Talking Of Books Reviews A Decent Bomber

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a little under half an hour, Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' program will review A Decent Bomber. Half an hour after that, they'll be interviewing me about the book.

I can't pretend I'm not a little nervous. For a start, this isn't really a great time to be talking about terrorism in your novel. But beyond that, it's a very public grilling for the book. Will they love it? Hate it? Be 'meh'?

I can't get a thing done. I'm just marking time. *sigh*

Time. Ulp. Listening in. Here we go. Oh golly, they liked it...

A book of real quality. Sensitively drawn characters. A book of real style and you find yourself experiencing, smelling Ireland. This is tangibly plausible. I love the complexity of the character of Pat. What I liked particularly about the book was that the plot never stopped to explain characters, the dialogue and plot carry their development. The dialogue is very natural, he has a very fine ear, McNabb. It was real and honest, the dialogue was true to the characters. They're frightening, the characters. It's a white-knuckle ride and a real page-turner.

This isn't a light book. It's a line-up of misery and pain. There's no plot humour, but the dialogue has lovely touches of gentle irony, very Irish humour. This is an extremely good book, more than a thriller, you could draw parallels with Le Carré.

Clearly a book to buy, people... :)

The interview was fun. They didn't like Boyle and Mary's shenanigans and I explained I wasn't so happy myself, two of my characters just ran away and did stuff they weren't supposed to.

Did I pick the name Pat O'Carolan for a reason? As it happens, yes, the troubador was a knowing reference and Pat was Sarah's Uncle Pat, whose wee farm up in Cummermore started the whole scheme going. Orla wasn't supposed to have the romantic involvements she ended up with, either.

How come conventional publishing hadn't picked me up? Dunno, these days don't really care that much either. I explained how Shemlan, my last book, had been about a man dying of cancer whose life is revealed to have been utterly pointless to him, about how I'm cruel to my characters. And about how that - or a book about an ex-IRA man - might not gel with what a risk-averse publisher's idea of a self-marketing book was.

Why thrillers, there are elements of literary fiction in here? That was nice of them to say, but I like to think I write a smart thriller. thrillers are fun, although Birdkill - my next book - is a little more complicated on a psychological level and perhaps a little more screwed up generally.

I told about how my developmental editor/reader for Beirut had told me to put more 'gunplay' into the book and how I regret having taken that advice, now preferring to rebel rather than produce formulaic books that are 'on genre'. They liked the interplay between Driscoll and MacNamara, the politicians in A Decent Bomber who are trying to pretend this stuff isn't happening. I confessed I had enjoyed playing with the idea that they are conflicting with the PSNI where before they had fought the RUC, but this time they were denying themselves rather than last time when they had been asserting themselves.

It's amazing how quickly half an hour can pass when you're talking about your books, but pass it did. I'll post the podcast when it comes around. So far I've sold a tad over sixty books in all. We're hardly troubling the NYT list here, people...

Book Review: Jamila's Thread And Other Stories

Jamila's Thread is a lovely little book to hold in your hand, it truly is. It's almost enough to make me give up my 'a book is about the words, not the physical form' argument in favour of ebooks. As booky books go, it's very sweet.

It's a tiny little thing, really - we're looking at 100 pages of pocket-book format set in large type. It's a collection of ten short stories that set out to rediscover the beauty of the traditional folk tales of the Middle East and North Africa and comes from Project Pen. With illustrations as richly Arabesque and fantastical as the stories they adorn, it's truly a pleasure to read.

 

Project Pen is a Jordanian collective - incubated by Oasis500 - that aims to create a next generation of storytellers and encourage the development of new forms of narrative and literary expression. They've got up to all sorts of shenanigans in their journey to challenge, explore and discover the somewhat moribund world of story-telling in the Middle East. This, their latest project, is probably the most culturally valuable because, in my humble opinion, it has the power to inspire others to follow in its path.

The stories are simply told and themselves are simple enough. Jamila, the star of the show, is an ill-fated little girl, the most beautiful of seven lovely daughters born to a cursed family. The only way to lift the curse is to banish Jamila and so her fate is set, to be eventually determined by two reels of thread, one gold; one silver.

The resolution of her story is clearly set from the first word: this is a world where wrongs are righted and justice is done. Cynics will clearly need to leave their shoes at the door. But every one of these tales has a wealth to offer that you won't find in the empty, research-driven world of Frozen or Tangled. These are stories from a world where the magical is a wide-eyed possibility, not a revenue opportunity from an untapped demographic.

