Canongate, 1985, 181p.

Every Gray book is a visual delight. This is another of those beautifully produced Canongate editions of Gray’s works, as usual with wide margins and illustrations by the author, though here there are no footnotes nor marginal annotations. In the main these so-called sorry stories feature, as the book’s title suggests, put-upon protagonists and include more than a few tales of unsatisfactory or failed marriages. They vary in length from two or so to 44 pages.

Gray’s narrators tend to have an air of detachment about them and it is unsurprising that their relationships are dysfunctional. Some have especially unfortunate habits. Job’s Skin Game’s narrator is so fascinated by his own eczema he subject his scabs to almost Linnaean levels of classification.

Of the other stories that do not focus on marriage Aiblins features the suppression by an academic of a younger poet’s works and acts partly as a device to smuggle in some of Gray’s own (accomplished) poetry which he nevertheless deconstructs in typical Gray fashion. Wellbeing is about the necessity of not being sane in our crazy world and Big Pockets With Buttoned Flaps is an unusual erotic preference.

15 February 2003 is not so much a story as an account of an anti-Iraq war march. Here Gray mentions that the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956. He is confusing this with the invasion of Hungary in that year. The (crushed) Prague Spring was in 1968.

With its illustrations of disconnection mixed with the odd desultory polemic, as an introduction to Gray’s world view this collection couldn’t be bettered.

Little Brown, 2005. 407p.

Well, this was a first. Never before have I thought of a Brookmyre novel, “this is a bit slow.” There have been digressions and lacunae interspersed in the plots but these have always been leavened by the humour permeating his writing. Once the action gets going this one does perk up a bit but then slows down again before picking up once more.

Two chapters (crucially including the first) are almost entirely devoted to information dumping disguised as back story. Where such information is essential to the plot (and here some is) it would be better unfolded in the narrative, shown to us rather than told. Admittedly that would have made the book even longer than it now is, but still.

The plot itself revolves around a worker in the arms industry, Ross Fleming, who has invented a device that threatens to turn that murky world upside down. The heroine, though, is his middle-aged and previously homely (yet ex-punk) mother, Jane, who is “recruited” by the team tasked with the job of recovering Ross after he disappears suddenly.

In the end it all becomes more than a little unbelievable – and Jane’s transformation into Action Woman is too quick – but Brookmyre plots have never really withstood much close scrutiny.

The book is still characteristically readable but somewhere along the way the author’s distinctive humour seems to have been mislaid. It is almost as if Brookmyre might have thought his usual comedic approach is somehow unworthy and he was making an effort at being a more “serious” writer. There are still flashes, though; a nice aside on the Catholic Church’s propensity to move doctrinal goalposts and a rant on the disproportionate contribution of Scots to human progress.

If I were recommending a starting point for potential Brookmyre readers I’d suggest other books of his, though.

B+W, 1991. 144p.

(The cover shown on the right is different to my copy’s. My Library Thing link showed the correct one.)

This is a collection of 19 short stories – some very short indeed. Their settings lie mainly in Scotland and explore a variety of domestic and other situations but a few consecutive ones are set in the USA (where some gentle fun is poked at USians feeble grasp of the geography of the wider world) and one features Australia.

The most successful are the longest two A Little Irony, where a female artist uses photographs of her narrator boyfriend’s penis in an exhibition, and What Do You Want, How Do You Feel?, about a marriage going through a rocky patch. These feel more rounded perhaps because their length gives room for character exploration. The latter also comes closest to providing the standard twist that people used to expect of a short story.

The social background of Bottle, wherein ne’er-do-weels are employed inside bottle banks, could almost be read as SF. As indeed could Problem, where a man’s wife reveals that she is in fact (or has somehow become; it’s not quite clear) a man. Within the story this sort of transformation appears to be a wider social phenomenon.

Robertson can certainly create atmosphere. The first story, Border, isn’t about much (a young boy travelling north by train looks for the border point after Berwick) but says it well.

If I have a criticism it is that a lot of the stories tend to peter out rather than end. Indeed there is one which finishes with the words, “Any time now something would happen.” Isn’t it the happening that a short story should be about?

Despite this stricture, Close is a well rounded and diverse collection.

Translated from the Czech Přílis Hlučná Samota, by Michael Henry Heim.
Harcourt, 1990. 98p.

