Number 23 - Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell

 

Another book with an incredibly bland cover.  I ordered the psychadelic cover from World Of Books but this is the one they sent me.  More than a little irritating.

However, the contents are the important part. This is a semi contemporary novel so I had high hopes for it (I find Mitchell's forays into distant history to be very tedious, but his writing set in times of living memory tend to be great)

And I wasn't disappointed.  Mitchell well and truly hit it out of the park with this book.  At nearly 600 pages it's a bit of a doorstop but it reads so easily it felt half that length.

I might be a few books behind on my total from last year, but my word count must be a lot higher. This is the 4th book so far that exceeds 500 pages by a distance.

It tells the story of a brief flash in the psychadelic music scene in the late 60s. We start with Dean, a down on his luck bassist who, on the worst day of his young life to date - lost his job, his money and his home - he runs into Levon, a music producer/manager, who takes him to watch a band playing at a venue nearby. Here he first meets Jasper de Zoet and Peter Griff Griffin a guitarist/singer and a jazz drummer respectively. They form a band together under Levon's guidance and are soon joined by Elf Holloway, a folk singer/guitarist/keyboard player.  thus the new band on the block - Utopia Avenue is formed.

The book follows them through the ups and downs of musical life - from a first gig that couldn't possibly go worse to breaking into the American music scene.  They run into many prominent figures of the late 60's scene.

The time period is drawn fantastically. It feels completely real. The characters are drawn equally well.  When their personal lives turn bad, we feel for them.  

On top of all this there are many nods to his other books, some more subtle than others.  Spotting the Easter eggs adds a whole new layer of fun into the book. 

I wasn't 100% certain that Jasper's storyline fitted the overall tone of the novel - especially when it became unapologetically supernatural in nature.  As brilliant and as tense as it was in the final segments, it sat oddly with the realism of the rest of the book.

That was a minor quibble though. I raced through this in just under a week. It's compelling, it's funny, it's sad, it's a fabulous portrait of 50's England seen through the eyes of a very different set of characters, a psychadellic head trip through the late 60s music scene.. What more do you want? 

Number 15 - Moonglow - Michael Chabon

 

Michael Chabon writes gorgeous prose.  I read The Yiddish policeman's Union a few years back, and while I'm sketchy on plot details, I remember really loving it.  So much so that I now have 4 more of his books in my TBR.  So I was quite happy when this was chosen for this month's book group (even though it wasn't one of the ones I already had, so it cost me money to go out and buy it)

The meeting was held a week ago last Wednesday and I've only just finished the book today.

I wasn't the only one in the group who hadn't finished.  This book is unique in the history of my book group in that not one person had finished it.

It's a memoir of Michael Chabon's maternal grandfather - or it purports to be. The first person narrator is one Mike Chabon and he's telling us about the stories his grandfather told him from his deathbed.

The old guy apparently had an interesting life.  A decorated veteran of WWII, an ex convict married to a woman with severe mental health issues, a rocket scientist in his spare time, and as he got older, a hunter of killer snakes in his retirement village, trying to avenge the many pets which have gone missing.

I say apparently, because the book is apparently fiction. It's hard to tell what it is. It is filled with Chabon's trademark luscious prose, layered narrative and deeper hidden meanings and metaphor.

On the strength of the quality of writing, I should love this book unreservedly...

The problem is that I don't. And one of the annoying things about this book, is that it makes me feel that it's a ME problem and not the fault of the book that I've actually found it a struggle to get through.

The structure of the book doesn't help.  In a well done attempt to recreate the randomness of memory and recall, the book is very choppy and bitty.  It takes till about page 180 before two consecutive chapters are set in the same timeframe. Every chapter up until that point requires a mental reset and effort to work out where in the timeline we are.  This does help to get across a whole lot of background information and the piecing together of the jigsaw pieces is sometimes quite enjoyable. 

It has made me laugh out loud frequently. It has made me feel sorry for the family. A chapter close to the end dealing with his mother's miscarriage was particularly moving. But this isn't a book I think I would read again, despite the fact that knowledge of the whole story will almost certainly grant more insight to events described earlier on, and to see the myriad of patterns  in the storytelling.

It's frustrating.  I can't fault the book, but it was a real struggle to get through. Your mileage may vary but this is a 6/10 or 7/10 at most for me.

