Book review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin: Not Quite the Sum of Its Parts

It's taken me a while to get around to this review, as I've really needed to cogitate on how I felt about this book.

I really loved aspects of this novel - quite a few aspects, actually - but overall I liked rather than loved the book as a whole, and it's taken me some thought as to work out why.

First off, the things I really liked: I loved the characterisation. I loved the premise. I loved the way Jemisin played with tropes - especially the Lovecraftian aspects, a thing that is very much in the zeitgeist at the moment with Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle and others. I loved the social commentary, even when it was far from subtle (the whiteness of the Enemy and the threat of gentrification chasing out the "real New Yorkers". The whole problem with Staten Island being part of New York, but separated - more because of White Flight and racism than a stretch of water.

But there was something that, for me, prevented the whole from coming together satisfactorily. I know it is the beginning of a series (although it follows on from the excellent short story The City Born Great) so that may be part of my issue with the structure, but it still seemed somehow lacking.

This book is very much a love-letter to New York City, to its resilience and culture and vibrancy, to its melting pot invention, its ability to absorb all comers and make them New Yorkers whilst allowing that diversity to add to its strength (not unique to NYC, of course; London is very much the modern prototype of this kind of metropolis).

I listened to the audiobook and must give a mention to the performer, Robin Miles. This is simply one of the finest readings of a book I have ever encountered, a full performance of character and subtlety and strength, aided by some superb production with the barest use of effects and music.

I may well amend this review - the book is clearly staying with me - and may well listen to or read it again before the next instalment.

A moment in time

I took this photo around eleven years ago. I’d been struggling with depression for a few years, leading me to lose my job. I’d been suicidal, had ups and downs, but been unable to pull myself out of the mire.

I had a wonderful girlfriend, who I’d met through work, and was living with her. She supported me, looked after me selflessly, and let me be a house husband and a step dad to her fantastic son.

But I couldn’t push the darkness away. I felt increasingly worthless and I’m sure some of that came out in my behaviour to her. Worse, I felt the depths returning - whether it was just the fluctuations of my brain chemistry, or the pressure of trying to be the good person I knew I needed to be but felt that I wasn’t.

I began to get terrified that the darkness would engulf me and this time take me, and one day she’d come back from work, having picked the boy up from school, and they’d find me bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

So, instead of trying to fix it, fix myself, I ran away.

I don’t know if she saw if coming, but one day I’d packed a bunch of my stuff into my backpack and waiting for her when she came home. I told her that I had to go away, for all of us, that I felt broken and couldn’t be there any more. I’d done it before but she didn’t let me go. This time she must have know I meant it, or just couldn’t take it any more.

“I’d have done anything for you,” she said.

I croaked out “I know.” I wanted to say but I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve you but that would have felt like begging to stay, and I really didn’t deserve that.

So I hurt her and the child who had come to see me as his father because I was hurting so much.

The next couple of years are hazy. I probably spent a lot of time laying on the floor trying not to feel anything. Somehow, I stayed alive.

I had a few lucky breaks that came along at times when I was able to take advantage of them. I connected with someone online who became a good friend, a nourishing relationship. I inherited a dog (on the second attempt; my sister had tried to get me to look after one dog that needed a home but I was far too angry with myself to be a good dog dad; the second time I was just up to the task, and the relationship, having to care for this other creature, helped me look after myself).

That lead to another thing. I’d joined a gym with my sister (again, thanks sis!) to try to regain the fitness I’d lost from all that lying around on the floor. We joined together so that we’d be letting someone else down if we didn’t go. She stopped after awhile anyway, but I really got into it (I’d always hated gyms). When I got my dog I thought “well, I walk him two or three times a day and never manage to burn off his crazy terrier energy. I’m sure running outside is just like the treadmill; let’s try that a couple of times a week!”

For the record, running outside is much harder than on a treadmill - especially as where I live “flat” is an alien concept - and I initially hated it. I stuck with it and, after about a month, something clicked. I became a runner, addicted to that endorphin lift and the trails and even the hills. I now run a half marathon at least once a month, have run a full marathon and, since I turn 50 next year, I’ve decided to run a 50k at some point to mark the occasion.

