The Servants by M. M. Smith is a rather different offering from the author's previous books as Michael Marshall and Michael Marshall Smith -- some of which I've discussed here in the past.
It has the same core premise as Only Forward and Spares (and to some extent One of Us), of a solidified subconscious realm where the protagonist's psychological issues are worked out through surreally allusive imagery. Unlike those stories, however (and even despite the fact that it's set in Brighton, like certain key scenes in Only Forward), it's a tighter, more disciplined work. It eschews the genre-bending, heavily cyberpunctuated S.F. setting of those books for a mundane, though compelling, narrative of difficult family dynamics seen through the eyes of a painfully alienated present-day eleven-year-old.
If it wasn't quite so dark, and so demanding of emotional maturity from its readers, this could even be a "Young Adult" book. As it is, it seems to have most often been described as a ghost story. It's not, or not really -- there's no sense that the titular servants (who are sometimes to be found hard at work in the otherwise empty and long-abandoned basement area of Mark's stepfather's Brighton-seafront house) are the surviving spirits of the dead. Rather, they're a function either of Mark's subconscious or of the house itself -- or, this being a work of symbolism, of both. The Servants places us firmly inside Mark's head, and forces us for much of the time to see his well-meaning though sorely tried stepfather as the monster Mark needs to believe he is. The reconciliation between them, desperately needed by Mark's sick mother, is achieved only through her son's under-stairs work experience with the eponymous nonexistent domestics.
Although I doubt more than a dozen other people on the internet have read the thing, the story reminded me of nothing so much as David "A Voyage to Arcturus" Lindsay's psychological fantasy The Haunted Woman, where a specific room in a house awakens the higher consciousnesses of otherwise mundane human beings, whose everyday selves are tragically incapable of retaining the enlightenment they receive there.
Peculiarly enough -- and I swear I'd forgotten this until this moment -- that book was also set partly in Brighton, and features a major character named Marshall.
The Servants is shorter than Smith's other books and more focussed, inspired by a humanistic (I might almost be tempted to say "christian") view of the value of vocation and of losing oneself in service to another. It's a very effective demonstration of his paradoxical versatility as a writer.
Andrew Cartmel's Prisoner novel, Miss Freedom (no Amazon link, for reasons elucidated here) is a decent enough Prisoner story, but -- for all its aspirations to be "a classic 1960s-style spy novel, in the tradition of John Le Carré, Adam Hall and Len Deighton" -- little more than that. It certainly hasn't the intellectual pyrotechnics to match Jon Blum and Rupert Booth's The Prisoner's Dilemma. Dilemma had a real sense of urgency about it, of having something important to impart which could only be told as part of a Prisoner story; by comparison Miss Freedom is... not lazy exactly, but certainly languid.
There's certainly much that's taken directly from the seventeen TV episodes -- Number 6 faces a clinically insane Number 2 (Hammer into Anvil) and a beautiful woman of ambivalent loyalties (The Chimes of Big Ben and passim), who place him in a subsidiary reality (A, B and C, Living in Harmony) where he's encouraged to tell a spy story with himself as the central character (The Girl Who Was Death), etc etc etc. Such elements as might seem newish (there's a rescue mission afoot to spring Number 6 from the Village, and the ousted Number 2 was actually on his side) are actually ringing the changes on these established elements.
Cartmel clearly knows his Prisoner, but most of his story is essentially pastiche -- well-written and perfectly competent pastiche, but unambitious. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is the way Number 6 redrafts his spy story as he's telling it, constantly revisiting earlier story elements and rewriting them. The fact that his fiction comes dangerously close to overlapping his reality might indeed suggest -- again, not exactly a new idea to the Prisoner aficionado -- that the Village itself is the product of Number 6's shellshocked fantasies.
Cartmel's biggest innovation, though, is in making his psychotic New Number 2 a sexually-motivated serial killer, which makes for some deeply uncomfortable moments. Given that a criticism frequently levelled against Cartmel's previous fiction has been his willingness to play the "violence against women" card, I might almost have found this creepy, if there hadn't been some evidence that he was attempting to address this tendency with a degree of complexity on a thematic level.
Basically, though... with this one, you're not really missing much. I feel less guilty about picking up one of the only 100 copies in existence, now.
