Book Review: The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

When I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, I immediately fell in love with Claire North's writing, and her books I have read since have done nothing to cool my ardour. As well as her beautiful prose, she builds fascinating characters and wonderfully intriguing ideas. Her novels are thought experiments, what-ifs of the highest order, using the interface of a single fantastical idea set in the mundane world to examine what it is to be human.



In this novel, we meet Hope Arden. When she was a teenager people began to forget her - teachers, school friends, family. When out of sight for more than a few moments, the concept of "Hope Arden" leaks from their minds and then they are meeting her for the first time.



Grown up, Hope has come to terms with this ability, this existence outside of people's perception - outside of society, because how can someone be part of a society that has no knowledge of them from one moment to the next. She has found, by necessity, a use for her peculiar talents; she has become the world's greatest thief. It isn't just that she can't be picked out of a line-up; if someone is chasing her and she ducks out of sight, her her pursuer will suddenly not recognise her as the woman they were chasing - or remember they were chasing anyone at all. How useful to be able to case a location again and again and again, with nobody able to spot the repetition.



And it is pursuing this calling, at a high class party in Dubai, that she finds herself in the presence of Perfection. It is not just an app, it is not just a life-coach, it is not just a lifestyle; it is a way of life that enables and encourages - even requires - its adherents to seek to perfect themselves. the perfect look, the perfect job, the perfect gym, the perfect partner, the perfect life.



Hope's investigation into Perfection is the perfect setting for North to examine society and belonging, social media and self image, status and identity.


Of course, the real take away message:


Read Claire North.

Book Review: Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane

For me, Dennis Lehane is one of the top-tier thriller writers. This second instalment in his Kenzie & Gennaro series builds slowly, relying entirely on character and mood - built from the first-person observations of Boston PI Patrick Kenzie as he describes the crazily changeable weather of a Massachusetts autumn, violence in the news, and hints at the events of the past season that have left him untethered.



This prologue sets a dark, foreboding mood, before the story starts in classic detective story style with a friend calling to recommend a prospective client, and setting up the meeting, all set against the easy back and forth banter between Kenzie and his partner in investigation and friend since childhood, Angie Gennaro. Although we are a hundred pages in before the first crime occurs, the book is never less than gripping as Lehane builds the characters, their world and relationships and history. The investigation lead the pair into situations smouldering with the threats of sudden and fatal violence. Once the first body turns up, the author begins the steadily crank the already building tension, and this doesn't let up for the rest of the book.




This first body seems separate to the pair's investigation but, of course, it is no spoiler to say that everything is connected, or ( if you've read the cover blurb, or the signs in the writing ) that this is a serial killer book. And, fair warning, steer clear if you don't like graphic violence. I'd forgotten how disturbing Lehane can get in his writing, but the most uncomfortable scenes are not those of actual violence but those where some of the worst characters in the book talk. One conversation in particular, with Kevin Hurlihy - a contemporary of the leads who is now a mob enforcer - still stains my thoughts.




Kenzie seems to surround himself with damaged, dangerous people - as well as Kevin, the mobsters, and the killers he investigates, there is Bubba, another childhood friend of himself and Gennaro who is a "good guy" only inasmuch as he deeply loves them both and will do anythings for them - however, Kenzie points out that the two are literally the only things in the universe he cares about and anything, or any body, else is utterly disposable.




The serial killer story has shades of The Silence of the Lambs ( and, Darkness was published in 1996, probably a deliberate nod to it ), but a huge difference with many other serial killer books is not only a complete refusal to lionise the killers - they are not geniuses, they are not extraordinary, they are not even inhuman ( they are, as he point out, very human even though they are the worst of us; they are Auschwitz and Belsen and Bosnia ) - they are, to quote Michael Marshall at the end of a page-long rant on this very subject "just fucking monsters that destroy" - but Lehane is a master at showing the effects: the utter devastation of loss and violence and cruelty visited upon the innocent without logic or reason or cause. The effects of just moving in that world, with Patrick Kenzie as the prime example.




Darkness, Take My Hand is not a flawless book; there are some moments when hints are dropped a little heavily, others where equally weighty red herrings proffered, and a couple of character moments that raise eyebrows but this can easily be forgiven in this superbly written, completely gripping, and hugely effective and affecting thriller.




I'll definitely be continuing with the series however, as I think I may have said after reading A Drink Before the War, I feel I will have to walk around in the sunlight for some time before I feel strong enough to re-enter the Boston of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

My plan had been to start my barrage of politics when I returned from my holiday, but I can't hold it in.

