Number 14 - Titus Alone - Mervyn Peake

 

And my continuing series theme continues with the final part of the Gormenghast trilogy.

At the end of book 2, Titus left the crumbling towers and struck out for adventures new. Those adventures are detailed in this, the slimmest of the three volumes.

He finds himself in a strange city, washed up on the banks of a river and is recued by the exquisitely named Muzzlehatch. Thus begins what is probably the strangest book in the series.  

Also the least satisfactory.

Peake was dreadfully ill when writing this and this book was pieced together by his editors and it shows. It feels bitty and somehow incomplete.  It's obviously not the completed draft that Peake would have wanted.

That's not to say it's a bad book because it isn't.  But compared with its predecessors, it falls short.

Gone are nearly all the characters that made the first two books so wonderful, no Prunesquallor or Flay or Steerpike, or any of the schoolmasters. Of course some of those characters couldn't have appeared in book 3 regardless, but you get my point.

Instead we have Titus and a brand new cast of supporting characters.  However, since the book is half the length of the first two, they don't seem as fully fleshed out as those in the first books. 

This started well.  Muzzlehatch is the best of the new creations, but his motivations are not what I would call crystal clear. Indeed, none of the new characters have clear motivation except for the fact that they all develop a deep devotion/love for Titus for no particular reason. This then leads them to fight for him or plan his downfall for non-reciprocation. 

From being a fantasy series with no magical elements, this book turns into a weird science fiction tale about a third of the way into the narrative.

Most of the more potentially interesting conflicts happen off camera and we only hear about them later on. I feel that Peake would have fleshed these scenes out fully and described then for us in detail had he been fit and well. The book would have been twice as long and all the better for it. 

What was happening in the factory?  We get the briefest of glimpses and need more. Who are the helmeted figures following Titus and why?  There are so many unexplained factors in this book. Given that the levels of detail in the previous volumes could almost be argued to be excessive, this marks the tone of this book as drastically different.

The prose seems to be lacking compared with the others. He's still capable of some truly alarming turns of phrase (Chapter 102 starting with "Under a light to strangle infants by..." being a particular favourite of mine - '"But you are very poor and very ill," said another voice, with the consistency of porridge' is another favourite), but this book just doesn't have the feel of the rest of the series. It's a faster read than the others, not just because of the lesser word count, but because the writing just isn't as dense or poetic as before. 

I wanted to love this book but I don't. It's very good. But the particular weirdness in this book feels out of place with the rest of the series.  It's not the same type of weird and just feels wrong. 

And I still want to know how Titus knew what a car is when I don't recall any motorised transport in the first books.

Number 13 - The Song of the Quarkbeast - Jasper Fforde

 

And continuing my theme of "next book in the series" here we have book two of Jasper Fforde's young adult series.

The follow up to The Last Dragonslayer takes place a few weeks after the events of book one.  Magic is slowly increasing, but not that much, and is still not trusted by a fair percentage of the population.  It's subject to many rules and regulations.

However, a rival firm (iMagic) want to monopolise magic use in the kingdom and take over as the sole suppliers.  There's lots of lovely moolah to be made if they can force our heroes out of business. They challenge Kazam to a magical contest and will stop and nothing to win.

Jennifer Strange and her friends can't let this happen, obviously, and face many obstacles on the way to the duel, including random curses, arrests and general incompetence (their own and other people's) and a wandering Quarkbeast that could spell cause a catastrophe all of its own.

On the way our cast is expanded from the first book, and the history of this version of Britain is fleshed out still further.  

This is a hysterically funny read. Fforde has an almost unique gift for giving a genuinely good story along with all the jokes. His Nursery Crime novels offer proper who-dunnits alongside the surreal mayhem. This book is no exception. We (I do at least) genuinely care whether Jennifer and Tiger Prawns can bypass bureaucracy  to keep Kazam open. I was genuinely upset when one of the funniest running jokes in the series came to an unexpectedly dramatic and moving end. As the plot unfolds we can see how carefully the various threads have been layered into the story.

The story moves with lightning speed and I raced through this in just a few hours. It's never less than amusing and is frequently laugh out loud funny.

If you want a quick, easy and brilliantly funny read, try this series - but do it in order.  Things might get a touch convoluted.

Number 12 - The Way Of the Worm - Ramsey Campbell

 

This month, I'm continuing, or in this case finishing, series I've been reading over the last two years.

This is the concluding part of Ramsey Campbell's Brichester mythos trilogy. Dominic Sheldrake, narrator of the first two books (The Searching Dead and Born to the Dark) is getting on in years.  Thirty years have passed since the events of BTTD and Dominic's son Toby is married with a daughter of his own.

Toby and his wife and daughter have recently become involved with a new (old) church in the city with all too familiar management.  The Nobles are back and their plans closer to completion than ever. Is there anything Dominic can do to prevent the approach of a cosmic horror?

No one writes paranoia quite the same way as Ramsey Campbell. His characters sense the horrors as often as they see them outright. They question what their own eyes and ears are telling them. The shadows contain half glimpsed visions, things that shouldn't exist. 

This builds to an unsettling sense of wrongness that is far more scary than any number of descriptions of dismemberment in medical detail that pass for horror in many other books in the genre.

The final chapters of this book drop the uncertainty into a definiteness that is scarier still. The paranoia wasn't paranoia. He gives us a nightmare vision that may well be the scariest sequence he's ever written.

This is a fine conclusion to an ambitious and frightening trilogy. The build up between the three books, and escalating stakes are deftly handled. The characters develop believably between the volumes. The time gaps between the volumes mean we've met Dominic and friends (and enemies) from childhood to old age. This is an unusual gambit which adds another layer of interest to the story.

If you like your horror to be cosmic and paranoid, there are very few writers to match Ramsey and this trilogy is one of his greatest achievements.

