these stories are rooted in a very well drawn world. These two books have given me far more insight into the culture of this city than The God Child gave me into Ghanaian culture, and they've entertained me far more.

This is available online from all the usual sources. Go out and buy it.  Somtow's renewed writing career deserves to be huge.

Number 93 - The Grieving Stones - Gary McMahon

 My second cheat read by Gary McMahon this year.

There's a melancholic feel that infests McMahon's prose, and this book is no exception. 

A therapy group take a weekend retreat to an old house deep in the Lake District, an English version of the Cabin in the Woods trope - but with Gary McMahon at the helm, you know you're not in for any cliched old nonsense.

The stones of the title are a set of standing stones near the house. There are rumours and legends that surround the stones, and the appropriately nicknamed Grief House. 

Our protagonist Alice, much like the central character in Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House, feels a deep connection to the forces that surround the house. 

To say much more about the story would be a spoiler.  However I will say that the Backward Girl is one of the most genuinely creepy images I've read in a horror novel in several years. Also this book contains one of the best nightmare sequences I've read outside of an Adam Nevill book.

Alice is a believable and sympathic central character.  When I say believable, I mean that it's easy to believe she exists and that her actions are credible in the circumstances, rather than that we believe what she's telling us. We see the entire story through her eyes and we know she's not the most reliable narrator ever from about the halfway point.  There are hints that everything happening may well be just in her imagination, which makes the ending possibly more chilling than if the sisters and the Backward girl were really there - which they could be. There are hints in that direction too.

The supporting cast are well drawn with not a single weak characterisation. The atmosphere builds beautifully and there are a few well placed shocks and sneaky reveals. 

McMahon is one of the more stylish writers lurking beneath the surface of the modern British horror genre.  He deserves to be much more widely read. Get out there and buy his books.

I think I will schedule the Concrete Grove trilogy for a well overdue read for the new year.

Number 92 - London's Overthrow - China Mieville

 

I'm not sure what, if anything to say about this book.

China Mieville is a very good writer of a weird science fiction almost steampunk sensibility.  His first book - King Rat - was so well written, that while I was reading it, he managed to convince me there was merit in drum and bass (pone of my least favourite genres of music but damn the way he wrote about it made itr sound good) 

His New Crobuzon novels are amazingly good.Embassytown was a drag for the first half but then picked up the ball and ran with it for a brilliant second half. 

This is a different beast altogether.  It's a political polemic  -and I must say I'm very firmly on the side of his politics. He knows his stuff and expresses it a lot better than I could so I'm not sure I'm qualified to dissect this book.

He paints a grim and depressing look at London in 2011, one year into Con-dem rule.

This is a warning from history.  A lot of what he predicts in this long essay has come to pass.  It's a well argued and anger inducing read. My only real criticism of this would be the grainy quality of a lot of the photos.  I kind of get what they were aiming at, but quite a few of them just come across as bad photos rather than the intended effect.

I found it online for a price befitting the slimness of the volume.  

Numbers 90&91 - The walking dead volumes 25 & 26

 The saga continues.  I want to finish it all by the end of the year, so two at a time in between books now.

The whisperer storyline is one of the best since the series started. volume 24 ended with the biggest shock and emotional blow so far.  Volume 25 picked up from that with an emotional aftermath and massive trouble for Rick.  The story hasn't been predictable in the slightest and Volume 26 finished with an event I would never have guessed at in a thousand years.

Vol 25 also had a special free issue 1 of one of Kirkman's other comics - Outcast - which seems like a pretty good take on the demonic possession story.  As marketing schemes go, I can't say it's ineffective as I will be seeking that out in the near future.

Only 6 volumes to go... Who is Eugene talking to on the radio?  When the tv spin off ran a similar storyline, it didn't go to any good places.

I'm aware that I now have some massive spoilers for the tv series, but I don't mind.  they've done a good job of keeping the two formats distinct yet similar enough I'm sure there'll be surprises for me on the way.

Number 89 - The God Child - Nana Oforiata Ayim

 

This month's book group book. When I read the plot description I did say to myself "I hope that's better than it sounds".

Unfortunately, when I finished the book, I found myself saying "Is that it?" at the close of the final chapter.

Ms Ayim is many things, she has a list of jobs a mile long in the about the author section.  However, a competent writer is not anything that should be added to the list anytime soon.

 This book is dull and plodding.  There are flashes of good writing at random intervals but, for the most part, this is dull. Dull and meandering, filled with unsympathetic characters, and almost wholly lacking in memorable incident.

Maya is a young Ghanaian girl living in Germany. Apparently her family is minor royalty currently deposed in their home nation. Her mother thinks they should still be treated as full royalty and spends her entire section of the book pulling the old "Don't you know who I am" over all and sundry, whilst maxxing out her husband's credit card. Her cousin Kojo comes to live with them as a brother.  I have no idea how old he was supposed to be when he was introduced, but he certainly isn't a convincing portrayal of a child character of any age. 

Daddy gets fed up of Mummy's profligate spending, divorces her (I assume - it wasn't entirely clear, but they were definitely separated) and the two children end up in separate boarding schools in England. Then Maya is back in Germany for a chapter where nothing much happens.  Then she's back in England at university and she decides to go back to the homeland where her mother is living it up again on an undisclosed source of income and Kojo is now a minor politician who drinks too much and drives too fast. Apparently they have some type of impact on the world around them.

It might be just the fact that I have no sympathy at all for riches to rags charaters who continue to behave as if they're rich.  We're expected to sympathise if they can't pay their creditors.  I feel more sorry for the creditor who was ripped off for their goods/services by a character who knew they didn't have the wherewithal to pay for it. I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about anyone in this story.

I should have known what was coming early on when there was an entire chapter devoted to Maya having her hair done. That was about as exciting as this story got.  The sole exception is one chapter late on, set at an art show, that actually managed to get a point across about western views on African culture. Other than that, there was nothing of note in the entire book.

Spoiler

When the narrator loses two close relatives over two chapters, I would normally expect to be shocked and upset for him/her. When that happened here I just thought oh. This book had perecisely zero emotional impact. 

Ms Ayim manages to portray the viewpoint of a young child who doesn't really know what's going on a bit too successfully.  Sadly, this continues into Maya's adulthood and the reader is asked to do a lot of work to pull out what's actually going on. For that to work, unfortunately, the reader needs to care.

The prose manages a certain rhythm for most of the book.  That works against it because theres so little variation in tone.  The narration doen't feel any more mature when Maya is grown up compared to the early chapters when she's still a young child. There are some glaring examples of bad writing in there as well.

A sentence that reads "I took off my pyjamas, showered, got on the number 7 bus to Russell Square..." cannot be excused.  She got on the bus straight from the shower? Where was she keeping her change purse? 

This sort of thing runs through the whole book.  There are big leaps in the narrative from paragraph to paragraph, or even mid-sentence like that example. Although this does mean the book is mercifully shorter, it doesn't add to the readability. 

This could have been a fascinating insight into another culture, but the writing completely lets it down.

If you still want to read it, it's available online or in most bookstores.