I know I'm in something of a bubble, but overlap with people of differing views on here. So, I'm going to be trying to put forth reasonable, polite and - hopefully - persuasive arguments over the next few weeks. You have been warned.

We have a UK General Election on 12th December. This is a great chance to do something wonderful; get the Tories out. This Conservative government has been one of the most destructive forces to this country ever. The implementation of austerity has harmed almost every aspect of society, and harmed most those who are most at risk; the poor, the elderly, the sick - with mental health provision being especially heavily affected. With the increased stress and worry, social divisions have become heightened.



Of course, neither of these things are accidental. There is no perceived crack that the Tories aren't happy to drive a wedge into for their own political gain. And the austerity programme itself was launched into with a barely suppressed glee that would have made Norman Tebbitt swoon. Because that is what the Conservative programme is all about, taking away the protections of the state - in either the mistaken belief that this is necessary hardship that will eventually prove a benefit, or a complete lack of concern over who is harmed and killed, depending on how charitable you're feeling.



Now, this Tory government is headed by a man who has been fired from several jobs for lying so blatantly it couldn't be ignored, who is so obviously self-serving that, on the eve of the Brexit referendum, he wrote newspaper articles arguing both for and against Brexit because he was undecided on which side would be most in his self interest.



I will have a great deal more to say in the coming weeks, but please register to vote if you aren't already, please actually cast your ballot. Please, please vote in a way that unseats a Tory MP or prevents one being elected.

Book Review: Stolen by Grace Blakely; a devastating review of a devastating economics

Blakely delivers a scathing, thorough and very readable account of why the move to 'financialisation' - that is, a vast portion of economic growth has moved to the finance sector rather than the manufacturing or service. As she puts it; the majority of wealth is in the hands of those who make their money from the money they have, rather than those who work for a living. Decades of regulation encouraging this behaviour, along with the selling off of public services and the financialisaton of public life has lead directly to the crash of 2007, austerity and the continuing economic uncertainty that has seen the driving down of wages in real terms.



Over each section Blakely lays out the history of how we got here with clarity - the Bretton Woods accord, the post war consensus, and the breaking of this with financial deregulation in the 70s and 80s - and the complete red in tooth and claw free for all since the end of the cold war. I've seen a few negative reviews where it has been said that the author "doesn't understand economics" which is patently untrue; she has a very through grasp of economic theory, and recognises that it is far from being the clear-cut science that many pretend, that it relies on assumptions in prejudices and and understanding that humans are not the 'rational actors' portrayed by classical economics.



Blakely very much wears her own bias on her sleeve - as well as lambasting right -wing economics she calls for socialist policies - but also criticises Keynes and Piketty where she feels they deserve it, while drawing on their good ideas.



After all this, however, I confess I struggled with the final chapter, on how we fix the situation. Partly, the author loses some of the readability in laying out her vision for the future; suddenly there is less verve and clarity, and it begins to read more like an academic paper. The other problem, though, is that she doesn't shy away from how huge a change needs to be made; it's not just the relatively minor legislation that a government can enact, but root and branch change not just on the level of that undertaken by the post-war Atlee government, but the far greater changes they proposed but were forced to back down from. Blakely also recognises that the forces of international capital would fight these changes before, during and after they were enacted. Frankly, the scale and difficulty of the changes she suggests are beyond daunting, but that doesn’t detract from their veracity.



Grace Blakely has given a vital critique of what many call late-stage capitalism, pointing out just how destructive it is, in so many ways, as well as a potential way forward, This book should be on every radical reading list, beside Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich and Rutger Bregman - and, if you’re wanting more optimism, The Spirit Level and The Optimist’s Guide to the Future.


( first published at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48201027-stolen )

Book Review: The Mongols by John Man

Author John Man takes us from the youth of Temujin, and how he became Genghis Khan and built an empire that crossed Asia into Europe, to his descendants - not just Ogedai and Kublai, but all the branches of his family, taking us into the internecine feuds and jostling for power while the empire Genghis has founded doubled in size, and then caused it to fracture and split.




He does a wonderful job of following the often tortuous paths of history with clarity, but also setting them in the context and feel of time and place; the attitudes of the lands and nations who faced the Mongols, well-argued reasons for why they fell or resisted. The canvas is vast, and he introduced me to many aspects of this history of which I was entirely unaware: the facts that the Turks were a earlier wave of settlers from the same part of the world, the Mongol conquest of the entirety of Asian Islam, the fact that European Christian crusaders allied with the Mongols on more than one occasion ( from a belief that they represented the mythical Eastern Christian emperor Prester John to simple practicality of fighting the same opponent ), the failed invasions of Vietnam and Japan, the off-hand remark that modern Pakistan was part of the empire. Each of these and more could fill volumes in their own right, and I hope I can find accounts written as well as this.