This is a book to enjoy if you want to find a few moments of serenity and spend a while in a Middle East we've all left behind - a world of ogres and djinn, fairytale princes and envious neighbours who have the power to turn boys into bulls. It's a beautiful little collection to read to your children at night and a tiny inspiration for story-tellers in the Middle East who thought there was no outlet for their work, for their first steps into a new world of imagination shared - a baby step in the direction of rediscovering the region's love of narrative and creative story-telling.

In its Arabic edition, it's called 'Abou Alfoul'. It should be on the shelves of all good booksellers in Dubai in February, as well as on Kindle and iBooks.

And I really would commend it most highly...

Book Review: Desert Taxi

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You'll find it hard to find a copy of this. Amazon's selling one - if I were you, I'd rush over and snap it up. It's out of print - a gem that deserves SO much more than oblivion.

I love this book. It's a treasured possession. My copy's not worn well, the paper's yellowed and brittle, dried out to the point where one page has simply cracked apart and is nestled loose, torn from tip to toe by an unknown hand - likely that of of gravity or being boxed up for a house move.

Anyone selling a mint copy? Hit me up - I'm a buyer.

I've just re-read it. Yes, I even put my Kindle aside to read a booky book. Having finished Alexander Frater's Beyond the Blue Horizon, I was ripe for another travelogue. And I slid this out of the shelf as I realised I hadn't read it in 20 years.

And what a read it is.

Mike and Nita embark on a madcap journey from London to Nigeria, where he has a posting, using an 18 year old Hackney Carriage. The kicker is this book was written (and the journey undertaken) in 1956. So the taxi's a sort of pre-war Model T sort of thing, not the Black Cab we know today.

Marriott writes brilliantly, observant and wry with a glorious command of language and an engaging style. The challenge they take on is clearly insane and his account of trawling through the Sahara in an ancient cab is peppered with scenes in which Foreign Legion and Touareg alike are left open-mouthed by the mad dogs and Englishmen puttering through their midday sun.

He's English - the sort of English of Empire and Evelyn Waugh. Nita - pretty and clearly possessed of a saintly demeanour (or a love of lunatics) beyond reason, is as bashed about in the journey as Bertha the taxi - but our self-deprecating and potty author makes everything come alive; you end up consuming the pages, rooting for these idiotic, impossibly hardy and resourceful people.

It's a book that deserves to be re-published, enjoyed and shared as a classic of travel writing. And it's been lost in the cruel mist of time - what a shame.

If you can find a copy, snatch it up. This book is charming, delightful, gripping and - yes - inspiring.

I wonder where Mike and Nita are today. If they've made the longer journey, they'll be in their eighties. I would so love to sit and sip a snifter and listen to them, creaky and smiling-eyed, tell me where their lives went next.

This book so deserves to be in print again...

Book Review: The Paris Trap

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Joseph Hone is a spy novelist who made something of a splash in the 1970s but whose star was eclipsed by the likes of John Le Carré. Hone's books have been re-released as 'Faber Finds', including Kindle editions which are, for the back list of a 1970s author, massively over-priced at £5.99.

I bought The Paris Trap because of a recommendation on Twitter - as I buy so many of my books now. And I got a fascinating book for my money. Author Jeremy Duns, introduced by uber-geek Gerald Donovan, shared the first page of the book on Twitter and the text leaped off the page at me. Set in Riyadh, it clearly was going to be an extraordinary read. In fact, the introduction to the Faber Finds edition is by Jeremy, who says he regards Hone as 'One of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century.'

All well and good - but what I didn't realise was quite how extraordinary a read this was to turn out to be.

For a start, Hone was writing in a simpler time. So his editors didn't stop him doing all the things editors throw their hands up at today, from lazy adverbs and clear 'writer's kinks' (he constantly uses 'some' in similes as in 'some great bird' and - actually - constantly uses similes that would give Dan Brown a run for their daftness money) through to sillinesses such as "I tried to remember what the label reminded me of. And then I remembered."

Suddenly, I realised, Faber, for your £5.99, certainly weren't prepared to edit this baby. The text was merely jammed into a file converter, unloved and unread (presumably), leaving us with classics such as "I couldn't avoid an unpleasant sneer oranger."

Of anger. They meant of anger. Similarly "autumntinted" and "attaché casefor a file" and others such as word repetitions - silly 'literals' that shouldn't be in a text from a major publisher. And certainly not for - you may have got the feeling I have an issue with this and you may just be right - £5.99.