Then another thing cam along. I’d applied for hundreds of jobs and rarely got any response, bottled the few interviews I had because I was so nervous and unsure and afraid. Then one job I applied for gave me a callback. It was an emergency recruitment for a call centre who needed to take on a lot of staff, and didn’t have time for the normal interview process so were doing group assessments. Somehow, I came across as friendly and personable and competent and smart, and was hired on the spot. It was a sales job - inbound at least - but it was a job, and I found I was really good at talking to people on the phone.

Then, within a month of joining I was asked if I wanted to move to a more technical customer facing department. “It’ll be much more complicat-” I barely let my new boss finish the sentence “Christ, yes! Sales is making my brain leak out of my ears!” How had I come t believe in myself so quickly?

Life hasn’t always been easy. I had a couple of relationships that I wasn’t able to commit to. through fear. The depression and anxiety waxes and wanes but has never been as bad as it was eleven years ago when I took this picture.

I feel that I was so lucky. Firstly, that I survived this condition that came so close to killing me, that my sister did so much to help me (and the woman I hurt, and others), that my dog came along a point when I could return his love (he’s still with me and even though he likes to think he has the energy of a pup, his joints mean our outings are limited to walks), that a job fell into my lap and demonstrated that I had skills and intelligence and worth. There have been times I’ve almost been in tears when a customer has thanked me for going out of my way to help them.

I’m with someone else now. It’ll be five years next summer since we met at a comedy club. We don’t live together (partly as she has a cat and I have a crazy terrier) so maybe there’s less pressure, but sometimes I’m still terrified that I’ll hurt her. Early one she told me that she has a good bullshit detector and zero tolerance for it, though, so I count on that instinct.

So, if anyone reading this is going through any stage of the hell that is severe mental illness - as I once read, depression and anxiety together is its own special kind of hell - know that if you hold on things can get better. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, randomly - things can improve. Every day that you make it through is another chance to find light, to find joy, to find yourself.

You owe it to yourself to survive, and to those people who love you, and those people you don’t know yet who will come to love you.

( originally posted as an answer to a question on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-is-that-one-picture-that-describes-the-lowest-point-in-your-life/answer/Paul-Perry-6 )

Book review: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth: Rethinking the economy

 While I say that as well as fiction I read non-fiction, really I typically only read popular science, ancient history and some travel. One area that I never expected to be reading is the wannabe science of economics - but, as with politics, you might not take an interest in economics but it will take an interest in you.

There have been a slew of popular progressive economics books in recent years - from examinations of our broken system like John Lanchester’s Whoops! and Grace Blakely’s Stolen, to those that are more focused on looking at how we build better systems (The Spirit Level and Utopia for Realists), to the more hardcore economic theory (I swear I’ll get round to reading Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis!), and Kate Raworth’s book may be the best I’ve read at both outlining the problems and offering potential solutions in clear, straight-forward language.

It is an idea she has been presenting and working on for almost a decade. While her degree is in economics she was disenchanted by the blinkered, systematised thinking that shackles the discipline (as she points out early on, and again at the end of the book, while other social sciences seek out an encourage different ways of thinking, economists are taught that certain core principles are not to be questioned - no, more than that; they are indoctrinated into the mindset that there are no other ways of thinking.)

The idea of the doughnut is simply this: the hole in the middle is the lack of human dignity - insufficient food, water, shelter, healthcare, education. Those basics that we should allow to all people as a right.

The outer circle is the limit to which we can live with the finite resources of minerals, energy, food production, clean air, clean water.

The doughnut, therefore, is the space between those, where we as a species, as a culture, can provide a decent standard of living for every individual for the long term, without threatening the environment that we rely on for our survival.

It seems like almost too simple an idea - and an even simpler diagram, however she begins by pointing out how important visual signifiers are to us - the iconic map of the London Underground, Copernicus’ illustration of the heliocentric universe - the rising curve of progress and Paul Samualson’s simplistic Circular Flow diagram, picturing the economy as a closed loop that is taught in Econ 101 to this day. Raworth references sharing the ‘doughnut’ diagram with activists who respond effusively stating “YES! That is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to say!”

And if that was all this book was, it would be no more than an interesting idea. I am sure there are many who are happy to scoff exactly so without engaging, but Raworth both delves into the history of and problems with economic theory, and outlines ideas - both conceptual and real-world ideas actually being implemented - for how we can, and must, do things differently.