It's available direct from The PS Publishing website if you don't want to give your money to Mr Bezos.

Number 11 - The Touch - F Paul Wilson

 

This month's theme is simply that I'm continuing any ongoing series I'm in the middle of - which will involve finishing 4 of them. Nut not this series.

Book 3 of the Adversary Cycle and still we've not had a single unifying theme pop up. Even good vs evil as a generic theme doesn't apply here. There are no monsters or demons in this story, just a miraculous force which gives a doctor the power to heal by touch.

And that's pretty much the plot.  GP Alan Bulmer meets an old homeless guy who passes on a gift (or mainly curse) of healing.

For one hour every day, he can heal all illnesses or injuries with a single touch.  However, he loses part of himself with every person he heals.

Naturally, this leads to the utter destruction of his life.

For a book with such a slim plot, it holds the interest remarkably well. Wilson, Like Stephen King, gives us fully rounded characters to get behind before he rips their lives apart.

It's not a perfect book. There are some questions that are never answered that maybe should have been. Who were the intruders at Toad Hall and why were they there?  The running joke following their fate is funny enough, but, other than showing what a hard-ass Ba is, it doesn't do much except make me wonder what they were doing there and was there going to be a follow up. Alan's wife's reaction to finding out about his ability didn't make much sense. It was quite predictable and I guessed the ending very early on.

However predictable the destination was, the trip there was a quick and easy read and never less than entertaining. When the shit hits the fan in the closing chapters, it does so in a satisfyingly gruesome and nasty fashion.

Considering that my copy of Reborn (allegedly Adversary Cycle 4) states on the cover that it is the first follow up to The Keep, I suspect that the later books retcon this and The Tomb into the series as they have all been very much standalone novels so far.

I wish I'd read these many years ago, at least partly because they would have been a lot easier to get hold of with these gorgeous covers.

I actually enjoyed this far more than the Salman Rushdie.

Number 10 - Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

 

This month's book group read, and the meeting had to be postponed last week because only one person had actually finished it.

This is the first time I've read a Salman Rushdie novel. Obviously I've known the name ever since the Satanic Verses inspired the slight overreaction from some groups, but I'd never got around to reading any of his books. Apart from something highbrow, I had no idea what to expect.

This is a modern day take on Don Quixote. The eponymous character is on a foolish quest for the love of a woman he has never met, only seen on television. he lives his life according to tv and reality has become a blurred concept for him.

He's accompanied on his quest by Sancho, his son who he has literally imagined into existence. 

The other lead character is Sam DuChamp, a writer of tacky spy novels, who is trying his hand at writing an existential novel about a man called Quichotte who can't tell fact from TV and who is on a quest to win the hand of a beautiful celebrity with the help of his imaginary but somehow corporeal son, Sancho.

Yes, it's gone all meta and Quichotte is a novel within a novel with lots of commentary about the nature of writing and the relation between a writer and his characters.

Of course the lines between Sam's life and his book also begin to blur.

It's all very clever and knowing, but in a way I found to be too obviously trying to be clever. The magical realist elements don't seem to fit naturally into the story when they appear.  It felt overwritten and "try-hard" and for me, it didn't quite work. The mastodon chapter particularly felt ridiculously out of place.

There are sections that are very good indeed.  The chapters from Sancho's POV are excellent, and the emotional highpoint of the book for me was the end of Sancho's journey. The title character though, is vaguely irritating. 

The ending of the book would be better if it wasn't stolen from an old twilight zone episode (also from a joke in HHTTG). It was also foreshadowed far too much, and gave us one of the sources he stole it from.

It may be that if I knew more about Don Quixote apart from the tilting at windmills I might have enjoyed it more... but we will never know.

My first Salman Rushdie novel, and I can't say that I'm overly enthused to rush out and buy his back catalogue. there were flashes of greatness, but overall I'm not hugely impressed. It was a chore to pick it up some days and that's never a good sign.

6/10, don't try so hard

Number 8.5 - This is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay

 

I actually read this last week, in the middle of the Paul Auster book, since I had a train trip midweek and this fit in my coat pocket (unlike the massive 760 page plus hardback).

This continues the theme for February of reading biographies.

Adam Kay was one half of comedy musical act Amateur Transplants, very funny and very sweary. Check out their song London Underground for possibly their finest hour.

These days he's writing for TV while he's not touring with his music. Before that, he was a doctor in London. This book is extracts from his diary during that time.

This is without doubt the funniest thing I've read in years. It reduced me to helpless tears of laughter several times, and at least one uncontrollable giggling fit that lasted nearly 10 minutes.

Kay has a knack for phrasing in a way that makes almost anything funny. Some of the stories in this really shouldn't be quite so hilarious, but the way he tells them makes it, as per the Stephen Fry quote on the cover, painfully funny.

It is also heartbreaking as per the Jonathon Ross quote. Whilst the majority of the book keeps you giggling out loud, every now and then, he pulls the rug out from under you with a genuinely sad story. The story of why he quit as a doctor is particularly sad. 

Another thing this book does his highlight exactly how much stress our NHS staff are under (and this was back in the noughties, it's only gotten worse in the intervening years). As well as making us laugh, this is a  heartfelt plea to save the NHS.  The point is made repeatedly how vital the NHS is to the country, and how pressured the doctors and nurses are. Humour is a great weapon to show the absurdities and truth behind  the kind faces you see when you enter an NHS hospital.

I work in IT for the NHS as my day job, and so much about the way the organisation runs rings true. I'm lucky in having a 9-5, but my job roles over the years have given me insight into how the wards run.  This book really threw open any blinds that were still closed to me. 

So this isn't just one of the funniest books you'll ever read, it's one of the most important if you value the health service in this country.