Dedalus, 2004, 243p

Not being a straightforward narrative this is a difficult novel to describe. Tenses shift within sections, there are stories within stories, false starts, rewritten chapters, repetitions of scenarios and the narrator is at pains to point out the fictionality of it all, indeed at times it reads more as a disquisition on literary efforts than an attempt at one. Yet, for all these strictures, it was immensely readable.

The tricksiness begins early as the novel starts with Chapter 0, where the narrator is thinking post coital thoughts about two characters who meet on a train and about whom he intends to write a novel. The bulk of Music, in a Foreign Language deals with the back story of one of these, a young man called Duncan, and the events leading up to the death of his father, Robert Waters. Waters and his friend Charles King had at the time been involved in slightly subversive activity in a Soviet style post-war Britain. This was the first appearance of that altered history in which Crumey also set parts of Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia. The compromises such a society demands, the paranoia it engenders – and the betrayals it necessitates – are allowed to emerge organically from the story. Despite the title, music as a motif appears sparingly.

My one minor caveat is that the female characters are not as fully rounded as they might be, but the book’s main focus is on the friendship between Waters and King, so perhaps that is understandable.

I was equally as impressed by this, Crumey’s debut novel, as I was by both others of his I have read. If you like well written, thoughtful – even playful – novels you could do worse than give Crumey a try.

Pan, British Battles Series, Illustrated, 1972, 239p

My knowledge of the Spanish Armada was hazy till I read this – Drake’s (un)interrupted game of bowls, fireships at Calais, wrecks on the Irish coast. In some respects it still is hazy as Lewis makes the point that very few reliable accounts exist and a high degree of interpretation, even guesswork, is required to make sense of the several running battles that took place over the days that the Armada spent hauling up the English Channel.

The book underlines the unwieldy, and unlikely, enterprise that the Armada represented. It was compromised from the outset by financial considerations which led to the watering down of the original concept of carrying all the necessary invasion troops itself, burdened by the concomitant necessity to link up with Parma’s army in Flanders and saddled with a commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who did not want the job as he thought he wasn’t up to it. Yet had the Spanish landed on and taken the Isle of Wight it might have been game over. The smaller, more nimble English fleet harried them all the way up the Channel and successfully prevented this.

Lewis is excellent on the gunnery aspects of the conflict. I had not realised before that the battles took place at one of those turning points in military history, in this case when oar-propelled galleys were being overtaken by full sail and the principal naval tactic since ancient times, ramming, by gunnery. The English had smaller guns, firing lighter shot with greater range than the generally larger Spanish weapons and took great care not to close with their opponents and so run the risk of damage or, worse, boarding. The Spanish thought this standing off ungentlemanly at best and unwarlike, even cowardly, at worst. Yet the damage the English could inflict was minimal. Only when the Spanish had begun to run out of shot and after the fireships at Calais had finally broken the Armada’s formation did closer encounters occur, at Gravelines. The fireships were, though, crucial in the Armada’s final demise as, to escape them, most Spanish ships cut their anchor cables and consequently had reduced means by which to secure themselves when later facing Atlantic storms. That the Armada declined to sail back the way they had come – favourable winds allowed the English ships to do so – speaks volumes for their reluctance to engage the English again, though.

Aside:
At one point Lewis refers in passing to the matter of Mary Queen of Scots, and praises Francis Walsingham’s “brilliant” detective work. Now, while that poor deluded woman certainly did not help herself, it is possible, even likely, that the final conspiracy may have been more a case of agent provocateurship or, in modern terms, entrapment, by Walsingham’s operatives.

Mention is made of the foul, insanitary conditions aboard ships in those days. Disease, particularly typhus, was rife. The privations the sailors endured are also touched on. That many Spanish ships did make it back to Spain reflects well on their commanders, specifically Medina Sidonia and his (unnamed) navigator. Others, of course, ended up on the shores of Ireland or Scotland. One was even blown back all the way to Fair Isle. Surviving the wrecks in Ireland did not guarantee safety. Unless they were highly ransomable most captives were executed out of hand. Such was the way of the late Tudor age.

Abacus, 1997.