She points out how so many of the great economic theorists of the past are selectively understood - Samuelson knew his diagram was a simplification ad absurdum, of use as only the most broad idea for non-specialists; when Simon Kuznets came up with GDP as a measure of productivity, he specifically warned that it was necessarily a narrow measure that should not be used as a benchmark to gauge progress; back to John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (I always find it remarkable that most people who quote Smith appear completely ignorant of the half of his work in which he talks about social responsibility and warns against the dangers of subverting everything to the acquisition of wealth).

She thoroughly dismantles the consensus idea of economics that growth is the Ultimate Good (quoting a respected economist whom she doesn’t name, when asked why perpetual growth is possible simply responds “Because it has to be!”) to a more thorough debunking of some of the assumptions and models that underpin a pseudoscience that has come to dominate both public policy and public consciousness to a degree that neither the public nor policy makers feel they can question it.

On top of this, the author outlines the generalities of what we need from a new economics and gives examples that work in the real world, along with concepts that should be used in general. 

But this is not a utopian exercise; Raworth makes sure to state that change will be far from easy, and requires some extremely difficult choices. Nonetheless, the tenor of the book is ultimately hopeful, pointing out possible routes out of consumption-driven catastrophe to a future that is not only survivable and sustainable but equitable and regenerative, where we are not merely ameliorating the damage we do to our life support system but actively improving it.

I mostly consumed this via the audiobook, while dipping into the ebook - hence the sparsity of notes. I feel I need to go back for a closer read, to fully embed the ideas. I should do the same for some other books - the ones mentioned at the start of the review. For all the economics is a pseudoscience, it may be the most important factor in how we cope with the coming decades, impacting on everything from our jobs to the welfare state to climate change and alleviating mass extinctions, to production of food and energy and technology.

A must read, and must act on.

The world looks much more frightening through the cracks in the wall

OK, so that was weird.

I had my mental health assessment earlier this morning, a fairly straight-forward phone interview with a perfectly pleasant lass, mostly answering questions on a 0-4 (never, some days, most days, every day) or 0-8 (avoidance and impact of various mental states on various activities), then a more general discussion ahead of a more thorough consult. My throat clamped up a bit and at the end of it I had a little cry - just broaching these things is totes emosh when you've been doing everything possible to avoid it - then I headed out on my bike to do some chores (and clear my head, truth be told). I got back, had lunch and suddenly decided to put on music and do housework.

Before you could say White Winged Dove, I was boogying away to Stevie Nicks (don't you dare judge me) all over the house wielding the vacuum cleaner like I was Freddie Mercury wanting to break free. Cool, I thought, I guess that's just the elation of release, because I'm finally doing something about it. Then Leather and Lace came on. I sang along with Stevie's part and dropped my voice for Don Henley's and suddenly my throat contracted on "Could you ever love a man like me?"

That's it. I was done. I'd fallen from elation to despair in a moment and it was all I could do not to collapse in a heap. I know how I feel about myself, was it that? AM I so fragile? This had never been "our song" with any of my partners, but it did take me back to the time my first relationship, my longest by far, my most painful breakup. Was it every failure since, every time I've run away or sabotaged a relationship before it could - as it inevitably would - end of its own accord?

Or is it just that my emotions are opening up, ever so slightly, after being buried? Is this why I've built this shell around myself, because I'm afraid of truly feeling anything, afraid that I can't control my emotions and they might destroy me as they almost have before.

I need to try to be brave enough to face the world outside, but it takes a lot. Facing it without the shell is all the harder. And if I'm having this much trouble listening to Stevie, who knows when I'll be up to Judie.

Book review: Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman: Are we the bad guys?

Starting as dusk gathers on Brighton pier and the evening strollers are transfixed by a murmuration of starlings, Julian Hoffman takes us around the world showing us how human activity is ravaging the wonders of nature that both nourish our sense of wonder and are vital to our health and wellbeing as part of a thriving ecosystem. It is not a happy book. The awe that Hoffman superbly captures at the beauty of the natural world only underlines what we are destroying by our wilful blindness and our obsession with economic growth and measuring everything with a short-term monetary value. From a previously unknown species of spider in an abandoned English quarry to the magnificent Balkan lynx and the few scraps of tallgrass prairie in the American midwest, we are pushing out irreplaceable biodiversity with roads and shopping malls and monocultured crops. 