Number 83 - Heap House - Edward Carey

 

I just discovered that I bought this book by mistake.  I found it in Poundland in their book section for only a pound.  That's both a great bargain and a damned shame. More on that statement later.

When I saw that illustration I thought that this was by the illustrator of that alphabet book with all the dead children so I snapped it up. As i just discovered, that alphabet book is called the Gashlycrumb Tinies and it's by Edward GOREY.  He died in 2000 and so is most definitely not the author of this book which was written in the mid 2010s.

Back to that statement about this being in Poundland being a damned shame... Poundland's basic business model is buying remaindered stock for any non food items and things that you would reasonably expect to pay more than a pound for.  That means that this book certainly didn't sell as many copies as it deserves to.

This might be a children's or Young Adult book, but it's one of the best things I've read this year. I've had so much fun reading this book. 

The storyline is kind of traditional - strange family, strange house,  in comes a stranger and things start to unravel. The most sympathetic member of the family faces a quandary regarding his loyalties... etc.

What makes this almost entirely unique is the plot details. The reason the family is so strange, the setting, and the characters set this book apart from pretty much anything else I've ever read.  I genuinely can't think of anything that this would compare directly to. Think Dickens trying to write Gormenghast with Neil Gaiman and Lemony Snickett with a dash of Roald Dahl and indeed the aforementioned Edward Gorey and you'd be somewhere in the ballpark.

Heap House is the home of the Iremonger family.  It's set in the middle of huge rubbish heaps imported from neighboring London. All the upstairs Iremongers have names almost but not quite like ordinary names.  Our hero is Clod Iremonger (short for Clodius), he has cousins called Moorcus and Timmus who also feature heavily in the story.  Our heroine is Lucy Pennant, a new servant in the house. All the servants are distant relatives too poor to live in the main house.  Once indentured they lose their London names and just become known as Iremonger. Lucy doesn't want to lose her name

Everyone who lives in the house has a birth object that they cannot be parted from. Clod's birth object is a bathplug, Timmus carries around a tap etc.  Clod has an almost unique abilty to hear all the birth objects talking. They all shout out names.  His bath plug, for example, always shouts James henry Hayward. 

The drama starts in the story when his great aunt Rosamud's door handle goes missing.  Clod and Lucy meet and form a forbidden friendship. Events quickly spiral out of control.  Items are moving by themselves.  Huge angry creatures are forming from the rubbish and a storm is gathering over the heaps.

There's a very blatant anti-capitalist metaphor at the heart of the story which adds whole layers of meaning to the proceedings.

The mock Victorian setting is brilliantly created and helped along by the mordantly funny illustrations that introduce every chapter. I didn't realise that this was part 1 of a trilogy when I bought it.  I'm very happy that it is because that means I have two more books in which to experience this world in. I've already ordered both of them.

This is still available in the usual outlets, although in paperback with not such a great looking cover.

It may be aimed at the younger generation but it entertained this adult enormously.  an easy 9/10 

By the way - here's the Edward Gorey thing if you've never seen it before

Animated Gashlycrumb Tinies Alphabet - Narrated by TDC - YouTube

 

Number 81 - Starship and Haiku - SP Somtow

Continuing in my quest to read Somtow's entire back catalogue, here's one of his earliest novels. In fact it won the the Locus award for best first novel, so it's his first.

You can tell this is a late 80s reprint from the fact that it has his shortened name on it instead of Somtow Sucharitkul. They knew how to put together a nice looking book cover in the 80s and this one is no exception.

The story has to score several points for originality. We're in the distant future (2022) and a plague is spreading across what's left of the world after the millennial wars.  The story is split between Japan and Hawaii.  

On Hawaii we meet Josh Nakamura and his little brother Didi who was born on the night that the moon was blasted out of the sky. People think Didi is simple but he has abilities that no one could guess.   They're desperate to leave for Japan, the last vestige of civilisation on the planet.

Japan has more than its fair share of problems too. Mass suicides are in progress at the behest of a mysterious figure calling himself the death Lord.  Ryoko Ishida, daughter of on of Japan's first ministers and blessed with the ability to talk to whales,  has other plans. 

This is a world ending apocalypse unlike any I've read before, and I doubt I will again.  I think maybe if I knew more about Japanese culture I might have picked up on some details that I've missed.

