Bloomsbury, 2010. 403p.

This is the latest in Boyd’s apparent taking up of genre fiction. Okay, An Ice-cream War was a historical novel as were The New Confessions and Any Human Heart but he is not generally considered a writer of genre. Yet having most recently tackled the spy novel in Restless, he now ventures into thriller territory. (I doubt he’ll be trying SF though.)

Returning a briefcase left at a restaurant where he was eating to a man with whom he had struck up a conversation, Adam Kindred stumbles into a murder scene. The victim is still barely alive and asks Adam to remove the knife from his body. Disoriented, Adam does so and the victim promptly dies. Suspecting the murderer is in the next room, Adam flees with the briefcase and thus becomes the prime suspect. So far, so very The Thirty Nine Steps. What follows deviates from that template but is still pretty much a standard thriller where Adam sleeps rough, takes up begging, attends the Church of John Christ, changes his name, links up with a prostitute and her son, then later with the policewoman who was first on the murder scene! – all the while pursued by the murderer at the behest of a big pharmaceutical company with a secret to hide. The secret is of course in the briefcase.

Put like that this sounds ridiculous. Not very literary is it? Admittedly the novel doesn’t touch the heights of earlier Boyd offerings like Brazzaville Beach, Any Human Heart or even Restless but it is very readable, rollicking along at a fine pace – and the characterisation is good.

It is also a signal reminder of how easy it can be to stay lost in modern society. Use no banks, mobile phones nor credit cards and you are virtually invisible; certainly hard to trace. Whether the novel much enlightens the human condition is something different, though.

The story is told from the viewpoints of several of the characters and Boyd does that mainstream thing of giving their histories. I know it’s supposed to add to roundness and provide motivation but it struck me that really – especially if this knowledge is essential to the plot – it’s just another species of information dumping.

Inevitably with multiple viewpoints some of the narrators are less engaging than others. I was at first irritated by that of the chairman of the research company Calenture-Deutz but it is a sign of Boyd’s skill that he is able to elicit sympathy and even compassion towards him.

The writing appears effortless, very little jars (but see below) and the stupidity of Adam Kindred at the start apart – don’t touch the knife! – is psychologically convincing. If you like thrillers with a bit of character meat to them give it a try.

Small rant alert:-
Within, we have the old homonym “vocal chords.” These are cords; as in small pliable cylindrical pieces of living tissue. They vibrate as air passes over them and so produce sound. They are not a set of musical notes sounded simultaneously. Does no-one proof read any more?

An epicentre is not some sort of super centre, not the very centre of an event or a circle. (That would be …. the centre.) The word, derived from ancient Greek through Latin, actually means “situated on a centre” and so is not in fact a centre at all.

Similarly, an epicycle such as Ptolemy used in his system of explaining astronomical observations is a cycle on a cycle and not the main circle of rotation.

As far as an earthquake is concerned – where the word can be used in its strict sense – the epicentre is the point on the Earth’s surface nearest to the earthquake’s hypocentre, which is the real “centre.”

To hear reporters on the news talking about the epicentre of the recent E Coli outbreak in Germany is annoying as they quite clearly are talking about the point from which the outbreak radiated, which would be its centre. There is no need to qualify or heighten the term in any way.

UEFA Europa League* Final, Dublin Arena (Aviva Stadium), 18/5/11.

Another disappointing final – as they so often are. Why do teams approach a one-off game as if they are going to get a second chance?

Okay, Braga managed to defeat Benfica in the semi-final by dint of not attacking very much but this was not a two-legged tie and they weren’t going to have home advantage for half of it. As it was they waited till they were one goal down before making any effort to attack.

In the second half they were more than able to hold Porto. Who knows? Had they gone at Porto from the start they might have got something from the game. If you’re going to lose anyway why not try to win instead?

It wasn’t much of an advert for the Europa League, which usually has more entertaining games than the utterly turgid Champions League the final of which, a week on Saturday, will in all probability be another dull watch.

*Like EUFA’s so-called Champions League this is another “league” which isn’t.

There are two interesting posts over at Ian Sales’s blog.

The first is an attempt to (re)define “hard” SF. As far as he sees it – and I largely agree – this is SF that is bound, more or less, by known physical laws, by the restraints inherent in, for example, Physics and Chemistry.

In this regard any use of the trope of, for example, faster than light travel is – despite decades of convention and use in what might otherwise be considered hard SF stories – not hard SF in the strictest sense, as, to our best knowledge, the speed of light is an insurmountable barrier.

This is not to decry other types of SF (which are perfectly legitimate) merely to say that they go beyond the bounds of the known and, in the case of Space Opera in particular, which cleaves the paper light years with carefree abandon, actually tend towards wish-fulfillment. Though of course there is the necessity of getting characters from here to there in a reasonably efficient, non-boring manner.

It is amusing to recall here what is perhaps the most famous phrase in Science Fiction – certainly in its dramatic form, “Ye cannae change the laws of Physics, Captain.” This from a TV programme which made a habit, nay a virtue, of portraying just that.

Ian makes a distinction between hard sciences (Cosmology, Physics, Chemistry) and softer ones such as Psychology, Archaeology and Anthropology. While agreeing that the term is most often interpreted this way I wouldn’t myself say that stories featuring these could not be hard SF.

The second of his posts is an announcment that he will be editing an anthology of… hard SF; to be called Rocket Science.

No need to rush. Submissions will not be accepted till 1^st August.

Rocket Science is itself a term that has often irritated me as it is most often heard in the phrase, “It’s not rocket science, is it?” as if rocket science was at the cutting edge, inherently incomprehensible. As Ian points out in his post, the science of rocketry – as opposed perhaps to some of its technological aspects – has, due to its basis in chemical reactions whose energetic outcomes are limited and, moreover, fixed – not evolved much in a century.