The author makes it clear he is not merely arguing for preservation for nature for its own sake, but because it is vital to human health and survival in the short, medium and long term. In one chapter he writes about an established set of allotments in London that not only provides food for locals but an area of green growth teeming with life, and an area of abandoned "waste ground" in Glasgow that nearby residents have turned into a park and nature reserve. Both are under threat from development and he begins by telling us "Of the following two places, one will be saved, the other destroyed." 

He does show us successes, and how small groups of determined people can fight and even sometimes win against the encroachment - as well as the above, there is some success on those tallgrass prairies, a patch of ancient woodland not five miles from where I write this (which, along with mention of other Sheffield woods in which I played as a child and have visited regularly since really brought home the value, as if that personal connection were needed), the former British Army testing site that, due to the danger of left-over munitions has remained undeveloped and become a remarkably vibrant and important habitat. The rejection of a new motorway that would destroy much of the Gwent Levels on the South Wales coast. 

However, despite this, I was left feeling bleak at the prospects. Yes, I am a depressive and currently managing a particularly low patch which may feed into my pessimism, but these patches seem so fragile, so vulnerable, so at odds with the economic forces that see everything as a resource to be exploited. In his final chapter he points out how many pieces of good fortune were needed to ensure that we still have a few slivers of the Cambridgeshire Fens that are undeveloped, and when we see that a drug for cattle is approved in Europe despite evidence that it is responsible for almost eradicating vultures when used in India, or that - despite a law and specific court orders making mining small islands in Indonesia completely illegal, this is openly ignored and corporations land heavy equipment to strip the vegetation and topsoil to scour the minerals beneath, causing run-off that buries and poisons the most valuable reefs on the planet, I find it difficult to hold out hope of change. 

I have known since I was young that talk of "destroying the Earth" is pure hubris. We are a blip on this planet and, whatever we do, it will continue and repopulate itself with new organisms, new diversity. We are here now, for this moment, and have a choice of how to treat our home and the creatures we share it with, a choice for the legacy we leave our children and grand children and great grand children. 

Still, as the cartoon says, for a brief glorious moment we had great shareholder value. 

Increasingly, I think I'm on the side of the David Morse character in 12 Monkeys.

Book review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

 Wow.

As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.

One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.

The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.

Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")

Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.

I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".

A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

Book review: The Compelled by Adam Roberts: half-built things

 Adam Roberts is the king of High Concept Science Fiction. His novels tend to be based on a single odd concept which he uses as a jumping off point to explore society, attitudes and people; in On, a civilisation that lives in caves and on ledges on an apparently endless cliff, in The Snow a weird apocalypse caused by eternal snowfall that buries the entire surface of the Earth to hundreds of metres.

In The Compelled, the world has been gripped by "The Compulsion", where random individuals are overtaken by the irresistible urge to take seemingly arbitrary items and collect them in huge sculptures, illustrated at the beginning of each chapter with wonderfully geometric otherworldliness by Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten.

There are as many theories as sculptures (or machines?) - that it is the work of demons or aliens or Gaia herself - but as we join the story the world has largely come to terms with the Compelled and their actions, albeit that the world economy is in recession due to the disruption caused. Police have learnt to deal with the not-theft and have procedures to differentiate from those who are simply crooks using it as an excuse, and some nations give licences to those who have demonstrated they are true victims of the Compulsion.

Chapters alternate through a disparate section of society, all Compelled or Compelled-adjacent, such as the social worker whose job it is to determine Compelled from Chancer (someone demanding all the cash from a bank or to have sex with a certain movie star because they say they are "compelled to do so" seems eye-rollingly common).

As so often with Roberts' work, what could be silly in other hands is turned, by the depth and deftness of his insights and quality of his writing, into something quite special and moving.

Roberts doesn't always nail the dismount, occasionally leaving things feeling unfinished. In this case that is literally situation as just as it seems we might be gaining some insight into what is really going on, he hits us with

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

Personally, I hope he doesn't leave us hanging too long, as I bloody loved this book.

Nine years running

 It's struck me that I've been running for nine years - and, boy, are my legs tired! Ba-dum.

I started running some time after my fortieth birthday, in the summer I think. As I turn fifty next March, I've decided to aim to run a 50k+ at some point that year to mark the occasion. The furthest I've ever run is a marathon - so 42.2 km - and that was the York marathon five years ago (five years today, in fact, as my Facebook memory reminds me).

I do run a half marathon just about every month, so with steady training it shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Events are always something to aim for so I may see if I can find an Ultra near me that isn't going to be too beyond my abilities.