Somtow's prose is lush and lyrical.  He builds this bizarre end of times in broad strokes.  Where some writers would have used 210 pages just to set up the premise, Somtow trusts his readers to follow him on this headtrip and not lose track and tells the whole story in those 210 pages. And it's a trip well worth following him on.  There are world changing revelations about the nature of humanity and life itself.  They're thrown at us as casually as most writers will have a character decide on what coat to wear.

Like everything else he's written, this is a damned good read. Highly recommended.

Number 80 - Gideon Falls Book 2: Original Sins

 

The second volume, collecting issues 7 through 11 of this continuing series by Jeff Lemire and stunningly illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino

As per my comments on the first volume, this book is gorgeous to look at.  It has a truly mind-bending plot. The art is amazing and the way the layouts are used as an integral part of the storytelling is remarkable to say the least.

There are some hints towards an explanation, and the apparently separate storylines are now officially merged.  

I've ordered book 3 already.  These books show how graphic novels can be just as valid a writing form as prose.  And they demonstrate tricks in the storytelling - use of layout etc. - that prose novels could never hope to emulate.

Number 35 - the Devil's Paintbrush - Jake Arnott

 

My 200th blog post! It's come around fast - only 2 and a bit years.  

Jake Arnott is best known for his crime novels set in the latter half of the 20th century - The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers, Truecrime.  That's the trilogy that made him famous and rightly so.

This is very surprisingly an embellished true story about the night Aleister Crowley, the infamous practitioner of black magic, ran into Fighting Mac, a very famous general of the British army in the Boer war, in a bar in Paris where he was hiding from a scandal that was about to break regarding his recent posting in Ceylon.

I assumed it was all a flight of fancy and Arnott had just thrown these real life characters together to see what might have happened, but in the afterword, it's explaimed that on the night in question, the two really did meet and spend the evening together.

Arnott used Crowley as a character in The House of Rumour as well. that book is well worth seeking out, it's got a truly unique structure to the story, based on the tarot deck and the story incorporates the Joestown massacre, Rudolf Hess flying to England in WWII to try to negotiate a truce, and Aleister Crowley being hired for nefarious purposes by British intelligence in WWI among many other threads. But I digress.

This is a young Crowley. The year is 1903. The scene, Paris. He is looking to take control of the magick order he is in, and he decides that Fighting Mac (Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald - one of the very few majors to have risen to that rank from being a private with no connections) can help him. 

The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the two very different characters.  Through flashbacks, we learn of the chain of events that led to Fighting Mac's disgrace, but they're tied into the narrative so well that they become an integral part of the story rather than feeling like info dump.

I made the mistake of googling Fighting mac when I started the book, to find out if he was real, and as a result, I found out quite a major spoiler for the ending.  However, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book.  Arnott is a great writer.  I'm not a great fan of historical fiction, but this is briliantly done.  It swept me through the story, I could almost smell the battlefields. 

There were sections so well written I reread the page just for the pleasure of the way the words flowed. 

I recommend this, and all Arnott's work without any reservation.

easy 8/10 maybe higher

Number 88 - Project Clio - Stephen Baxter

 A quick cheat read from my growing selection of novellas from PS Publishing. I only know Stephen Baxter's name from his collaberations with Terry Pratchett (which I shamefully haven't read, or indeed bought, yet). Still if Pratchett was willing to team up with him for three books, he must have something going for him.

And on the strength of this he probably does.  This is a fun little romp through a very fictionalised late 60's where the John Steed and Emma Peel Avengers series was based on a real agency who were using it to hide in plain sight. 

A mysterious company, known as the company, is producing advanced technology and, through a magazone known as Magazine, is making the nation's children produce strange toys from kits known as kits whilst they listen to endless guitar solos broadcast from the Company's own pirate radio station known as... the station.

There's a lot of ground covered in this book in a very short number of pages.  We have assassins attempting to kill ex-soldiers to stop them killing an ex-nazi scientist who  holds vital information about the company. We have a pair of agents trying to take down the evil version of Radio Caroline.  We have a good cop trying to reconnect with her stepson who is under The Company's control. Oh, and a potential alien invasion from within, setting the groundwork for invaders from beyond the Solar system to swoop in and destroy humanity.

The characters are as developed as you can get in such a short book.  The prose is witty and to the point. It's not laugh out loud funny but I did have either a broad smile or an ironic grin on my face for most of the time I was reading this.

 It's still available from PS Publishing. If short and witty take-downs of 60's tv sci fi are your thing, go ahead and buy it.  You won't regret it.