A wealthy and powerful newspaper owner is murdered in a luxury house in Perthshire. The police have apprehended the four burglars responsible. But one of them has left a package with his lawyer, to be opened if he didn’t make a quick return to her office. And the security consultant Donald Lafferty, friend of journalist Jack Parlabane, dies minutes after uttering an oblique message to the assembled TV crews outside the police station where the suspects are being held. A tale of intrigue and conspiracy follows where skulduggery at the heart of government is revealed and unravelled. While the plot and its resolution is not entirely convincing the book is vastly readable with the occasional joke or reference thrown in to lighten things. I particularly liked, “I’m a man of stealth and haste.”

It is interesting that this was written in the dog days of the 1990s Conservative Government yet reads as well now as it might have done then; as if nothing has changed, which of course, in some respects, it hasn’t.

I have noted before Brookmyre’s usage “borne of” when “born of” makes more sense. He adds here, “up to high doe” (which gave me an image of a deer on a plinth) and “thrusted” as the past tense of thrust.

This was only Brookmyre’s second novel so a few infelicities are to be expected. But he has the increasingly irritating habit here of beginning every new scene in medias res and then flashing back to its beginning. He also feels the need to provide backstory for every new viewpoint character when they take up the narrative thread. While this is a timeworn literary technique it is no more than a form of info dumping.

The Country of the Blind is a Brookmyre. It does what it says on the tin. All well and good. Sometimes that is what hits the spot.

Hutchinson, 1991, 299p.

In Argentina in 1964 two young lovers, Franz Schmidt and Rebecca Czinner, children of German emigrés, decide to marry. When the two sets of parents meet, Becky’s father, Eli, a concentration camp survivor now blind, thinks he recognises something about Franz’s very affable father Rudi. Despite his reservations about all that the state of Israel represents and his past complicity as an economist with the Nazi regime, he contacts Jewish authorities in Vienna and Tel Aviv. The ramifications of this decision and of the continuing effects of the Holocaust both on individuals and on Israel are the backbone of the book.

Franz’s father disappears. His associates in Argentina reveal Franz’s father’s past to him and kidnap Becky and her friend in a bid to prevent Rudi’s transportation to Israel. It is too late, a trial date is set and the girls are set free. The love story here is a twentieth century variation on Romeo and Juliet but any animosity between the two families can barely be described as such.

The bulk of the book is set in Israel to where Franz has gone to support his father and try to understand his past actions. Becky joins him to avoid their relationship falling apart. They fall into the orbit of an Israeli journalist who speaks out against the trial. In a rather unlikely coincidence which stretched credulity, another journalist covering the trial turns out to be the former husband of Becky’s mother and the lover of a boy whom Franz had an affair with at school.

The inevitable outcome results and in a coda the lives of the main characters thereafter are described through the medium of Becky’s English cousin Gareth of whom up to then we had never heard.

The Holocaust is a sensitive subject and while Massie treats it obliquely he is clearly attempting to deal with serious issues. In this respect it is unfortunate that he renders the sentence Arbeit Macht Frei under which Franz’s father was photographed during the war with an “s” at the end of its first word. His control slips at times too. This humdinger of a sentence leapt out at me. The evening was spread out peacefully as they left the hotel, and looked for a taxi. This, with its strategically placed comma, can only mean, “The evening looked for a taxi.”

If I was to sum this up in one phrase it would be, densely written but flawed.

Serpent’s Tail, 2006, 241p.

At the start of Belonging Jack McCall is a janitor come handy-man at a remote set of luxury flats in the Swiss Alps. One day in the middle of winter a middle aged male resident arrives with a young woman called Thérèse. The next morning the man is dead, having slipped on the balcony during a snowstorm which has cut the site off. Jack has to help deal with the body and he and his girlfriend Anna look after Thérèse till the police arrive.

Due to a disturbed childhood and regular psychoanalysis Anna over-interprets things and constantly questions Jack about the reasons for his actions. She also desires to settle down. Three months after the incident she persuades him to go back home to Edinburgh to get married. En route, at the Gare Du Nord in Paris, Jack has cold feet, slips off the train – and seeks out Thérèse. He takes up with her and finds she is a child of divorce. The dead man was in fact her estranged father whom she had only just sought out. She blames herself, through her revelation of their true relationship, for her father’s death. Jack and Thérèse subsequently travel to a remote location in Spain where a small group of people live a very basic life in not much more than huts. At this point the novel loses its way a little as the motivations of the various characters are obscure.

