Books? Care for some books, Madam? Can I interest you in a short review of a book? Yes I can!
Clarissa Oakes – Patrick O’Brien
As is often the case with these later Master and Commander books, O’Brien is going back over ground already trodden – in this case the difficulties presented by having even a single woman present in the all-male environ of the Royal Navy ship at sea. In this case though it’s a well-deserved barnstormer, the titular Oakes an excuse to lay out in exacting detail how discipline and good manners aboard slowly disintegrate
The dénouement is slightly contrived, with Oakes letting slip some essential puzzle piece in a casual conversation to Stephen ‘James Bond at sea’ Maturin, but otherwise it’s still astonishing how much O’Brien is getting from what is now a very long-in-the-tooth setting. Also he still hates Australia.
Case Study – Graeme Macrae Burnet
A funny one this, presented in the infamous modernist framing story where the author is provided with a bundle of papers, these ones alternating between a biography of a fictional enfant terrible psychotherapist in the 60s and the macabre diary of one of his latter-day patients. I found the slightly trashy diary sections preferable to the more literary biography, which despite being humourous and well put together was a bit much like reading an actual biography of a psychotherapist, which I wouldn’t often do.
The Book of CP-System – Fabien Sanglard
Despite owning both Sanglard’s Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein and Game Engine Black Book: Doom, I wasn’t going to bother with this one as I have no particular connection to or affection for arcade machines; somehow however I got sucked into reading it during lunches at work. And it’s excellent, a detailed and fascinating breakdown of one of the great pieces of custom arcade hardware and what must have been involved in putting together games for it. I’d buy a physical copy but the price of Amazon’s print-on-demands is, uh, considerably more than I remember.
Shadows of the Empire – Steve Perry
Look, all respect to fan favourite character Dash Rendar but this is not a good book. Partial mark for the characterising Darth Vader as a sort of long-suffering Smithers to the Emperor’s Mr Burns, but everything else is tedious at best and gratuitously sexist at worse. I posted a round-up of some of the most Marenghi-like sentences.
He Who Whispers – John Dickson Carr
Back on the Dickson Carr, this one’s a real firecracker with each act taking place in an outlandishly gothic setup. There’s a central London dinner club no-one has turned up for, a man murdered alone atop a great stone tower, and sneaky goings-on in a New Forest stately home. Still sexist though.
Inversions – Iain M. Banks
I took the dive and read the last Banks Culture book I hadn’t covered. Turns out this was a great one to leave till last, knowing all the usual Culture series tics made spotting them from the outside in this inverse telling very satisfying. But the story stands as a fantastic bit of sci-fi all by itself, the story of nations – and by extension worlds – being given gentle nudges in the direction of what you might call progress by two different (but ultimately very similar) outsiders. Only flirts with the kind of ultra-violence that Banks tones down from this point on in the series, but was very prominent in e.g. Use of Weapons. It’s a slow burn in general, without much of the kind of action denouement Banks likes to give to the Culture novels. All the more memorable for it.
The Long Shoe – Bob Mortimer
Picked up this Bob Mortimer book at my Mum’s and read it over a weekend. Mortimer has such a distinctive patter that it can be distracting at first to read paragraphs written in his style, though he does occasionally throw it out and fill in a chapter or two from an outside perspective just to show he can. The plot is mostly nonsense, this is entirely about hanging out with the character sketches, so it’s a shame that some of them here are a little stale – ‘South London lifestyle yoga instructor’ is very mid-2000s – but I did enjoy it.
A Game in Yellow – Hailey Piper
I feel like I missed a lot of references and allusions here by not having read Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Having bought it entirely from seeing the cover in a bookshop window (I don’t read much horror), it was an enjoyable read on its own merits, a story of terminal self-sabotage with a strong noir flair. The depiction of BDSM is unusually authentic, almost to a fault. Like writing sex scenes as a whole, too much attention to detail can draw out the absurdity. That said, I’ve certainly read worse.
Thrawn – Timothy Zahn
I wasn’t expecting much from Thrawn 2.0 but Zahn really pulled out all the stops here, having been given the chance to start again and do Thrawn ‘right’ twenty five years after first writing the character. He turns in something which is actually kind of on the pulse of genre writing, with a handful of characters – Thrawn, his provincial attache Vanto and disinherited mining magnate Pryce – who are all in some way trying to serve an Empire that is inherently hostile to them. Shades of A Memory Called Empire or The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and Pryce’s story in particular is that kind of bureaucrat power play porn, culminating in her commiting an atrocity. The trick of the book is to get you to root for these bozos. It’s not Proust, it’s still a Star Wars book and it in fact directly ties in to a season of a children’s cartoon where Thrawn is a moustache-twirling characature, but I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected.
Anathem – Neil Stephenson
Scurrilous monks! I’d have been happy had they never left that monastery (or ‘concent’, as the book’s alien phraseology would have it) and they were just Name of the Rose-ing it up for 900 pages. In the event this was still a very wild ride, with the constant reconfiguration of setting and mystery meaning that the high page count flew past. It occasionally becomes a bit “Boy’s Own Adventure Weekly” with the regularity with which our motley protagonist Erasmus and crew are placed at the centre of attention, to the point where there’s an extremely jarring part where Erasmus returns to his formal rank within the order he’s part of and it just feels bizarre.
It’s possibly the most end-of-history book ever written, albeit with a kind of strange optimism to it despite the deeply, utterly cynical account of human nature it presents. The philosophical and mathematical asides were fine, it’s something of a novelty to see phenomenology represented at all in literature, let alone as a positive development, so I appreciated that.
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