This is the second novel by China Miéville I've read. And, er, I was rather disparaging about the other one. I haven't re-read that review, but I believe I compared Miéville to Nathan Barley, ranted at length and then disappeared in a puff of disgust, accompanied by the Wicked Witch of the West's exit music.
Why, then, did I read Perdido Street Station? Partly, I think, because a friend recommended it and assured me it wasn't awful. And partly because I actually want to like China Miéville. I didn't hate Kraken with glee. I hated it with immense disappointment.
Fortunately, Perdido Street Station is a hundred times better than Kraken. It has more heart, more warmth, more energy. I certainly don't think (unlike Miéville himself, apparently) that it bears any favourable comparison to the rich, languorous work of Mervyn Peake in all its shadowy beauty, but then I don't think anything does. Peake's prose seems effortless, as if Gormenghast and its inhabitants simply spilled themselves slowly on to the page like dark, bittersweet treacle, but there are many moments in Perdido Street Station where Miéville's words are contrived and self-conscious. While I could certainly lose myself for long periods in this engaging, original fantasy, I was regularly brought back down to earth by the overwhelming sensation that Miéville was jumping up and down in front of me shouting "Look at me! Look at my imagination! Look at my writing! LOOK!"
Broadly speaking, Perdido Street Station tells the story of maverick scientist Isaac, his artist lover Lin, who has a scarab beetle instead of a head, and Isaac's attempts to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a sort of bird-man from a far-off desert whose wings have been sawn off as punishment for some terrible, unspecified crime. During the course of his experiments on various flying creatures, Isaac acquires through nefarious means a strange caterpillar. With the hatching of the caterpillar comes the unleashing of a terrible, almost apocalyptic threat to New Crobuzon, the huge, corrupt, festering city-state in which the story is set, teeming with human, 'xenian' - and as it turns out, artificial - life.
I found, however, that I wasn't immensely bothered about the novel's plot. Indeed, I enjoyed it more when nothing much was happening. I derived far more pleasure from the long digressions into the steampunk squalor of New Crobuzon and its bizarre inhabitants than I did from the action-packed climax. It was, oddly, the action-adventure towards the end of the novel that I found drawn-out and tiresome, not the rambling scene-building and vivid, intricate descriptions and vignettes that mostly make up the first three or four hundred pages. The real star of this baroque fantasy show is neither plot nor character, but New Crobuzon itself. For all its foulness, its filth, its brutality and betrayals, its uniquely capitalist horrors, I wanted New Crobuzon itself, above all, to survive. I could have gone on reading about New Crobuzon, and its strange, diverse inhabitants from cactus-people to amphibious dockers to the horrific artificially 'Remade' underclass, forever. The glorious names of the suburbs and side-streets and stations, too, all help to build the vivid sense of place.
Unfortunately, the characters just aren't that appealing. Isaac, who likes to bandy around words like 'moolah' and 'capice', is an irritating mockney, and the scenes in which he and Lin meet with their bohemian friends just made me think of a bunch of pretentious Hoxtonites. Maybe this was deliberate on Miéville's part, but it certainly didn't make me empathise with the characters in any way, and it was here that I saw strong echoes of the self-conscious hipster posing of Kraken. It's possible that the author wants us to dislike the characters so that there is an element of surprise in learning that these are the people who will be forced to save the city from destruction, so that they can be shown to grow and change, but for me, this wasn't a strategy that succeeded. There are a hundred wonderful things about Perdido Street Station, but I think Miéville is best when he's at his most meanderingly descriptive and conceptual, rather than trying to deliver action-adventure or character-driven storylines.
Monday, 18 July 2011
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Blood Harvest by SJ Bolton and The Rapture by Liz Jensen
I finished Justin Cronin's appalling pile of stinking nonsense, The Passage, before we went away, and was planning to read Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell on my holiday. Unfortunately, after the first five excellent, intriguing, unsettling pages I managed to leave the book in a Glasgow hotel room on our way up to the Highlands, so that was that. Fortunately, the charming town of Ullapool has two bookshops, at which I purchased Blood Harvest by SJ Bolton and The Rapture by Liz Jensen.
Blood Harvest is a dark rural thriller set in an isolated Lancashire town. It's all terribly creepy stuff - the town has a shadowy past of child deaths and disappearances, and, while thankfully stopping short of setting fire to policemen, clings to the sorts of seasonal folkloric traditions you'd expect from the villagers in The Wicker Man. It's an unsettling place for outsiders, and it's from these outsiders' points of view that the story unfolds: the Fletcher family, whose brand-new home abuts the churchyard, Evi, a disabled psychiatrist assigned to work with a young woman haunted by the loss of her child, and Harry, the new vicar.