Any advice for an event, or ramping up to that distance, will be gratefully received.

Book review: Recursion by Blake Crouch, in which I somehow don't use the phrase "mind fuck"

 Time travel stories are tricky beasts. So often the author can be tied up in knots by trying to be too clever in their plotting, or simply by using the idea of changing the past as an excuse to propel the story at the expense of internal or character consistency.

But when done well, it can give us a doozy of a story, and Crouch manages this magnificently.

While he's been on my radar - and my TBR pile - for some time, this is my first of his books, and grabbed me from the get go. The idea of False Memory Syndrome dangled an intriguing thread, immediately making me want to know where this would lead, and the author's prose is as cinematic, fluid and immediate as any top-drawer thriller writer, the kind of writing that mostly disappears as the reader is simply immersed in the tale - but, thankfully, with a deftness of characterisation that is so often missing from these writers.

He sets up the parallel tales of cop Barry Sutton, drawn into the suicide of a woman assailed by a double set of memories, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist driven to find a way to recover memories as a treatment for dementia, and weaves them together in a way I honestly didn't see coming. About a third of the way through threads seem about to wound up before Crouch hits us like a truck coming out of the darkness with the real concept, sending the book spiralling off in recursive loops and increasingly extreme outcomes that could quite easily have felt too much had they not been handled so well. 

(It's around this switch where I found the only sour note in the whole book; Barry's character reactions just seem completely off, given that he has just remembered is while previous life and both losing and regaining his daughter, his actions and interactions with Helena seem unaffected by this emotional maelstrom. However, as this is just prior to the Big Reveal, I'm happy to put it down to Crouch perhaps concentrating on what is to come.)

As well as the plotting and wonderful time travel premise (which is compelling enough for me to suspend my disbelief, even though I find it no more credible than magic or faster-than-light travel), the novel is fascinating due to the way the author writes character and uses the alternative timelines. That he shows Barry's marriage didn't fail because of his daughter's death, how characters are affected by their circumstances - even though Barry and Helena fit perfectly together and cherish the lifetimes they spend together, their is no clumsy hint of their being twin souls that are meant to be and will always find each other no matter what; having found each other, they need to make the effort to ensure they do so in each subsequent timeline, and this is reinforced by the ending that leaves open that, having now found each other so much later in life than previously, there is no guarantee that the people they now are will click in the same way.

Another bit of genius is the idea of the "dead timelines", where the alternatives cease to exist except as memories. There's a debate in science fiction that the many universes idea as it pertains to time travel can both be used as a lazy get out of jail free card and can also represent a callous indifference to the fate of others, as explored brilliantly in the TV show Rick and Morty, where realities are discarded with abandon when things go awry. In Recursion, Blake Crouch explicitly foregrounds how going back in time to change things for your own advantage - saving a daughter from a speeding driver, rescuing a failed relationship, focussing on a professional project that you'd allowed yourself to be distracted from - will have repercussions for other people that you cannot even begin to comprehend and, while he could have written a story in which these repercussions remain relatively small scale and personal, I quite like the Roland Emmerich-type extremes to which he takes it.

Blake Crouch has written a high-concept scifi thriller that drags you along and leaves you both open-mouthed and thinking. Perhaps it's not In Search of Lost Time or Solaris, but it is a damned-near perfect scifi thriller.

Five well deserved stars.

Review originally published on goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3585601013

The unexamined life is not worth living, and I am too frightened to examine my life.

I barely live it, drifting day to day in a haze, numbing myself with alcohol and porn and pointless online arguments.

I feel utterly paralysed, unable to move because I cannot see more than a few millimetres in any direction. I had dreams of writing but am afraid to find out that I have nothing to say, afraid to to try an fail and, although I know that not trying is a greater failure still, I seem to prefer the certainty of that than the unknown failure beyond.

This is depression, of course. I recognise that I have sunk into its coldly comforting embrace again, although I have never truly been free of it. I know this is not the worst I have been - I am not lying vacantly on the floor for hours or making complicated plans to end myself (in retrospect the complexity being something a a survival strategy, part of me knowing that I just needed to survive long enough for the urge to pass).

But I feel I am fighting terror. No, not fighting - holding it at bay, covering my eyes so as not to recognise it like the monster in the closet.

Not fighting. Letting myself sink.

Small random acts of sensible mercy

 I killed a rabbit last night.