All of this is played out to an occasional backdrop of overheard news of the Iraq War and the July 7^th and Madrid bombings which is not germane to the plot and does no more than locate the story in time.

Unlike Butlin’s earlier The Sound of my Voice or Night Visits, both of which employed second person narration – wholly or in part – Belonging is a thoroughly conventional first person tale, narrated from Jack’s viewpoint. Both of those earlier novels were more tightly focused, with fewer characters. Though Anna is displayed in all her annoying smugness, Thérèse’s motivations remain opaque – her parents’ divorce and mother’s remarriage aren’t really sufficient to explain her malaises – and some of the bit players are not as well delineated as might be hoped for. The climactic event was certainly unexpected but the novel seems to dribble away afterwards, taking what felt to me to be a wrong turning as Jack’s life reassembles.

Belonging is nevertheless finely written, just not as satisfying and meaty as Butlin’s previous novels.

PS Publishing, 2010, 112p.

This was the collection I mentioned had been in a BSFA mailing about 18 months ago – a taster from Postscripts.
I’ve only just got round to reading it. The authors include Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell and Gene Wolfe.

Most of the stories are not SF but are fantasy or horror; the best of which is Lisa Tuttle’s Closet Dreams where a young girl dreams of her incarceration by a man she calls the monster.

Of the out and out SF Eagle Song by Stephen Baxter concerns messages from Altair which recur at time intervals that decrease in powers of three from 7510 BC to 2210 AD. While clearly not our own history it parallels that closely, so the phrase “hippy chick” and the use of helicopter gunships in Vietnam supposedly in 1967 jarred a little. Footvote by Peter Hamilton relates the consequences of a private venture opening a wormhole to another planet and Gene Wolfe’s Comber is set on a world where cities drift on tectonic plates.

The writing throughout all the stories cannot be faulted but the fantasy and horror didn’t do too much for me.

Solaris, 2009, 414p.

This is the third of Brown’s Bengal Station novels, which feature the telepath Jeff Vaughan. In Cosmopath someone is asassinating telepaths. In the first two chapters both Vaughan and Parveen Das, another of the viewpoint characters, thwart attempts on their lives and are then separately invited by an extremely wealthy businessman, Rabindranath Chandrasakar, to join him on an expedition to another world. The action thereafter mainly focuses on Vaughan, but Das and Sukari, Vaughan’s wife, have occasional chapters to themselves.

With this third instalment we can see a pattern to the Bengal Station stories.

There will be a threat to Vaughan or those he cares about, or a financial incentive which drives him to undertake a mission for some third party. In Cosmopath his daughter, Li, has leukæmia and Chandrasakar offers to pay for the treatment.

The case will involve a trip off world where events reminiscent of pulp SF take place. In this one, on Delta Cephei VII, the resident aliens don’t wish humans to spread further than they already have.

While Vaughan is away his loved ones will be in danger of some sort. Here, Vaughan’s wife Sukari and his adopted daughter, Pham, are kidnapped to try to force him to reveal the secrets of Delta Cephei VII.

The self-serving Dr Rao will make an appearance or two.

None of this breaks any ground – nor is it intended to, Brown is reworking and updating familiar themes. It’s not cutting edge but it is all very readable.

Harper Collins, 1996, 390p.

This collection of short fiction comprises 18 stories first published in the pages of, among others, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ms., Playboy and Omni, plus some otherwise uncredited. They range in length from 3 to 37 pages. I read quite a few of these on my trip away but was not taking notes and so have not commented in depth. Despite the mainly non-genre organs where they first appeared all have an air of otherness about them, of things not quite explicable.

The most Science-Fictional, Ether, OR, appeared in Asimov’s. It is narrated sequentially by the various inhabitants of a town that can shift its location.
The title story, Unlocking the Air, is one of Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales and relates the story of a revolution in that fantasy middle European country. Daddy’s Big Girl is a near fairy tale about a girl who keeps growing. The Poacher takes as its subject matter a well-known fairy tale but approaches it, in typical Le Guin fashion, at a considerable tangent.