Showing posts with label m[ichael] m[arshall] [smith]. Show all posts
Showing posts with label m[ichael] m[arshall] [smith]. Show all posts
04 February 2009
08 January 2009
Greeks, Spooks, Terrorists and Supermen
In my general remissness recently, I've omitted to mention any books not written by me or my friends since... well, it looks like October, which is actually more recently than I thought, but the time before that was August. I clearly have been slacking.
At present I'm still immured in Kim Stanley Robinson's One Mars Two Mars Red Mars Blue Mars trilogy. (Incidentally, I've discovered since that October post that the TV adaptation I mentioned of Red Mars is being co-developed by someone whose screenwriting credits include Armageddon, Die Hard with a Vengeance and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. So I take back everything I said about it being potentially a complex, serious political drama and therefore a good idea.)
I'm now some 70 pages into the final book -- no, sorry, the final novel -- in the sequence. It's taking me a long time, admittedly, but I submit that this is only partly my fault. Parallel with this I'm reading Tom Holland's Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. More on both when I finish them (which, in Blue Mars's case, is looking like sometime around the date of Robinson's first Mars landings in 2020).
Meanwhile, here are brief (Note to self: yes, brief, because I haven't got all day here) mini-reviews of some of the other stuff I've managed to get read during the past few months.
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod: I read this so long ago now that it's difficult to remember what I thought about it, except that I found it enjoyable and disturbing in equal measure. It's set in a divergent near-future where Al Gorewon the 2000 US Presidential election was allowed to take office after winning the 2000 US Presidential election -- but the world's gone to hell in a handbasket anyway. It's quite a clever take on the near-future story, and produces an appropriately hideous and apocalyptic world of nuclear terrorism, rampant misinformation and state intervention in private affairs.
MacLeod makes the transition from "proper SF novel" to "proper SF novel pretending to be a thriller" with consummate ease, assisted no doubt by his obsessive interest in politics. Although the final twist where... er, very broadly "the good guys win", was an excessively silly one. I hope this new direction doesn't mean an end to his space-opera and further-future stories, because those are ace.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek: the man who discovered Britain by Barry Cunliffe: An impressive reconstruction of the exploratory voyages of a natural scientist from the Greek colony of Massalia (now Marseille) who have left the womb of the Mediterranean to visit not only southern Britain but apparently Lewis, Shetland, the Baltic coast and even Iceland, as early as the fourth century BCE (Equally astonishing is the throwaway detail of a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by a Phoenician fleet under commission from Pharaoh Necho II a good couple of centuries earlier.)
Cunliffe's an archaeologist, meaning that his narrative takes in the architecture and technologies Pytheas might be expected to have encountered, as well as the few remaining fragments of Pytheas's own writings which exists (mostly as quotes from other writers insulting him). It's dry in places, but the story is utterly fascinating.
The Intruders by Michael Marshall: The books of crime writer Michael Marshall -- also known as SF writer Michael Marshall Smith -- are always highly entertaining to read, thanks to his urgent, chatty style and his brilliance at turning a phrase. ("It began to rain then, with sudden firmness, as if it had meant to start earlier but forgot.") Approximately every three books, he also comes up with a new story to tell, and this is one of those.
The nature of that story means that the book is very difficult to classify in one genre or another, but that's been true of all his books to date. (Those sold as SF are actually dark-fantasy stories set in cyberpunk futures, while the Straw Men trilogy, marketed as crime thrillers, involve Neanderthals surviving in the Pacific Northwest and an ancient brotherhood of serial killers who've been secretly running the world since prehistoric times.) My only quarrel with The Intruders arises to some extent from this genre ambiguity, in that the crime-novel protagonist is exasperatingly slow to understand, and then to believe in, the horror-fantasy plot he's living through. Otherwise it's an excellent read.
(I've recently picked up Smith's The Servants, a ghost story published -- in my edition, at least -- under the name M. M. Smith, so I'm looking forward to that one, too.)
The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley: Politically disturbing sequel to 1986's mould-breaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. This one has many more superheroes in it, which is always fun, but takes the earlier book's only mildly disconcerting view of Bruce Wayne as a Nietzschean superman to absurdly Mussolinian levels, with Batman defeating his enemies, and wresting control of the world from its corrupt leaders, just through being a helluva lot harder than anybody else. Especially the real Superman, whom Batman makes his bitch halfway through the novel.