Whether this lack of editing is what left idiocies such as "a tactful after-shave lotion" in the MS we may never know. Let alone "the sugary orchestra"...

So what about the plot, the premise, the big idea? Bear with me here, it gets a bit involved. Super-spy Harry Tyson used to write TV scripts and had created a successful series called 'Hero' before joining British Intelligence as a real life spy. Hero is to be made into a feature film starring blue-eyed hearthrob Jim Hackett. Terrorists sympathetic to the Palestinian cause kidnap Harry's girlfriend Katy and Susie, his daughter by estranged wife Sarah in an attempt to coerce Harry into rewriting the screenplay of the film to make it more sympathetic to their cause. We've barely even started here and I'm already drooling and banging my head gently against the laptop keyboard. I also can't shake Jim Hacker from Yes, Prime Minister. I know it's wrong, but it's in my head like a Bony M single and I can't get it out.

Jim Hackett, an old friend of Harry and Sarah's, is estranged from wife Katy - Harry's girlfriend, although Jim and Susan don't know it. They, meanwhile, are sleeping together. Enter the French police, who are brutal, stupid and great at getting shot at. There's a French film maker called Belvoir and a French copper called Brion. With Sarahs and Susans, Belvoirs and Brions I'm already getting confused and that's without adding Anna Kalina the dumpy terrorist intellectual with a habit of wearing baggy jumpers and yet who has a gorgeous face. This makes her a Lesbian, apparently. I'd have thought dungarees would have done, but who am I to cavil at a chap's characterisations?

Anna has kidnapped Katy and Susan and is hiding them in a hole in the ground where she likes to drink Hine cognac and kiss people. She kisses Harry before sending him out into the world to rewrite his script and shoot Hero while his woman and daughter are held by terrorists in a bunker. His woman, Katy (previously Jim Hacker's smacker) is of Russian noble extraction (sorry, Hackett) and yet doesn't know much about Napoleon beyond Empire Line Dresses. She is a dress designer. I might have forgotten to mention that. At one stage, while she is being held by terrorists in a bunker, Jim and Harry work on the launch of her new collection which they aren't going to let a simple kidnapping disrupt. It all gets pretty messy, to tell the truth.

Harry's daughter, a pebble-glassed schoolgirl, is fascinated by Napoleon and so she and Katy set to in their new bunker home, making a Napoleonic puppet theatre. If only Terry Waite or John McCarthy had thought of this, the years would have simply flown by for them. 

Katy, by the way, buys Harry a present of a 'sweetly pornographic peepshow'. Before she is kidnapped, clearly. The market for sweetly pornographic peepshows in terrorist bunker hideouts being - as far as I am aware and you can please feel entirely free to correct me here - limited. 

We are reminded of this sweetly pornographic peepshow many times for some reason. Perhaps because Katy turns out to be a lesbian, too, eventually suddenly realising in a single moment of Anna's animal magnetism that she doesn't like boys and sex hurts her. If sex hurts you, you are clearly lesbian. And vice versa. Hope that clears up things for any of you gels out there feeling a little confused about things. Go get yourself a baggy jumper see if you feel any the better for it.

There is much in the novel that doesn't belong in a novel. For instance: "The Inspector stood up, walked over to the top of a filing cabinet, put the top back on a thermos of coffee and adjusted his shirt and tie in a little mirror on the wall behind. Then he blew his nose and settled his moustache."

Right. 

BTW, Thermos is a proper noun and so gets a capital T, Faber.

Simile. Often odd if not a wee bit looney. "Striding around the first-floor salon like a minor prophet" had me wondering how minor prophets stride, while a warring couple "returned to the fray like sleep walkers". 

If you really want to go to town, try "I took in the two absorbed figures beneath the arched ceiling, set against the white-washed background, in a moment - as in a picture: this suddenly proffered domestic interior, like the vision of a room seen while walking down a foreign village street at midday: an old man shaving from a bucket, or a woman turning a mattress - the work of other people's worlds, which we may share intimately for a moment, before losing it all in the next step we take down the street going back to our hotel."

I mean, whaaaaat? The shouty man's scaring me, mummy...

There are many Wisdoms: strange descents into claptrap and odd gobbets of tossed-in half-thought that draw the reader up and leave the questing mind wandering around, clutching at imaginary butterflies in search of anything that might be justification for the latest surreal assertion: "Children can remain the same for months on end and then suddenly change overnight." and, later on, "She wanted to surprise herself - not be the surprise."