Not that this book is simply a brief overview, Man goes into detail that is substantial and in depth, but not overwhelming. Early on I had been perhaps a little disparaging of his narrative style, but that was entirely unfair; while quite different from the style of, say, Tom Holland, one of my personal favourites and a consummate writer of narrative histories. While initially it seems that Man is rushing through events and piling up detail, he circles back and suddenly he is building a narrative picture that has drawn the reader right into the heart of the story. His main achievement, though, is the way he connects the events to modern history, not only the China ( including how the Chinese claim Genghis for their own ) but Russia, the 'Stans, the Middle East and even how it moulded medieval Japan.




I do have to say that one problem with the book is the way he deals - or doesn't deal - with rape. This becomes especially apparent in a later section when he revisits the fact that one of Genghis' sons was viewed ( possibly correctly ) as illegitimate as his mother had been held captive by an enemy tribe for several months, as well as the fact of Y-chromosomes originating in Mongolia being widespread throughout Asia and Europe. He states these matters as simply that, without acknowledging the sexual violence implicit in both. I'm sure the author would say something along the lines of "it was a simple fact of how the world was then", but he doesn't say anything in the text and this omission, whether he feels it irrelevant, or is uncomfortable with the subject, leaves for me a troublesome gap that should at least have been recognised.

Story review: Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage by Alix B.Harrow

Wow.


This is one of the things I love about anthologies, that they are so often filled with perfect gems from authors I would not otherwise encounter. Alix Harrow's story is set in an alternative America where the land is resisting colonisation, where the native peoples have a connection with the land that, Mythago Wood-like, confound attempts to force settlement - but, while into the early 20th Century the United States has barely reached the Mississippi, it still seems that the technology and perseverance and cruelty of the European settlers will dominate.


The POV character is Oona, the progeny of a drunken Irishman and a native Amerind woman, employed through necessity as a Mapmaker, someone able to help the invaders find their way into the hostile land. Harrow wonderfully portrays the dichotomy of seeking to earn a living in the economy imposed by the white man while betraying her own heritage and a people who have shunned her half-breed nature. We also get a glimpse, via footnote, into wider world of native magic; of the headwaters of the Nile being an inland ocean populated by gods, of Ireland filled with hallucinatory mists and transient fairy mounds.


Just beautiful.

Story review: The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton

This is a tough one for me to score and review. As with the previous tales in the collection, the quality of the writing and construction show that these stories are indeed Some of the best. Here we have have a story told from the POV of the daughter of a scientist - born from self-cloning, and then pressured into being constantly enhanced into something more than human. Her mother is clearly brilliant, driven and insane and this leads to my issue with the piece; I loathe mad-scientist stories. I grew up on pulp and b-movie narrative where the world was destroyed by over-reaching, over-ambitious, arrogant or just plain evil and see the erosion in expertise this, in part, has lead to. It is a theme that has become part of our culture, repeated endlessly in lazy articles and online arguments. In reality, it is not science and scientists that cause the problems, nor even war and generals, but politics and politicians misusing the tools provided to them.



Now, I know that many of the great "destruction by science" tales are not about arrogant scientists at all, or barely so - the progenitor of the genre, Frankenstein, is misread as such, and is a deeper story about a search for meaning and a creator - but just reading that trope tends to set my teeth on edge.



However, that is my reaction to that aspect of the story and is, perhaps, rather unfair. Because this is a fabulous piece of writing. Burton suggests the world as a backdrop - it is in Rome, including the great structures such as the Colosseum and the Senate on the Capitoline Hill, ruled over by Caesar. Is this scientist a witch or an alchemist? But we get reference to other cities that were not contemporaries of classical Rome, and dropped references to technology that is distinctly modern. That fact that this left as no more than hints and never explained makes the backdrop tantalising and somehow mythical.



The first-person narration from the daughter, in the past tense further enhances the mythic quality, and a sense of doom; the story opens "Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained." So we know where this is going. The backbone of this story, like The Art of Space Travel, the previous one in the collection, is this mother/daughter relationship, although this is obviously far darker and more negative than that of Emily and Moolie, as mother pressures daughter (neither is given a name) through the promise of a fake love to become what the mother wants, despite her own wishes, but ultimately is saved by this and becomes greater than her parent.



You know, I think I've talked myself around.