Given that the character's shown himself by the end to be a bullying, abusive tyrant, it's a little difficult to cheer on his new world order. One to avoid, sadly.
Spook Country by William Gibson: Gibson's previous non-SF novel, Pattern Recognition, doesn't seem to have been particularly well received, but I adored it for the inventiveness of its real-world concepts (the protagonist's neurotic brand-sensitivity renders her "allergic" to specific trademarks, a concept which could be played for laughs but instead comes across as rather poignant) and its sparsely lyrical descriptions, particularly of n American visitor's view of London. B. gave me both it and Spook Country for my birthday back in November, and a reread confirmed me in my love for it.
This follow-up (and incidental sequel) is possibly rather better, although I was less immediately enamoured of it. What I thought was the main innovation -- the extensive descriptions of the highly cyberpunkish medium of locative art -- turns out to be an exaggeration of something that actually exists, while the Chinese-Cuban organised crime family who practice a highly disciplined blend of Soviet spycraft and Santeria were a little too weird to be really involving. The two non-Cuban viewpoint characters were both thoroughly engaging, though, and the way the plot slowly assembles itself in front of the reader who has access to all three narratives -- while never quite making sense to any of the protagonists -- is masterful. It's interesting to see Gibson's traditional thematic concerns modulating themselves to a more realistic world, though -- it must have been a fascinating discipline for him.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Very lovely in a number of ways, this episodic story of the adventures of a boy brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, werewolves and vampires, and his eventual confrontation with the secret society who killed his parents, feels a little like Gaiman by the numbers. This isn't to say that there's anything here that's directly familiar from his previous books (in the way that, say, Odd and the Frost Giants involved his third, slightly different portrayal of the Norse god-triad of Odin, Loki and Thor)... just that given the premise it's very much the kind of book I would, by now, expect Neil Gaiman to write. I'd like to see him try something really adventurous -- ideally an adult novel of the quality of American Gods, but in a different genre. I'd love to see him tackle some proper SF worldbuilding, for instance... but a realistic novel like Gibson's pair would be excellent too.
I'm sure I read more books than that during the second half of last year, so I'm fairly certain there are more that have been left off. (Well, there's Shining Darkness and The Eyeless for a start. I ought to get round to reviewing those at some point, but they don't fall into the category of "not written by friends of mine".)
If I remember any, I'll try to get round to adding reviews of them in future. Meanwhile, I probably also owe you some witterings about film and TV, but those are going to have to wait for a few days.
At present I'm still immured in Kim Stanley Robinson's One Mars Two Mars Red Mars Blue Mars trilogy. (Incidentally, I've discovered since that October post that the TV adaptation I mentioned of Red Mars is being co-developed by someone whose screenwriting credits include Armageddon, Die Hard with a Vengeance and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. So I take back everything I said about it being potentially a complex, serious political drama and therefore a good idea.)
I'm now some 70 pages into the final book -- no, sorry, the final novel -- in the sequence. It's taking me a long time, admittedly, but I submit that this is only partly my fault. Parallel with this I'm reading Tom Holland's Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. More on both when I finish them (which, in Blue Mars's case, is looking like sometime around the date of Robinson's first Mars landings in 2020).
Meanwhile, here are brief (Note to self: yes, brief, because I haven't got all day here) mini-reviews of some of the other stuff I've managed to get read during the past few months.
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod: I read this so long ago now that it's difficult to remember what I thought about it, except that I found it enjoyable and disturbing in equal measure. It's set in a divergent near-future where Al Gore
MacLeod makes the transition from "proper SF novel" to "proper SF novel pretending to be a thriller" with consummate ease, assisted no doubt by his obsessive interest in politics. Although the final twist where... er, very broadly "the good guys win", was an excessively silly one. I hope this new direction doesn't mean an end to his space-opera and further-future stories, because those are ace.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek: the man who discovered Britain by Barry Cunliffe: An impressive reconstruction of the exploratory voyages of a natural scientist from the Greek colony of Massalia (now Marseille) who have left the womb of the Mediterranean to visit not only southern Britain but apparently Lewis, Shetland, the Baltic coast and even Iceland, as early as the fourth century BCE (Equally astonishing is the throwaway detail of a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by a Phoenician fleet under commission from Pharaoh Necho II a good couple of centuries earlier.)