Put the gun down, dude. Step back slowly.

There are issues of POV (or Point of View) throughout. I wouldn't usually bring this up as I think POV quibbles are the territory inhabited by Word Nazis, but they genuinely interfere with the flow in this book. The whole mixes Harry's first person POV chapters with third person chapters, but then we also flip-flop between the two and Harry has a nasty habit of knowing what everyone else is thinking. Show not tell, my editor would be screaming and I'd have to hit the cur hard to shut him up. "Katy, I could see, was conjuring up that lost world of sleigh-bells and privilege and sensibility even as she spoke - as a person will plan future holidays to take his mind off a serious illness which he comes to forget, poring over time-tables and sunny brochures."

Harry's a mind reader, although he would appear to be dyslexic.

There's a whole scene featuring Alain Belvoir the film maker and his old parents or someone like that. It features a loving portrait of an old lady called Chummy who has flaking skin and shitty ducks. I do not know for the life of me why any editor would have left it in the book.

The dialogue is generally a horse's arse, too. "Brion was tired: he could only speak in clichés." had me laughing precisely because that's what Brion had been doing all along. And everyone else, for that matter. Later on Harry puts his finger on the very button. "Sometimes," He opines, "it all gets too stupid."

Reluctantly I have to stop, although there's a lot more. I had started making notes in my Kindle text, something I rarely, if ever, do unless I'm working on an edit or my or someone else's work. I like to enjoy books I'm reading, not pick them apart. But I couldn't help myself, simply because there's just so much in here you can't read fluidly or without being brought up time and time again by the flubs and bumps. To channel Hone, it was like a turbulent flight peppered with constant changes at foreign terminals like a series of interruptions that reminds one of the workings of complex roundabout systems such as those found in city centres that have a concatenation of major routes like some long piece of Italian pasta.

Don't get me wrong - don't think I disliked this book, because I didn't. I enjoyed it immensely. But for the wrong reasons, I suspect. This book is a text book raw MS for editors to practice on. It contains every quirk, error, oddity and clunk you'd want to demonstrate every aspect of good book editing for the modern self-editing author or professional editor. It's a classic 'before' manuscript that fails to tell its story well because of its legion flaws - including the fact the basic story premise itself is as stupid as a pair of gin-pissed March hares who've got their paws on an inexhaustible supply of Amyl Nitrate soaked carrots.

Book Review: Zero History

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It's terrible not to have the time for stuff and I'm increasingly struggling to cram everything in. I suppose the pressure of writing is foremost: when you're 'in the zone' everything becomes subordinate to your own work and the world you're building. When things jam up a little you end up on Twitter and infesting other places where the jobless and marginalised smoke up and drink cups of odiously strong tea. Reading has been relegated to a few minutes in the evening or snatched moments wandering around in a towel. There's no time for that curling up on the sofa stuff.

So it might be my fault entirely that William Gibson's Zero History was a labour of love to get through - I might have been introducing more interstices than any author deserves of a reader. It's the third in the 'Blue Ant' series, preceded by Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. All three books are built around a sort of now, perhaps a few months into our future at the time of writing but now, of course, a couple of years into the past. The drones featured in Zero History would have been very cutting edge and funky in 2010, when it was first published. Now they're more 'meh'...

Funny that Gibson's Neuromancer remains so startlingly futuristic and Zero History feels a little dated.

Ex rock star Hollis Henry and ex drug addict Milgrim are sent on missions to discover fashion coolness by multi squillionaire agency head and cool addict Hubertus Bigend. Bigend is interested in how military clothing achieves coolness in a circular relationship that injects street coolness back into military wear. Or something like that. He's saved Milgrim from his existentially threatening addiction only to make the man his tool - an echo, in fact, of the plot of Neuromancer and I did feel several times that Zero History was a cookie-cut of the Neuromancer arc.

Zero History lacks some of the flashes of descriptive brilliance that mark Gibson's earlier work. It doesn't come across as fresh and impelled, it doesn't compel the reader as much and meanders a lot. There are lots of blind alleys, scenes that don't actually seem to take us somewhere. The coolness becomes wearing, pressing down on you. Oh this is so cool, that's such a concept, this hotel/club is funky beyond even sehr funklich. Hollis' boyfriend, a cool military type, BASE jumps off the Burj Khalifa and I have to resist the urge to purge the whole damn book from my Kindle. The cause, the mission impelling the characters to their climax, seems rather, well, marginal. At the same time, there's a lot to love. The drug-autistic Milgrim, always somehow feeling a little two-dimensional, falls in love with Bigend's despatch rider and you find yourself rooting for him to get to root her. Bigend's a twat, but then when you've worked with Bigend types you'll maybe have less sympathy for that overwhelming control freak millionaire mentality.