Tom, the eldest Fletcher child, is terrorised by visions of a sinister, deformed girl in the churchyard. Voices are heard, cruel and life-threatening tricks are played, and secrets - many, many secrets - are kept by the insular community, led by the patriarchal land-owning Renshaw family. Heptonclough has some gruesome skeletons in its cupboard, and it's up to Harry and Evi to unearth them. The mystery plot really is gripping and the horror mounts impressively - I couldn't fault Blood Harvest for page-turning tension and shiversome, shuddersome atmosphere.
Its weaknesses, then, come primarily from character rather than plot. Harry, while largely likeable, is a standard 'trendy liberal vicar' stereotype - he's essentially Alan from The Archers. The Fletcher parents made no impression on me whatsoever and the Fletcher children didn't ring especially true for me either: their behaviour and reactions were certainly more dictated by the needs of the plot than by what would be realistic or consistent for children of their ages. Evi was much more successful, but her growing relationship with Harry made me wince - their flirting is cringeworthy in the extreme with dialogue straight from a Richard Curtis film. Fortunately, the relationship becomes a little more convincing as the plot builds, and I'd have to give Bolton considerable credit for not taking the easiest path for their budding romance as the story concludes.
I was reminded throughout of Phil Rickman's excellent Merrily Watkins series, which have a similar insular, secretive rural setting, the same echoes of the supernatural and also feature a young vicar (female, this time). I don't think Blood Harvest is quite as good as Rickman's series - particularly the later books - but there's the same sense of atmosphere, and the guilty pleasure I got from racing my way through Blood Harvest echoed the ease with which the pages turn whenever I've gone away with a Phil Rickman book tucked in my suitcase.
Blood Harvest is a dark rural thriller set in an isolated Lancashire town. It's all terribly creepy stuff - the town has a shadowy past of child deaths and disappearances, and, while thankfully stopping short of setting fire to policemen, clings to the sorts of seasonal folkloric traditions you'd expect from the villagers in The Wicker Man. It's an unsettling place for outsiders, and it's from these outsiders' points of view that the story unfolds: the Fletcher family, whose brand-new home abuts the churchyard, Evi, a disabled psychiatrist assigned to work with a young woman haunted by the loss of her child, and Harry, the new vicar.
Tom, the eldest Fletcher child, is terrorised by visions of a sinister, deformed girl in the churchyard. Voices are heard, cruel and life-threatening tricks are played, and secrets - many, many secrets - are kept by the insular community, led by the patriarchal land-owning Renshaw family. Heptonclough has some gruesome skeletons in its cupboard, and it's up to Harry and Evi to unearth them. The mystery plot really is gripping and the horror mounts impressively - I couldn't fault Blood Harvest for page-turning tension and shiversome, shuddersome atmosphere.
Its weaknesses, then, come primarily from character rather than plot. Harry, while largely likeable, is a standard 'trendy liberal vicar' stereotype - he's essentially Alan from The Archers. The Fletcher parents made no impression on me whatsoever and the Fletcher children didn't ring especially true for me either: their behaviour and reactions were certainly more dictated by the needs of the plot than by what would be realistic or consistent for children of their ages. Evi was much more successful, but her growing relationship with Harry made me wince - their flirting is cringeworthy in the extreme with dialogue straight from a Richard Curtis film. Fortunately, the relationship becomes a little more convincing as the plot builds, and I'd have to give Bolton considerable credit for not taking the easiest path for their budding romance as the story concludes.
I was reminded throughout of Phil Rickman's excellent Merrily Watkins series, which have a similar insular, secretive rural setting, the same echoes of the supernatural and also feature a young vicar (female, this time). I don't think Blood Harvest is quite as good as Rickman's series - particularly the later books - but there's the same sense of atmosphere, and the guilty pleasure I got from racing my way through Blood Harvest echoed the ease with which the pages turn whenever I've gone away with a Phil Rickman book tucked in my suitcase.
***
Oddly, my next bit of holiday reading also turned out to feature a disabled psychiatrist as a central character. The Rapture by Liz Jensen is a sharply-written thriller which starts small and ends big, as the plot, rolling snowball style, rapidly gathers substance and scope. Gabrielle Fox, recently out of rehabilitation after an accident which has left her paraplegic, is sent to work at a high-security psychiatric institution for criminally disturbed teenagers. Her first patient is Bethany Krall. Now 16, Bethany killed her mother at 14 by repeatedly stabbing her with a screwdriver. Now she's having terrifying, violent and horribly accurate visions of natural disasters. Is Bethany really predicting the future... or is she making it happen?
The Rapture starts slowly before building to a frenetic, tense, action-packed conclusion. However, what it gains in pace it loses in realism and moves firmly into the apocalyptic thriller genre rather than the subtler, more psychological read I was expecting, to the point where I rather felt I'd read two different books altogether. Not that that's really a criticism. It's thought-provoking, deals with huge themes and events, and includes many moments of incredibly dark humour as well as nail-biting tension - there were times when I was strongly reminded of some of the work of Chuck Palahniuk.