The cover shown here is slightly different from the book I read, which did not have the blue right angle at the top left.

Like Closely Observed Trains this book is short, indeed barely a novella, but it is beautifully written (and well translated into USian.)

For thirty five years Haňťa has been compacting paper in a cellar room overrun with mice. During this time he has salvaged hundreds of rare books and stored them in his flat where they take up all the space and even hang over his bed, like a sword of Damocles ready to fall.

Spiced up with reminiscences of Haňťa’s early life and encounters with his suppliers and his boss there is a characteristic Eastern European air of strangeness about the novella which borders on magic realism but does not quite stray into it. While Haňťa is working he sometimes has visions of various philosophers, plus Jesus and Lao-Tze, and ruminates on the fate of the mice caught up in his compactor, the battles between rats occurring beneath his feet and the necessities of having an “other” to confront.

The routine of his job is underlined by the repetition in nearly every chapter’s first line of his statement about thirty five years spent compacting paper. This could be a metaphor for the dreariness of life under a dictatorship, or just of a relatively uneventful life in general. Yet there is incident too, little sparks of colour, variation and human interaction.

The book is effectively a monologue, with little dialogue to speak of, presenting a bleak outlook on life – and, surprisingly for an Eastern European novel, absolutely no sex (although a gypsy woman does offer) – but Hrabal nevertheless engages our empathy and sympathy. Despite not having the same burden of history to freight the narrative Too Loud A Solitude easily stands comparison to Closely Observed Trains in terms of its examination of the human condition.

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?

Postscripts 22/23, PS Publishing, 2010. 394 p

The book – one of the most recent in the Postscripts series of anthologies – contains short stories encompassing a range of genres from SF, Fantasy and Horror through to mainstream but mostly in the speculative realm. There are too many stories to consider individually but the standard is high. Even if not all are entirely successful the book contains very few duds. One of the most effective tales is the title story, by Lucius Shepard, about a plot by a famous movie star to enravel his associates in the – perhaps simulated – murder of his girlfriend. Eric Brown’s The Human Element works well even if it re-visits one of his early themes, the relationship between an artist and his work. All the contributions are worth reading though I found Bully by Jack Ketchum too predictable. The Forever Forest by Rhys Hughes was curiously old fashioned, as if the author was trying too hard to convey otherness; it reads as if it might have been written in the 1950s. There’s also a story, Osmotic Pressure, by someone called Jack Deighton, which contains a fair bit of (arguably necessary?) information dumping.

Translated from the Arabic, Imarat Ya’qubyan, by Humphrey Davies

Harper Perennial, 2007. 253p.

The Yacoubian Building was first published in 2002 but has probably lost none of its relevance even given recent events in Egypt. The book is about the inhabitants of said building in Cairo and their various (mis)fortunes. Whether all Egyptian life is there I’m not in a position to judge; there certainly is a wide cross-section of society within its pages, though. The characters are memorable enough; some verge, as in magic realism, on larger than life, but their motivations are always clear. The viewpoint characters engage sympathy and are used to point each other up effectively.

In part the book deals with the daily grind of living under a dictatorship and the petty corruptions involved in survival but also slyly illustrates how those abused by power can be used by unscrupulous religious manipulators to further their own ends.

The wider culture Aswany portrays may not be as saturated with sex as in the West – though there is a mention of semi-naked girls on television adverts – but everyday life as depicted here most certainly is. Then again, love, sex and death are the novelistic big themes, possibly the more so in a society where lack of sexual expression is expected. Or, given that it was also a salient feature of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, does sex become more important when it perhaps represents the only means of personal expression in repressive societies?

The translation is effective (if into American English) and mostly flows easily – the book is very straightforward to read yet doesn’t lack complexity – but had a couple of infelicities. A footballer does not “shoot” the ball to another player and the ugly word “governorate” is employed to describe what appears to be an administrative district. (Governorate has a Wikipedia entry but “does not exist” in either dictionary.com or thesaurus.com.) The term bailiwick might have been better but is perhaps too old English. Would district or jurisdiction not have been clear enough?

To sum up, The Yacoubian Building is a very readable and interesting illustration of the differences and similarities between cultures and of what it means to be human.

I’ve just caught up with the news that Joanna Russ has died.

She was one of the first women to break into the male dominated world of 1960s Science Fiction and used feminism as her main theme, explicitly critiquing sexism and women’s perceived role in society. In this respect SF was, of course, a perfect vehicle with its ability to take a fresh look at how things are and how perhaps they ought to be.