An interesting read and a book that had me standing on occasion towel-wrapped and dripping onto the tiles as I tried to hold out to the end of the scene. And a book that lay on the bedside table for days, unloved as I read other stuff more immediately interesting (given the novel I'm working on, I'm spending a lot of time on the history of the IRA and the Irish Troubles). Not the book I'd recommend as a first Gibson novel. That remains, through all the years, Neuromancer.

Book Review: Tatiana

(Photo credit: Mark Coggins)

Martin Cruz Smith's first big bang bestseller was Gorky Park, still held up as a remarkable example of the detective/spy thriller genre. My genre, in fact. The one I write in. And I happen to consider Mr Cruz Smith to be among the very best of his kind. What's perhaps depressing is that after Gorky Park he's never really seemed to become a massive international bestselling author along the lines of Deaver et al. Sure, he's popped 'em into the NYT list every time, but I never felt he got quite the accolade he deserved. Maybe he has and I've just missed it.

His work is consistent, solid and bang on genre. I read Havana the other week and enjoyed myself immensely - it's another 'Arkady Renko' novel (Renko being the star of Gorky Park) and a thoroughly entertaining romp around corrupt Cuba. There's even a touch of Rum Diaries to it, which I loved. Both the Hunter Thompson book and the touch. Actually, and the film - although that's an unfashionable opinion, I know. It was something of a box office tank, that one.

I digress.

Tatiana is the latest Arkady Renko novel and will cost you a staggering £7.99 as a Kindle ebook. That's a hell of a price for an ebook - I usually wouldn't pay more than £4.99 simply because above that publishers are merely taking the mickey. I have turned my back on novelists whose work I have consistently enjoyed at this price point before, more a matter of principle than anything, but I weakened. Cruz Smith is very, very good after all.

I'm not sad I did, although even being a millionth of a percent responsible for convincing the yoyo toting cretins in mainstream publishers that this price point is acceptable to ebook readers still makes me feel guilty.

Tatiana is Cruz Smith at his finest. It's probably a better book than Gorky Park all in all. The self-hating Renko (The son of a badass old Soviet-era General who hated him and considered him a soft Southern shandy drinking poofter, Renko keeps a revolver in his safe and a single bullet in his bookcase) is once again drifting around looking for trouble. His dogged pursuit of 'inconvenient' cases has destroyed his career, leaving him an investigator still rather than a prosecutor or even higher - everyone agrees if Renko had just gone with the script instead of being an awkward bastard that's where he'd be. Renko's got a bullet lodged in his brain that could move and kill him at any time.

He really doesn't give a shit. Got it?

He's on the trail of the murderers of journalist Tatiana Petrovna, who has been investigating some big-time crooked oligarchs and 'fallen off' her balcony as a consequence. What follows is a dash across Russia, from Moscow to Kaliningrad, featuring old soak coppers, officials on the take, gunmen and mafiosos and much dashing around and shooting things. Renko's chess-playing genius of a ward makes a reappearance and hooks up with a check-mating red-head babe as he gets sucked up into the mayhem, a splash of humanity propelled pell-mell through a soup of corruption, fatcats and wickedness. It's brilliantly written stuff, painstakingly researched, with plot points built around the unlikeliest of things - handmade racing bicycles, the symbolic language of international interpreters' notes and Chinese shipyards all make an appearance. The dialogue is bang on, Renko's self-loathing actually endearing and the love interest suitably lovely.

It's quirky, fresh and dynamic. The pace never really lets up and it's one of those books you find yourself standing naked on cold ceramic tiles and reading because you just don't want to close the Kindle.

That might have been too much detail. Sorry.

Tatiana half made me want to give up writing and half inspired me to try harder. It's a brilliantly crafted book that has its flaws - there's some sloppy editing (FOR SEVEN POUNDS NINETY NINE!) around the shooting up of a Zil, the endgame's a bit slapdash and not quite worth the build up. That bit reminded me of Smilla's Feeling For Snow - by the time you realise the endgame's a bit off, you've finished the whole thing and enjoyed it all so much it doesn't really matter. But I'm really quibbling here, because I loved this book and finishing it was one of those 'Oh. Bloody hell...' moments when you realise there's no more banoffee pie in the world, ever.