Cunliffe's an archaeologist, meaning that his narrative takes in the architecture and technologies Pytheas might be expected to have encountered, as well as the few remaining fragments of Pytheas's own writings which exists (mostly as quotes from other writers insulting him). It's dry in places, but the story is utterly fascinating.
The Intruders by Michael Marshall: The books of crime writer Michael Marshall -- also known as SF writer Michael Marshall Smith -- are always highly entertaining to read, thanks to his urgent, chatty style and his brilliance at turning a phrase. ("It began to rain then, with sudden firmness, as if it had meant to start earlier but forgot.") Approximately every three books, he also comes up with a new story to tell, and this is one of those.
The nature of that story means that the book is very difficult to classify in one genre or another, but that's been true of all his books to date. (Those sold as SF are actually dark-fantasy stories set in cyberpunk futures, while the Straw Men trilogy, marketed as crime thrillers, involve Neanderthals surviving in the Pacific Northwest and an ancient brotherhood of serial killers who've been secretly running the world since prehistoric times.) My only quarrel with The Intruders arises to some extent from this genre ambiguity, in that the crime-novel protagonist is exasperatingly slow to understand, and then to believe in, the horror-fantasy plot he's living through. Otherwise it's an excellent read.
(I've recently picked up Smith's The Servants, a ghost story published -- in my edition, at least -- under the name M. M. Smith, so I'm looking forward to that one, too.)
The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley: Politically disturbing sequel to 1986's mould-breaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. This one has many more superheroes in it, which is always fun, but takes the earlier book's only mildly disconcerting view of Bruce Wayne as a Nietzschean superman to absurdly Mussolinian levels, with Batman defeating his enemies, and wresting control of the world from its corrupt leaders, just through being a helluva lot harder than anybody else. Especially the real Superman, whom Batman makes his bitch halfway through the novel.
Given that the character's shown himself by the end to be a bullying, abusive tyrant, it's a little difficult to cheer on his new world order. One to avoid, sadly.
Spook Country by William Gibson: Gibson's previous non-SF novel, Pattern Recognition, doesn't seem to have been particularly well received, but I adored it for the inventiveness of its real-world concepts (the protagonist's neurotic brand-sensitivity renders her "allergic" to specific trademarks, a concept which could be played for laughs but instead comes across as rather poignant) and its sparsely lyrical descriptions, particularly of n American visitor's view of London. B. gave me both it and Spook Country for my birthday back in November, and a reread confirmed me in my love for it.
This follow-up (and incidental sequel) is possibly rather better, although I was less immediately enamoured of it. What I thought was the main innovation -- the extensive descriptions of the highly cyberpunkish medium of locative art -- turns out to be an exaggeration of something that actually exists, while the Chinese-Cuban organised crime family who practice a highly disciplined blend of Soviet spycraft and Santeria were a little too weird to be really involving. The two non-Cuban viewpoint characters were both thoroughly engaging, though, and the way the plot slowly assembles itself in front of the reader who has access to all three narratives -- while never quite making sense to any of the protagonists -- is masterful. It's interesting to see Gibson's traditional thematic concerns modulating themselves to a more realistic world, though -- it must have been a fascinating discipline for him.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Very lovely in a number of ways, this episodic story of the adventures of a boy brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, werewolves and vampires, and his eventual confrontation with the secret society who killed his parents, feels a little like Gaiman by the numbers. This isn't to say that there's anything here that's directly familiar from his previous books (in the way that, say, Odd and the Frost Giants involved his third, slightly different portrayal of the Norse god-triad of Odin, Loki and Thor)... just that given the premise it's very much the kind of book I would, by now, expect Neil Gaiman to write. I'd like to see him try something really adventurous -- ideally an adult novel of the quality of American Gods, but in a different genre. I'd love to see him tackle some proper SF worldbuilding, for instance... but a realistic novel like Gibson's pair would be excellent too.
I'm sure I read more books than that during the second half of last year, so I'm fairly certain there are more that have been left off. (Well, there's Shining Darkness and The Eyeless for a start. I ought to get round to reviewing those at some point, but they don't fall into the category of "not written by friends of mine".)
If I remember any, I'll try to get round to adding reviews of them in future. Meanwhile, I probably also owe you some witterings about film and TV, but those are going to have to wait for a few days.