Story review: Clover by Charlie Jane Anders: Transformation, luck & beauty

This is an utterly beautiful little story, a perfectly worked gem. A mostly black cat is gifted to a young couple with the promise it will bring luck, and things seem to go well - not miraculously well, but a steady streak of progress in their respective professions. Nine years later, to the day, another cat is delivered as a companion for the first. The first cat, Berkeley, doesn't seem to take to Clover and this disruption begins to reverse the good fortune of the previous years.



Charlie Jane Anders give this a fairy tale cadence throughout, which works perfectly. The unexpected gift of cats from strange men is odd, but within the tone this is not too strange to be accepted. Perhaps it is the cats, but there are hints of Murakami and, perhaps, Charles de Lint.



The tale itself is simple, that of a couple facing the ups and downs of life together, the one from whom we get the POV questioning himself when things go awry and paralysed with fear, unable to communicate. What makes it sparkle is that handling of tone and detail; the characters are minimally but artfully sketched with small details, and is the world. This is clearly a fantasy tale - as I say, a fairy story, with strange people delivering cats that (may) grant luck and may not be cats at all - but the brushed mise en scene suggests a world that is barely tomorrow - increased displacement of refugees, violence and intolerance. Actually, as it was published in 2016, perhaps we are in that tomorrow.



The whole is filled with compassion and flair and magic. We are left with lose threads but this is fine as they are part of the richness of the tapestry, and an acceptance that not having magical, external luck is simply normal life. If that maneki neko actually was any more than a placebo after all.



I see that the story is marked as All the Birds in the Sky 1.5. I've had that on my shelf for awhile, so I think it is due a read.




Original review at goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673995901

Book review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Tim Marshall presents an interesting book showing how, in so many ways, geography is destiny, how climate, along with access to arable land, navigable rivers, and suitable coastal seaports determines the level of success a nation can achieve and indeed - along with the seas, rivers, deserts and mountains that border it - the reasons a given area will even become a nation.



This in itself should not be especially revelatory - in his wonderful Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared Diamond give an extraordinarily well argued case of how these factors have shaped the history of humankind, and Marshall references this - but here the writer gives ten specific examples, focusing on recent history, current geopolitics, and the future. He is making the point that these factors seem to be something we have forgotten, that we have been blinded by the power of technology and how much it has shrunk the globe but, in fact, power - either economic or military - still relies on moving large amounts of material by land and/or sea.



He covers such things as Russia's lack of a warm-water port and single point of easy land access to Europe via the Northern European Plain and how this explains that Putin's focus on Ukraine is at least as much tactical as ideological. Why India and China have never had a major conflict, separated as they are by the greatest mountain range on Earth. Why any talk of a Latin American great economic power is premature to say the least, due to the all but insuperable terrain and, well, that it's just so damned far from the rest of world. How, once it gained control of the landmass via clever dealing/luck/genocide the United States was almost guaranteed dominance due to the terrain, climate, and positioning. (As an aside, he points out that annexing of Texas in 1836 was a close thing; how much would an opposite outcome have changed things?)



Marshall writes with clarity but, surprisingly given his pedigree as a journalist, rather drily. Perhaps this is a stylistic choice to let his assertions speak for themselves and grip the reader, which they generally do. While he mentions trade rather a lot, and food production and water availability, his focus is largely on how geography affects military movements (Russian tanks across the aforementioned Northern European Plain, Chinese warships through the Straits of Malacca, etc) and the transport of oil and gas. That this last currently tops all else for importance is difficult to argue with - the modern, and modernising, world runs on energy and fossil fuels are currently cheap and plentiful and (barring the increasingly obvious side effects of their use) incredibly efficient. Marshall seems to be implying increases in fossil fuel use - references to expansion of fields in South America, Africa, and the Arctic in particular - and not only is this depressing but his predictions barely touch on the effect of this use, and don't seem to account for the changes in climate in sea levels that they will bring.



This edition was revised in 2016, and I was constantly reminded of how some things have changed since publication. That Crimea is now part of Russia a startling but minor change. What kept leaping out were the points when discussing US influence around the world. For instance, in the sections on China and Korea & Japan, much was made of China's aggression nautical expansion and the pressure it is putting on its neighbours - throwing money at Pakistan and other places to develop friendly ports, or the threats toward South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the rest. The author regularly states that there is no percentage in countries switching allegiance despite China's best efforts while the US has their backs, and I could not help but think of Donald Trump's systematic dismantling of American diplomacy and soft power. OK, he may be out of the way in two years (or less!) but trust is easily lost and difficult to regain. When faced with both carrots and sticks from the new Asian proto-superpower and uncertainty on the reliability of the existing American one, it may not be a difficult decision. After all, to refocus and repurpose a quote from the book, "Beijing is close, and Washington is far away."


3.5 stars