Seriously. Get this book. It's simply glorious fun.

Book Review: Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

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In conference presentations, when it comes to discussing the changes being wrought by the Internet in areas such as publishing, I am fond of referring to the concept of quality. I almost invariably include a picture of the cover of Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because the book itself centres around the complexity, even impossibility, of defining Quality.

The argument I am making goes something like this: arguing that the quality of a book is inherent in its being something you curl up on a sofa and read is mad. You can curl up on a sofa and read a Kindle, too. The smell of a book is not the quality of it, either. The form 'book' is merely a receptacle for the words; changing the receptacle does not change the quality of the words, merely the quality of experience in consuming those words. If we look at the qualities of the receptacle: stable text, easily readable, accessible and easy to store, it's quite clear that the ebook reader is vastly superior to the booky book. It's like a Sumerian arguing for the rich smell of clay instead of that nasty papyrus stuff. It doesn't matter. Its.about.the.words.

Quality becomes irrelevant where technology improves access. See?

In fact, we are willing to accept lower quality receptacles where we can gain easier access to content. Look at the iPod, which is vastly inferior to a CD, but which we prefer because we have instant access to pretty much all the music we could ever want. And so the Kindle, which made it possible for me to wake up the other day, decide I had been referring to a book I hadn't read myself since the late 1970s and so conclude I wanted to read it now. Thanks to the Kindle, instead of having to comb bookshops or place special orders for it, I had the book in my hands in seconds flat.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about a man who has another man inside him, embarking on a road trip with his son Chris and two friends (John and Sylvia). The author is never named, but the man inside him, his former self, is called Phaedrus. Phaedrus was a lecturer at a university in Bozeman, Montana who went insane and was treated with electroshock therapy, erasing his troubled and destructive personality. Phaedrus reappears in the protagonist as the road trip takes them back to Bozeman, the protagonist drawn back to the university, his past and his emergent past self. The book is subtitled 'An enquiry into values' and it weaves the story of the road trip, Phaedrus' story of intellectual angst turned gradually inward into burgeoning insanity and the protagonist's own musings and observations on life, philosophy and, of course, motorcycle maintenance.

The narrative is constructed with a light hand, even though the book can nosedive deeply into the syrupy quasi-murk of philosophy at times. You can choose to skip here or to slow down and get to grips with Pirsig's forays into analytical thought - some of which are light and some of which become almost impenetrably heavy. At times my 'so what' gland kicked in, so I found myself both skipping and slowing, depending on my mood, my patience and the passage.

Bits of the book came back to me as I read, I was surprised to find my memory of certain key sections was inaccurate - over the years I had modified the tale in my recollection. Sort of Chinese Whispers for one. In one section, a student finds it impossible to write an essay about Bozeman, then a street in Bozeman and so Phaedrus has her write about the front of the town hall by breaking it down into bricks, starting with the top left hand brick. She dashes off thousands of words without a hitch. I remembered that one wrong, for instance.

But my memory of Pirsig's arguments about the indefinability of Quality were clear. And they remain a fascinating element of a book that is rarely less than enthralling. Somehow it manages - in the main - not only to be readable, but enjoyable and thought provoking too. That's a pretty heady mixture of qualities in itself - a mix that Pirsig generally pulls off deftly. It's also a book that polarises readers rather neatly - I've met people who think it's all tedious, pretentious twaddle wrapped in a thin veneer of everyman philosophising.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was apparently rejected by over 120 publishers, going on to become a major bestseller (over 5 million copies). In its time, it was one of those books you simply had to have on the bookshelf, dahling. And you always suspected some people just cracked the spine before adding it to the collection in a prominent place. It's one of those books.

It's perhaps no surprise to learn that Pirsig studied at Bozeman and struggled with mental illness, himself undergoing electro-convulsive therapy. He also had a son called Chris - the book turns out to be deeply autobiographical and I hadn't appreciated that before sitting down to write this review. Love it or hate it, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance stands as a remarkable work. And yes, I would recommend reading it.

Book Post: Shemlan's First Outing

I'm going to be meeting the Twitter Book Club (@TwitBookClub or twitbookclub.org) tomorrow to talk about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. It'll be the first time I meet people who've read it who aren't close friends, family or beta readers.