I didn't enjoy The Rapture quite as much as I loved Jensen's earlier novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (you can read my review of that one here). Interestingly, both novels have at their core a disturbed and dislikeable child with unexplained psychic abilities - but give me creepy, precocious little Louis over the stroppy, attention-seeking Bethany any time. I realise, of course, that Bethany is supposed to be vile, but it's clear that we're also supposed to come to feel sorry for her. And yes, I did... but nowhere as much as I felt the author wanted me to. And ultimately, I preferred the microcosmic focus of The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, which revolves around a single dysfunctional family, to the global sweep of The Rapture. But that's a small criticism. The Rapture is crammed with multiple layers of nuance and theme, convincingly flawed characters and a rollercoaster of a plot. Maybe not the most uplifting book you'll ever read, but the more you read, the more you'll struggle to put it down.
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Eagle-eyed, calendar-sensitive readers may have noticed that I haven’t posted a book review in over a month. That’s partly because after Florence & Giles I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence for about the eighth time and I don’t tend to review re-reads. But it’s mostly because after that, I read The Passage.
Justin Cronin’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi tinged horror novel has had some very enthusiastic reviews from generally trustworthy sources. A major studio bought the film rights before it was even finished, such was their confidence that The Passage would prove to be a major success. And it has.
I don’t know why, though. Because The Passage really is a god-awful mess. A 1,000-page god-awful mess.
Actually, no. It’s not a 1,000-page mess, because the first couple of hundred pages are relatively good, with well-developed characters who are engaging, if a little clichéd, plus a decent pace and multiple intriguing plot threads. Not brilliant, by any means, but I wanted to keep reading and I cared about the characters – the same characters, by the way, to whom all the book’s blurb refers. The ones you could be forgiven for thinking the book might reasonably be about.
It’s a pity, then, that most of these characters are cursorily abandoned at the end of the first section, remaining entirely or mostly absent for the next 800-odd pages of this tedious, undisciplined, repetitive pile of nonsense. Instead, the large majority of the novel focuses on characters from the Colony, a sort of quarantined community descended from children evacuated when a mysterious virus, which turns victims into savage, light-fearing, non-speaking, super-strong vampiric monsters, sweeps across the United States. And those characters are dull. Really, really dull. There’s blandly self-pitying Peter and his equally bland brother Theo; there’s tough girl Alicia (whose nickname ‘Lish’ grated on me so much I wanted hurl the book across the room every time I saw it simpering out of the page); there’s Sara, the closest thing the Colony has to a doctor; there’s her brother Michael, a technology expert. And some others who are so boring I can’t even be bothered to remember their names.
Michael was mildly interesting and certainly the only one of the bunch I actually wanted to survive. The others I cared nothing for whatsoever. Deaths in the novel (and there are many) are rendered utterly unaffecting by Cronin’s clunking prose and paper-thin characterisation. Even Amy, the mute potential saviour of mankind, is about as interesting as cold porridge.
The plot may seem promising, but it’s so lazily executed that I struggled to give a toss what was going to happen next for at least two-thirds of the novel. It’s browbeatingly repetitive, consisting almost entirely of the Colony either fighting off attacks from ‘virals’ or sending people off on expeditions outside where they mostly end up doing much the same. There’s a lot of ill-thought-out nonsense about the virals’ all-important telepathic abilities, but it’s vaguely rendered and full of glaring inconsistencies, as is the Colony itself. It’s action-packed, but the action is written to a formula repeated ad nauseam, so I found myself yawning every time things were supposed to be getting exciting. The whole book reads rather as if Cronin was getting paid by the page, or simply writing down a description of a 26-part big-budget American TV series he was imagining in his head. It’s episodic, drawn-out and slow.
Some reviewers have compared The Passage to Stephen King. In the sense that Stephen King is long past his best and has lately been known to write over-long, indulgent, ramblingly incoherent novels that need editing down by around half, perhaps that's fair. But that’s where the comparison should end.
The Passage, apparently, was written after Cronin’s young daughter turned up her nose at the acclaimed literary novels with which he began his career and suggested that he write genre fiction instead about a girl who saves the world. I’ve never read any of Cronin’s previous work, but The Passage does very much read like a book being written by a man with nothing but contempt for popular fiction or genre novels in any sense other than how thickly they might line his pockets. There's not a speck of pride or care in the way this book has been written; it's genre fiction written by someone who thinks it's easy. And Cronin's daughter should probably be humanely killed before she has any more rotten ideas.
Don’t waste your time on this one. Life is too short to plough through 1,000 pages as bad as these.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)