Le Guin’s typical compassion and sympathy for her characters are evident throughout.

Jonathan Cape, 2006, 390p.

Warner has been known principally for stories featuring women, eg Morvern Callar and The Sopranos, or with Scottish settings, The Man Who Walks. The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven represents a departure, a different focus. None of its themes nor concerns could be considered narrowly Scottish.

A man is told by his doctor he has The Condition, which is nowadays not an inevitable death sentence. The novel is constructed from his activities of the next few weeks and his memories of the women he has known. (Not as many women as he once planned.)

There are striking stylistic and narrative echoes of other authors; William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms and John Banville’s The Sea, The Sea but more particularly of JG Ballard. This tendency was clinched on page 94 when a sentence was begun with the word already – a typically Ballardian usage. Reflecting this there is a Science Fictional tone to some of the language. A winter festival of gift giving is known as Three Kings, an area of construction and development is Phases Zones 1 and 2, a train destination is Kilometre 4. The Heaven in the title may be the local cemetery, which is mentioned several times.

As with Ballard and earlier Warner novels the tone is dry and distanced, hence none of the characters entirely springs to life. Indeed certain characters are not named but only given attributes, The Woman Who Watched, Puta of Asunción, Beautiful Screamer, Manic Coma, though admittedly these last few are inmates of an asylum.

Despite hints – a past Civil War, a fascist regime – which clearly point to Spain, the author, through his narrator Manolo Follana, resolutely refuses to name the country in which the story is set, only saying variously our language, our country, our region, the Capital City. Said narrator has a particular animus against English as a language, with its similarly spelled words with totally different meanings, eg tear. He is, incidentally, capable of the spectacularly ugly (and ungrammatical) sentence; for example, “I showed Teresa the new units my Agency were designing the interiors of,” and occasionally uses “less” when “fewer” is the better choice.

A flavour of magic realism tinges the narrative, albeit at a less heightened level. A more or less adult Manolo is taught to swim by two Vietnamese girls in the confines of the rooftop water tank of the hotel where he was brought up. An old man dies in a bath in one of the hotel’s rooms with the taps still running; the bath ends up cascading through the ceiling of the dining room below where his granddaughters were eating. On two occasions, one fatal but offstage, the act of sex is accompanied by the shedding of blood.

In amongst all this there was the – in context rather jarring – Scotticism of the phrase “sweetie” wrapper.

The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven is an example of accomplished modern world fiction. For me, though, too many of the characters are insufficiently fleshed out.

Victor Gollancz, 2000, 277p.

A few remaining true humans, veterans of the Forever War, live along with their offspring on the planet of Middle Finger near a collapsar called Mizar. Most of humanity has become Man, a hive mind similar to that of the Taurans, their former enemies. The inhabitants of Middle Finger live in a kind of sufferance, their activities monitored by a Man sheriff and a Tauran. As in The Forever War, relativistic effects are important in this universe. Radio messages from or to Earth take 80 years to arrive but faster messaging and travel can be achieved via a collapsar jump.

Tired of their existence, a few inhabitants of Middle Finger plot to take a spaceship on a forty thousand year trip round the galaxy. The Tauran and Man hive minds refuse permission but they steal the ship anyway. While only a few months out weird things start to happen.

At this point we seemed to lurch into a different book entirely. The tone may not have altered much but the background did. Forced to turn back to Middle Finger our adventurers find the population there and on Earth has disappeared. They use the collapsar to return to Earth to find out what’s happened.

Even before this story shift the characters were far from convincing, being almost indistinguishable one from the other. After it the narrative failed to suspend disbelief and in the denouement, two dei ex machina popped up in quick succession as Haldeman off-handedly pulled the rug from under the scenario underpinning his Forever War/Peace setting – not to mention all of human history.

While Haldeman’s The Forever War was an important milestone in the history of SF Forever Free most certainly isn’t – unsurorising given that it’s a 25 year later (second) sequel. It’s not tripe nor exceptionally badly written but neither is it a good example of the satisfactions that the genre can deliver.