I'm a tad apprehensive, tell the truth. Readers are a funny lot and their perceptions, thoughts and questions never fail to have me rethinking things from a totally different perspective. I suppose I'm lucky in that so far (touch wood) people have generally played nicely, even my protesters have been gentle in their remonstration.

I'm not expecting any protests about Shemlan, although I can't say I was necessarily expecting the controversies of Olives. The book was championed in the year's first edition of Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' earlier this month, which was all very nice (the podcast is linked here for your listening pleasure) and the genteel members of the TOB team seem to have enjoyed the read. It'll be interesting to find out what the booky twits all made of it.

If you want to come along tomorrow, I'm assured you're more than welcome. I'll have a couple of copies of Shemlan with me if anyone wants to buy 'em, too! The TwitBookClub meets at 11am Saturday the 18th January (and every third Saturday each month) at Coffeol Emaar Boulevard, Boulevard Plaza, Tower 1, Ground Floor - here's a handy map. There's even 50% off food and 20% off drinks for book club attendees. Yes, you did hear that right. 50% off! Where are you going? Wait for me! Sorry, Dubai radio ad scriptwritis.

I'll let you know how it all goes... In the meantime, if you want to get your own copy, you'll find all the links to buy Shemlan as an ebook or paperback right here.

Book Review: Waiting For Sunrise (William Boyd)

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I hate to do this. I have long been an admirer of William Boyd's stuff, but this book was one I had to force myself through, often finding myself skimming. It's always such a disappointment to approach a book by an author whose work you've enjoyed and admired (A Good Man in Africa and An Ice Cream War, his first two novels, had me hooked and I've enjoyed his other work since) and then find yourself increasingly alienated as you realise this just isn't, well, 'doing it' for you.

Waiting for Sunrise is set in the period just prior to, and during, the First World War. Lysander Rief is sexually dysfunctional. He visits his psychologist and is entranced by a society beauty he meets there and then joins up when war breaks out. He enters the intelligence service and has to save Britain by discovering a code.

The main character, Rief struck me as being all over the place - I often found myself drawn up to ponder why on earth would he do that or say this? I suppose part of that is because little personality shines through that isn't self-obsessed and obnoxious. A sexual predator with little love for women, Rief is half Austrian but not interred or even interviewed as war breaks out, in fact he is recruited by military intelligence.

There doesn't seem to be much structure on offer here, it reads as if it was made up as we went along. Rief in Austria, Rief the sexual failure, Rief the actor, Rief the upper class twit, Rief the soldier, Rief the spy, Rief the lover, Rief the boozer. They none of them appear to be going anywhere cohesive that follows a growing narrative, they just wander around in Brownian patterns. And they all become a tad exhausting.

There are echoes of TE Lawrence in Rief - his superiority, his drawling insolence at a senior officer over whom he has a hold, his decision to become a private rather than take the commission he could so easily have achieved. And yet they are only echoes - and it's David Lean's Lawrence, not the man himself - there's nothing of the complexity and conflict that make either the real Lawrence or O'Toole's portrayal interesting. Rief isn't, well, driven to anything. He just muddles through.

I liked the setting and I liked the language, Boyd manages to capture the clipped accents of upper class schoolboy amateur spies nicely. There are elements of this book that are brilliant and reflect the talent and experience a much-loved novelist with a stellar career behind him.

But the thing as a whole rambled and just didn't come together for me. I came out of it feeling a little tired and perhaps a tad puzzled. For dark wartime espionage you can't better Alan Furst...

Three stars, then.

You can find the book here.

Book Review: The Summer Book (Tove Jansson)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You'll probably know Tove Jansson - if you've heard of her at all - as the Moomin woman - and that's certainly how Finland's tourist trade likes to promote her. You can hardly move in Helsinki without being met by one of the strange bulbous-nosed things. A celebrated illustrator and artist, Jansson was born to artist parents and was about as Bohemian as a Scandinavian gets - including a life-long relationship with her female partner (which everyone appears scrupulously to avoid calling a 'relationship' but which Jansson's own writing makes clear is a thing of shared beds).