17 June 2005
Two Michaels
Blood of Angels was ultimately disappointing -- a superior but not terribly inspired serial killer / conspiracy thriller. It's well-written, and the prose pulls you giddily along with it; it's undeniably an entertaining way to spend your time, but there's none of the inventiveness and depth of Michael Marshall Smith's slipstream S.F. / fantasy / horror novels, or of The Straw Men itself.
The Straw Men had real intellectual substance to it: it delved into the prehistoric origins of civilisation, drew parallels between humanity's development of concepts of moral and physical boundaries, and thus made some fascinating connections between paleontology and architecture, which were its themes as much as serial killing or conspiracy (both of which it treated with horrific effectiveness) were. I've come to the conclusion that it's a book that should never have had a sequel, unless the sequel had things to say that were just as compelling.
Although The Lonely Dead at least took the palaeontological ideas and did something else interesting with them, it lacked the depth of its predecessor. Blood of Angels unfortunately relegates both palaeontology and architecture to an extremely minor subplot, concluding with a four-page conspiracy-theory infodump which makes The Da Vinci Code look sane. The story at which this small portion of the novel hints is most certainly one I'd have been interested in reading, but it isn't the story the book's about.
Instead, this conspiracy of serial killers which has been secretly attempting to undermine and destroy civilisation since prehistoric times becomes... well, just another terrorist conspiracy, as far as the plot's concerned. The fact that they're terrorists who actually are profoundly ideologically opposed to every value of the civilised world makes them an interesting metaphor for the fears of contemporary America, but even this isn't taken anything like as far as it could be.
Ultimately, Blood of Angels reads as a placeholder for a future novel. I really hope Michael Marshall writes something as exciting and original as Only Forward or The Straw Men again sometime soon, rather than spending the rest of his career turning out these passable imitations.
In other books-related news... some comments, mostly positive, from readers of Peculiar Lives have begun to surface in various forums. It'll probably be a while before there are any formal reviews, though. And Wildthyme on Top still hasn't materialised, despite the official launch date (for this, the first book of a new line from Big Finish) still being listed as May. Knowing as I do that the proofs were finalised back in January, I'm beginning to find this a little irritating. Never mind.
I'd completely stalled on reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, so I've now brought it to work with me, so that I'm persuaded to spend my lunch and coffee breaks reading it. It's good, honestly -- it's just physically unwieldy, bulky and so extremely long that it's difficult to feel as if you're making any progress with it. I've also embarked on The Dancers at the End of Time, which is one of those books I can never quite believe I haven't read already, and am enjoying it very much so far.
I am, however, having my usual pavlovian response to reading Moorcock, which is to have "Dickie Davies Eyes" by Half Man Half Biscuit going through my head:
The Straw Men had real intellectual substance to it: it delved into the prehistoric origins of civilisation, drew parallels between humanity's development of concepts of moral and physical boundaries, and thus made some fascinating connections between paleontology and architecture, which were its themes as much as serial killing or conspiracy (both of which it treated with horrific effectiveness) were. I've come to the conclusion that it's a book that should never have had a sequel, unless the sequel had things to say that were just as compelling.
Although The Lonely Dead at least took the palaeontological ideas and did something else interesting with them, it lacked the depth of its predecessor. Blood of Angels unfortunately relegates both palaeontology and architecture to an extremely minor subplot, concluding with a four-page conspiracy-theory infodump which makes The Da Vinci Code look sane. The story at which this small portion of the novel hints is most certainly one I'd have been interested in reading, but it isn't the story the book's about.
Instead, this conspiracy of serial killers which has been secretly attempting to undermine and destroy civilisation since prehistoric times becomes... well, just another terrorist conspiracy, as far as the plot's concerned. The fact that they're terrorists who actually are profoundly ideologically opposed to every value of the civilised world makes them an interesting metaphor for the fears of contemporary America, but even this isn't taken anything like as far as it could be.
Ultimately, Blood of Angels reads as a placeholder for a future novel. I really hope Michael Marshall writes something as exciting and original as Only Forward or The Straw Men again sometime soon, rather than spending the rest of his career turning out these passable imitations.
In other books-related news... some comments, mostly positive, from readers of Peculiar Lives have begun to surface in various forums. It'll probably be a while before there are any formal reviews, though. And Wildthyme on Top still hasn't materialised, despite the official launch date (for this, the first book of a new line from Big Finish) still being listed as May. Knowing as I do that the proofs were finalised back in January, I'm beginning to find this a little irritating. Never mind.