I know it’s use is as much metaphorical as anything else but I’ve always felt tempted to respond to anyone who trots out the, “It’s not rocket science,” line, that rocket science isn’t rocket science.

Rocket Science, however, may be.

Yes, that is how you spell it.

It is not derived from the Latin for smallest, minimus, and hence should not be rendered as miniscule.

In my Shorter Oxford Dictionary its first definition is as a small letter in a 7^th century cursive script. Secondarily it means lower case in general, then extremely small.

Its derivation is from French, after the Latin minuscula (littera), meaning minor letter.

Picador, 2005. 264 p.

The last two Banvilles I read – see here and here – had both been on my shelves for years and while never less than elegantly written were a touch distanced and unengaging but this one won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 so I thought that maybe he’d become a little more accessible.

The Sea can be summed up in one sentence. A man whose wife has died of cancer reminisces about his childhood and first loves and goes back to visit his old holiday haunts. There is of course more to it than this but that is the essence.

Banville has his narrative mouthpiece, Max Morden, adopt a meandering style, not quite stream of consciousness but with some sudden jumps in time and place. This all looks natural on the page, as if written effortlessly, but must have taken a high degree of crafting.

The typical Banville traits are all present, the literariness, the elegance, the beautifully constructed sentences flowing with sub-clauses, the use of unusual or high flown vocabulary (velutinous for velvety, for example) the revelation, very late, of a useful piece of information which helps to make the connection between the novel’s various strands. This last is something of a tease, however, (if not a cheat) and could be taken to exemplify a failure to provide sufficient foreshadowing.

The characters are all well rounded (and they can be irritating) but sometimes it seems as if they are being lined up one after another to have their little foibles exposed before the narrative flows elsewhere.

There is no plot as such but Banville’s prose carries the reader through. I do like him as a stylist. Overall, however, the effect is curiously flat and enervating. There can’t have been much competition for the Booker in 2005. Or was it just Banville’s turn?

Surprisingly for a writer who normally seems very meticulous there was one “lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song – see lay 10a ) and a “liquified.”

I see Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has said it’s time to stop banker bashing. I saw a clip of him on the television news claiming this in the House of Commons.

This might be considered a little hypocritical of him coming only one day since he levied a tax on banker’s bonuses. A tax at which said bankers were said to be “livid.”

Except I don’t buy it. It’s much more Machiavellian than that.

Do you believe for a minute that these bankers were not aware this tax was on the cards? Cue much confected outrage.

These people have some nerve considering they bankrupted the country and continue to reward themselves handsomely for it while the rest of us mere mortals will be the ones paying the price.

By the way; do you get a bonus from your work? (I certainly don’t. Moreover, I don’t expect one.)

And why should you?

Why should anyone?

Your salary is your remuneration. You knew what it would be when you took the job on. Just exactly who needs a bonus to turn up and do their job?

And don’t give me this rubbish about going abroad if the money’s not enough. Let’s call that threat by its proper name. Blackmail.

Back to George Osborne.

He said that because of a deal he’s cooked up with his banker cronies – the deal which he says means it’s time to stop banker bashing – that there would be, and I quote, “less bonuses.”

Not, you’ll note – as I did – “less paid in bonuses” and certainly not “fewer bonuses.”

So much for an expensive private education.

George; you’re not much of an advert for Eton, nor for Magdalen College, Oxford.

Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT.

This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in mind – one with a potentially light-hearted take – but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound.

It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen – formalin, tank and all – from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby – two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) – and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts.

Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint.

While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc.

This may be a reason why it failed to make the award ballot for this year’s BSFA Awards.

Pedantic asides:- Miéville did make me think what the plural of quid pro quo might be. (To my British mind Miéville’s anglicised formulation “quids pro quo” would mean getting money for something rather than a mutual back-scratching.) Taking the phrase as meaning “this for that” then the English plural, for the phrase as a whole, would be quid pro quos. For the Latin plural you would have quae pro quibus (these for those.) There are two other semantic possibilities; quid pro quibus (this for those) and quae pro quo (these for that.) Miéville also seems to think that “law” and “lore” are homophones. Not where I come from they aren’t. And the establishment is a dry cleaner’s, not a dry cleaners.

I believe Miéville’s next is to be set in space. It’ll be interesting to see his take on that.

A Happy New Year to everyone.

In passing I hope any USian readers note the absence of the possessive (‘s) in the above sentence. Which is to say I did not write, “Happy New Year’s,” a usage I have heard on US TV programmes and which every time I do hear manages to irritate me enormously.

In Scotland (and the UK as a whole) the greeting relates to the whole year; not just to its first day. For this reason I shall still be saying, “Happy New Year,” to folks during all of next week – and beyond, depending on when I first encounter people during 2011.

It’s a culture thing. Ignore me if you like.

If you’re Chinese, or Middle Eastern, New Year is some other time anyway.

On BBC TV news yesterday – in Scotland certainly, and I think on UK-wide bulletins too – it was stated time and again that the Forth Road Bridge had been closed due to snow for the first time “in living memory.” For all I know other news providers said the same.

It was a significant event certainly, especially for all those inconvenienced by it, but since the bridge was opened in 1964 that would be the first time, then; first time ever, no qualification required. It was only 46 years ago after all, nowhere near three score and ten. There are loads of people older than me (and younger too no doubt) who can remember it opening.

It makes you wonder – again – about the accuracy of all the other comparisons we are provided with on these organs of supposed truth telling.

Maybe this isn’t really a linguistic annoyance; just one about those who don’t think about what they’re saying. Or writing, for those who composed the script.