Through a moment of Kindle caprice, I met Tove Jansson the novelist and was instantly entranced. My first buy was The Summer Book and, in Helsinki for the summer, the book made perfect, delicious sense. I went on not only to voraciously read everything of hers I could get my hands on in the weeks that followed, but went on to reread them too. Funnily enough, her Moomin legacy to this day overshadows her serious writing (look at her Wikipedia page and you'd think she'd never written a book) and yet her novels are gloriously written observations of humanity that veer dangerously close to philosophical. Her The True Deceiver is a book as dark as the Finnish winter nights. But, fie!, we're not here to celebrate darkness, but the summer.

The Summer Book is about a little girl, Sophia, and her grandmother - whose name we never learn. Together, the girl and the grandmother explore the island off Finland the family takes to each summer. Father is a sculptor, mother is never mentioned. Sophia's world is magical, her bafflements and quizzical nature delightful and her moments of rage and contrariness explored with an insider's knowledge. Her grandmother, bluff and all-knowingly wise, is as well able to see the magic of the island as Sophia - albeit through eyes that know they will soon close for ever.

"When are you going to die?" the child asked.

And Grandmother answered, "Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours."

Thankfully, nobody told Jansson how to write. The very first story in what is essentially a collection of sequential short stories progressing through the months of summer is 'The Morning Swim' and, horror of horrors, the POV is all over the place. One minute we're seeing the world through Sophia's eyes, the next through Grandmother's. And so it goes throughout the book, we share the world through both of their points of view with wilful haphazardness.

This lack of structured composition will horrify the Word Nazis, as will a great deal of 'Showing'. And yet both are critical elements in a book that takes its time narrating not very much at all really and yet which is enchanting, entrancing and utterly captivating. The constant POV switches are never confusing, never pull you up or jar. They just show us how two strong personalities see the same world with different eyes and yet with a charming regard and care for each other. It's not without its dramas, this celebration of Finnish island life: there are storms and malevolent cats, Venice sinks into the sea and little girls with curls split Sophia and her Grandmother.

And island life is critically important to the Finns. They have over 780 islands, from the great fortifications of Suomenlinna to skerries with single rusty-red wooden houses and bare guano-spattered rocks. The sun's warmth (and the sea's coldness), the sound of the breeze wind in the reeds, the smell of the sea and oil-cloth, cork floats and fishing nets and the whiff of Grandmother's sneaked cigarettes are in every chapter of The Summer Book. If great narrative transports us, this book has remarkable greatness in every page.

Five stars, clearly.

You can buy The Summer Book here.

Book Review: Neuromancer - William Gibson

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came to this particular party almost thirty years late. But oh, my, what a party it was!

I romped, giggling, through this book. I read it standing up, I read it waiting in the car, I read it when I should have been editing my own work. I devoured it with glee. It's so very well done, you see.

I gave up reading sci-fi decades ago. I can't remember what did it in the end, I think it might have been Frank Herbert's 'Yet another Dune book that milks that last drop from something that used to be better', but sci-fi became 'just not quite my thing.'

I'm going back now.

William Gibson's book invented 'cyberpunk' and gave us the setting for films like The Matrix, Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. Cyber-thief Case has had his ability to 'jack in' to the matrix burned out of his cortex by his vengeful employers and is on a fast track to drink, drug and crime fuelled suicide when he's rescued by a mysterious chap called Armitage.

Armitage fixes the damage, but he's got a purpose for Case who embarks on a race against time as Armitage complements his repair job with sacs of time-release neurotoxin placed in Case's veins. Do the job fast or get fried is the message. Case and murderous sexbomb Molly (Who calls a murderous sexbomb 'Molly' for pity's sakes? Only a lunatic or a genius, I figured) embark on a rampage through spaceports and Case gets down and dirty inside the cyber-world of the 3D realised network that is the Matrix. And oh my, it's fun stuff.

That I could be so blown away by this book today only had me wondering what this did to readers back in 1984. And that Gibson only trips up twice with his future technologies, as far as I could see, is little short of miraculous. In one scene, Case is fencing a valuable contraband of three megabytes of RAM. Well, I remember in 1984 three meg of RAM was like ten Yottabytes now. It was a huge amount. We were creating pioneering samplers using an Apple IIe with, wait for it, 64k of memory. My car key's probably got 3 meg in it.

In another technoflub, Case uses a payphone. Cute. But that just added to the fun for me, a little like playing a vintage synth that still sounds better than today's smartest sampler. This book is truly a classic and I'm very glad indeed I picked it up in a 'don't know what to put on the Kindle next' random moment.

If you hadn't got the message by now, let me just add I can't recommend it highly enough.

Five Stars.

Here's the Kindle book at Amazon.co.uk.