I'd completely stalled on reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, so I've now brought it to work with me, so that I'm persuaded to spend my lunch and coffee breaks reading it. It's good, honestly -- it's just physically unwieldy, bulky and so extremely long that it's difficult to feel as if you're making any progress with it. I've also embarked on The Dancers at the End of Time, which is one of those books I can never quite believe I haven't read already, and am enjoying it very much so far.
I am, however, having my usual pavlovian response to reading Moorcock, which is to have "Dickie Davies Eyes" by Half Man Half Biscuit going through my head:
Mention The Lord of the Rings just once moreIt happens whenever anybody mentions The Lord of the Rings, as well. I'm a martyr to my earworms, gentlemen, and that's a fact.
and I'll more than likely kill you.
"Moorcock, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock,"
you fervently moan...
10 June 2005
Marshall Lore
I'm halfway through Blood of Angels, which I'm enjoying. It does seem to be continuing a trend: The Straw Men was readable as a once-off novel (and a fantastic one), whereas The Lonely Dead read as an unplanned sequel. So far Blood of Angels reads, not even as the third volume in a trilogy (although of course a climactic enough ending could still change that), but as the next book in an ongoing series. Which is a valid enough thing to be in its own right, of course, but it does make it seem less of a worthy successor to the sheer horrific brilliance of The Straw Men.
After showing us a ribcage and the bones of a hand on the previous two books, the cover of Blood of Angels presents us with a pelvis. Which is always nice. If I carry on buying the series, will I eventually be able to assemble a complete skeleton? Interestingly as well, after adorning the ribcage with a necklace and the hand-bones with a ring, the artist chooses to break up the pelvis with a bullet. Perhaps the publishers felt that the kinds of jewellery generally found in the pelvic region might not go down well with book-buyers.
After showing us a ribcage and the bones of a hand on the previous two books, the cover of Blood of Angels presents us with a pelvis. Which is always nice. If I carry on buying the series, will I eventually be able to assemble a complete skeleton? Interestingly as well, after adorning the ribcage with a necklace and the hand-bones with a ring, the artist chooses to break up the pelvis with a bullet. Perhaps the publishers felt that the kinds of jewellery generally found in the pelvic region might not go down well with book-buyers.
30 July 2004
Marshall My Thoughts
Finally getting round to replying to Steven K's comments on Michael Marshall [Smith]'s The Lonely Dead -- SPOILERS for which, and for its prequel[*] The Straw Men, will shortly follow.
I actually finished the book a week or so ago, but have, as advertised, been busy.
I do agree that The Lonely Dead was ultimately unsatisfying, and that it fails to live up to the promise of The Straw Men. This is partly because the big revelation towards the end appears relevant only on a local scale, and (despite some vaguely mystical hints) is unlikely to affect the characters in the same way. Which when compared with "Human society has always been run from behind the scenes by a secret cabal of serial killers", is bound to come as something of a disappointment.
I actually quite like the grounding of the fantastic in reality in both these novels -- to start off small-scale and ordinary and then build up to that revelation in TSM was a pretty bold move, and one that I did feel worked for me. Given the usual expectations of a crime thriller, it's an interesting experiment with generic slipstreaming -- TSM can just about be accommodated within the crime genre, but TLD's frankly SF revelation definitely slips the moorings, like an X-Files episode smuggled into a series of an ordinary cop show.
I think another part of the problem is that, after the discoveries they make in TSM, the characters in TLD are less grounded in reality. Instead they're grounded in a paranoid fantasy based loosely on reality, and the sideways slip into a world where Neanderthals live on and are responsible for all of humanity's "hidden people" legends (just as the Straw Men themselves are responsible for all the conspiracy theories) is less shocking and effective than it would have been if it had come in the first novel, or in a non-series novel with new characters.
That said, there's a lot that's effective in TLD -- quite apart from the prose, which is to die for. The meditations on addiction, whether that comes in the form of cigarettes or serial murder, were very chilling indeed. The tracing of the serial-killing impulse to ancient sacrificial ritual was also very fine, and put me closely in mind of Neil Gaiman's excellent American Gods, another novel by a British US resident about how ancient elements of European culture infuse that of the modern-day United States. And the returning characters from TSM, apart from Zandt who's hardly in it, were still as compelling.