I do not recall reading The Female Man, perhaps her most famous novel, but may have done so in my teens when most of my reading came from the local Library. I do have Picnic On Paradise (1968) on my shelves and certainly read that but must admit I don’t remember much of it from this distance in time.

What is undeniable is the impact Russ had in promoting women and feminism in SF.

Russ also took a great interest in slash fiction and seems to have been a force in it beginning to be taken more seriously than when it first appeared.

Joanna Russ 22/2/1937-29/4/2011. So it goes.

Millenium, 1998. 292p.

The book contains two novellas and five shorter stories taking in SF, fantasy, thriller and mainstream. The title novella has quite the most unsympathetic narrator I think I’ve ever read. He is supposed to be British and Shepard gets the idioms correct but we use “at night” rather than “nights” and (mostly) don’t call the game “soccer.” Full marks for the effort though. It’s a strange tale set on a space station beyond the orbit of Mars, where the usual human venalities and appetites abound.

A Little Night Music’s SF gloss features reanimated musicians but is really about a failed marriage.

Human History is set in a post-apocalyptic world where strange creatures known as Captains exert control over the remnants of humanity. Things do not turn out well.

Sports In America is a straightforward tale about a gangland hit that doesn’t quite come off. The characters rattle on unnecessarily about baseball and American Football.

The Sun Spider is a fantasy/SF cross where a theoretical physicist has discovered life in the Sun.

All The Perfumes Of Araby, a story published in 1992 but set in 1992 and which has been somewhat overtaken by events in the real world – the Middle East has not evolved in quite the way depicted, there are as yet no inoculations against AIDS – has a female Desert Storm veteran wishing to recapture some of that experience by taking up with a smuggler based in Cairo. The smuggling goes wrong.

Beast Of The Heartland is about a declining boxer who has a chance of one last big payday. Shepard manages to find a new angle on this hoary old scenario.

Apart from the two non-speculative ones the stories as a whole show a tendency to start in the real, solid world and part way through shift into a more fantastic milieu. Their narrators are also keen to tell rather than show and to philosophise. Betrayals are common. The collection as a whole is really just what you’d want in fiction.

Picador, 2008. 553 p.

In the first part of the novel a shy boy called Robbie Coyle is growing up in a village called Kenzie in 1960s Scotland with the ambition of going into space. Since his father is an ardent socialist and anti-American Robbie therefore wants to be a cosmonaut. A frequent attender at his local library, he devours knowledge about the Soviet Union and discovers that “Russian is a language where some letters are written back to front and others are completely made up.” Quotes such as this display Crumey’s excellent ability to inhabit the world of a pre-adolescent. As he matures he starts to hear a voice in his head. The section ends with that voice saying, “I guess we’re not in Kenzie any more.”

The story then flips into a scenario of a Soviet-style Britain where a young adult Robert Coyle has been recruited into a space project to reach, before the wicked capitalists do so, what is possibly a black hole travelling through the solar system. The secret “Installation” where Robert is in training is suitably grim, the illustrations of the many compromises people have to make in such a society convincing, though whether dissidents could flourish there is another question. Perhaps this exists in the same British Democratic Republic which featured in the author’s Mobius Dick.

This central section could be considered an Altered History novel where the Jonbar Hinge lies in whether or not a man named Deuchar died while trying to rescue twins from drowning many years before the time the action is set. Yet its juxtaposition with the preceding and following parts, set in the “real” world, argues against this. And Crumey’s treatment of his subject matter does not have the feel of SF. The Soviet section can be read to be implicitly a figment of Robbie’s imagination. The subtlety of the point of divergence also marks this out from SF treatments of Altered Worlds. While Crumey pushes credibility a little by having characters in the central section behave and speak, or have the same names as, those in the book-end segments he does certainly avoid the trap into which Philip Roth fell in The Plot Against America of restoring the altered world to normal by the end.

The coda, a (present day?) exploration of the situation of Robbie’s ageing parents and a young boy who meets a mysterious stranger on a mission (which he is unwilling to explain) provides counterpoint and a resolution of sorts.

Sputnik Caledonia is excellently written and engaging, with convincing characters, but not quite as full of verve as Mobius Dick. I will look out for more Crumey, though.