As, say, the second book in a trilogy (and I'd hope that would be what it turns out to be, rather than an open-ended series) I think it's very good. Hopefully it forms a brief diversion from the main action, and a prelude to the character development and (again, hopefully) genuinely shocking revelations of the third volume. Perhaps that's the only context in which it can really be judged -- as an individual novel, it suffers from its evident series status.
Generally, though, it's pretty damn good, but -- because of its position in the series -- precisely how good depends on where the story's going next.
[*] OK, so strictly speaking "prequel" was coined to refer to a story which is written and published later than a story which came out before, but which is set earlier -- effectively, a book- (or whatever) length flashback. Thus Prelude to Foundation, The Phantom Menace, The Merry Wives of Windsor etc. So... what is the word which just means "story to which the story currently under discussion is a sequel"?
I actually finished the book a week or so ago, but have, as advertised, been busy.
I do agree that The Lonely Dead was ultimately unsatisfying, and that it fails to live up to the promise of The Straw Men. This is partly because the big revelation towards the end appears relevant only on a local scale, and (despite some vaguely mystical hints) is unlikely to affect the characters in the same way. Which when compared with "Human society has always been run from behind the scenes by a secret cabal of serial killers", is bound to come as something of a disappointment.
I actually quite like the grounding of the fantastic in reality in both these novels -- to start off small-scale and ordinary and then build up to that revelation in TSM was a pretty bold move, and one that I did feel worked for me. Given the usual expectations of a crime thriller, it's an interesting experiment with generic slipstreaming -- TSM can just about be accommodated within the crime genre, but TLD's frankly SF revelation definitely slips the moorings, like an X-Files episode smuggled into a series of an ordinary cop show.
I think another part of the problem is that, after the discoveries they make in TSM, the characters in TLD are less grounded in reality. Instead they're grounded in a paranoid fantasy based loosely on reality, and the sideways slip into a world where Neanderthals live on and are responsible for all of humanity's "hidden people" legends (just as the Straw Men themselves are responsible for all the conspiracy theories) is less shocking and effective than it would have been if it had come in the first novel, or in a non-series novel with new characters.
That said, there's a lot that's effective in TLD -- quite apart from the prose, which is to die for. The meditations on addiction, whether that comes in the form of cigarettes or serial murder, were very chilling indeed. The tracing of the serial-killing impulse to ancient sacrificial ritual was also very fine, and put me closely in mind of Neil Gaiman's excellent American Gods, another novel by a British US resident about how ancient elements of European culture infuse that of the modern-day United States. And the returning characters from TSM, apart from Zandt who's hardly in it, were still as compelling.
As, say, the second book in a trilogy (and I'd hope that would be what it turns out to be, rather than an open-ended series) I think it's very good. Hopefully it forms a brief diversion from the main action, and a prelude to the character development and (again, hopefully) genuinely shocking revelations of the third volume. Perhaps that's the only context in which it can really be judged -- as an individual novel, it suffers from its evident series status.
Generally, though, it's pretty damn good, but -- because of its position in the series -- precisely how good depends on where the story's going next.
[*] OK, so strictly speaking "prequel" was coined to refer to a story which is written and published later than a story which came out before, but which is set earlier -- effectively, a book- (or whatever) length flashback. Thus Prelude to Foundation, The Phantom Menace, The Merry Wives of Windsor etc. So... what is the word which just means "story to which the story currently under discussion is a sequel"?
18 July 2004
Culture
Recently watched:
Spider-Man 2, which is great -- I love the romance and the simple heroism it promotes. The morality is no more complex than in the original Star Wars trilogy, although slightly more interesting: Peter Parker's great temptation is not to evil, but to neutrality. The movie makes its moral points in bold strokes -- to do the right thing you must make sacrifices, good people can be corrupted yet remain at heart good people, "With great power comes great responsibility" -- but it does so with such good-natured and childlike earnestness that you can't but love it. Plus it has some great self-aware lines ("Guy called Otto Octavius ends up with eight arms! What are the odds?"), and Kirsten Dunst is lovely.
Recently finished reading:
What Does a Martian Look Like? by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (the authors who brought you The Science of Discworld, The Science of Discworld II and, apparently, an original sf novel called Wheelers). It's an entertaining book, and I have a lot I'd like to say about it. At some point I may even do so, here or on the book reviews section I keep meaning to add to my website. Suffice it to say that, while I'm fully convinced that Cohen and Stewart know what they're talking about when it comes to science -- and they can write it clearly and compellingly -- their attempts at cultural analysis, and evaluation of extant works of science fiction in particular, frankly suck.
Their eagerness to promote "correct" science in SF, and deride (as "lazy", "wrong" and at one point even "discourteous") SF which doesn't consider this to be a priority, leads them at times onto distinctly unsteady ground -- which they then stomp around on, throwing their weight about like Godzilla. (Speaking of which, surely you realise that bipedal dinosaurs were nowhere near that big? Godzilla would be far too heavy for its bones to support its weight -- thus rendering the spectacle of a gigantic dinosaur pounding New York or Tokyo into rubble entirely unbelievable.)
Currently reading:
The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall. I've been a huge fan of this author since he was known as Michael Marshall Smith and wrote SF novels (or -- as some of his less charitable readers aver -- the same SF novel on three separate occasions). The Lonely Dead is a sequel to his earlier horror-thriller The Straw Men, and on first opening it I found myself slightly disconcerted. The first chapter was, somehow, nowhere nearly as involving as his other work. Distressingly, I thought that something must have gone wrong -- and I confess, shamefully jealous non-genius writer that I am, that I felt a moment's schadenfreude at the prospect.
Marshall was just easing us in gently. After the second chapter I was utterly sucked in, and have been having trouble since letting go of the book even when I'm supposed to be asleep, eating or working. Marshall has a deceptively conversational style which keeps sucker-punching you with unexpected jokes and subtle metaphors, even when he's writing about faceless conspiracies of serial killers. It's fantastic stuff -- unfortunately, both for my writerly self-regard and for my various ongoing projects.
Spider-Man 2, which is great -- I love the romance and the simple heroism it promotes. The morality is no more complex than in the original Star Wars trilogy, although slightly more interesting: Peter Parker's great temptation is not to evil, but to neutrality. The movie makes its moral points in bold strokes -- to do the right thing you must make sacrifices, good people can be corrupted yet remain at heart good people, "With great power comes great responsibility" -- but it does so with such good-natured and childlike earnestness that you can't but love it. Plus it has some great self-aware lines ("Guy called Otto Octavius ends up with eight arms! What are the odds?"), and Kirsten Dunst is lovely.
Recently finished reading:
What Does a Martian Look Like? by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (the authors who brought you The Science of Discworld, The Science of Discworld II and, apparently, an original sf novel called Wheelers). It's an entertaining book, and I have a lot I'd like to say about it. At some point I may even do so, here or on the book reviews section I keep meaning to add to my website. Suffice it to say that, while I'm fully convinced that Cohen and Stewart know what they're talking about when it comes to science -- and they can write it clearly and compellingly -- their attempts at cultural analysis, and evaluation of extant works of science fiction in particular, frankly suck.
Their eagerness to promote "correct" science in SF, and deride (as "lazy", "wrong" and at one point even "discourteous") SF which doesn't consider this to be a priority, leads them at times onto distinctly unsteady ground -- which they then stomp around on, throwing their weight about like Godzilla. (Speaking of which, surely you realise that bipedal dinosaurs were nowhere near that big? Godzilla would be far too heavy for its bones to support its weight -- thus rendering the spectacle of a gigantic dinosaur pounding New York or Tokyo into rubble entirely unbelievable.)
Currently reading:
The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall. I've been a huge fan of this author since he was known as Michael Marshall Smith and wrote SF novels (or -- as some of his less charitable readers aver -- the same SF novel on three separate occasions). The Lonely Dead is a sequel to his earlier horror-thriller The Straw Men, and on first opening it I found myself slightly disconcerted. The first chapter was, somehow, nowhere nearly as involving as his other work. Distressingly, I thought that something must have gone wrong -- and I confess, shamefully jealous non-genius writer that I am, that I felt a moment's schadenfreude at the prospect.
Marshall was just easing us in gently. After the second chapter I was utterly sucked in, and have been having trouble since letting go of the book even when I'm supposed to be asleep, eating or working. Marshall has a deceptively conversational style which keeps sucker-punching you with unexpected jokes and subtle metaphors, even when he's writing about faceless conspiracies of serial killers. It's fantastic stuff -- unfortunately, both for my writerly self-regard and for my various ongoing projects.
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