I was cycling home from my girlfriend's flat, in the dark, in the rain. Going up Langsett Road toward Hillsborough, very little traffic although it was only around 9 pm. A car flashed past in the opposite direction, white headlights then red tail lights reflecting on the wet tarmac and the tram tracks, and suddenly there was this long furry shape twitching in the road.

It must have chosen that moment to run across the road, just in time to be hit by that random car. Behind the shops and flats on that side are allotments and there's a stretch of woodland on this side so, even though we're barely a mile from the city centre, there's a good bit of wildlife.

The rabbit seemed huge, stretched out perhaps two feet I reckon, fur slick and seeming golden in the streetlights. It must've been still trying to run but every time it tried it would just twitch with enough force to spring into the air before landing, broken backed, on its side again. I stopped my bike and watched for long seconds, but it wasn't ready to die yet. Another car or bus or tram might be along any time to finish the job, or maybe not, and who knew what pain and terror the rabbit was going through.

So, leaving my bike on the wet pavement I walked across the road. "Hello, rabbit. I'm sorry." It seemed only polite to say something, to acknowledge the creature. The heel of my shoe came down twice on the delicate skull and it stopped twitching forever. I stood for a few moments wondering whether to just leave it there, but moved it to the undergrowth beneath the copse of trees; I wouldn't want any foxes or crows feeding on the carrion to meet the same fate, the rabbit become grisly cheese in a weird mousetrap.

I can't help wonder if anyone was watching from one of the windows of the low-rise flats to see me, a figure in the rain-drenched dark stamping on some helpless furry creature, how such a tableau may have looked, my small act of mercy some random horror.

Perhaps there's a lesson in there about perspective and needing the full facts, or perhaps I'm overthinking things.

Book review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by KJ Parker: Grimdark with jokes

I’ve been reading Tom Holt since Expecting Someone Taller in the early 90s, and KJ Parker since stumbling across the Shadow trilogy in the 2000s, and wasn’t aware for a long time that the latter was a pseudonym for the former - or, to be more contemporaneous, that many people suspected KJ Parker was a pseudonym for a well-known writer, and there was quite heated discussion within the community as to their identity.




Not that I’d have been that interested - I’ve always been more interested in the work than the personalities behind it - but I don’t think I’d ever have linked the authors. Holt’s funny, frenetic, while learned and very English style seemed (to me) to bear very little relation to Parker’s dark, foreboding, intricately-plotted tales of individuals fighting fate and obsession to a level that changed the course of nations. Indeed, it didn’t even occur to me to compare the two until a friend mentioned the potential connection.




I mention this because this is the first KJ Parker book I’ve read that has been written since the connection has been acknowledged, and I don’t think it can be coincidental that, in many places, this seems like a blending of the two styles. Mixed in with the story of the military engineer colonel, a former slave and displaced person who has risen through the ranks of an imperial army due to his skill and knowledge but is no soldier, much of the tone is comic; Orhan ( the protagonist in question ) from the start feels out of his depth, apparently muddling through a situation where disasters seem to be multiplying exponentially. The difference in tone to the Scavenger and Engineer books, with their pace driven by the protagonists’ obsession and friction between destiny and self-determinism, could hardly be more marked.




Early on, I confess that this tone kept my opinion lower than it might have been - I’m certainly not against levity in grimdark fantasy ( the master of this is Joe Abercrombie who can take you from belly laughs to stark horror and back again in the space of a few pages ), so perhaps the fault was in my own comparing of the evident clash of styles.



Soon enough, however, I found myself entirely carried forward with the story. Orhan and his regiment of engineers find themselves at the capital city of the mighty Robur empire ( there are many references to classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Constantinople - and I’m sure others I missed ) just as things seem to be falling apart, and Orhan may be the only hope of saving it. Or at least saving the city. Or at least saving his friends. Or at least saving himself.




The tale is pure KJ Parker - overwhelming odds, intricate and surprising plotting, moral ambiguity, incredible detail on technologies of carpentry and metallurgy and siege-craft without detracting from the story - shot through with humour, almost entirely based on the fact that we see it all from the point of view of a character with both too little belief in his own brilliance and the knowledge - or arrogance - that only he can save the day.




On top of which, because Parker/Holt is a very good writer, we have multiple themes of privilege - sexism and racism, especially based around the fact that Orhan is a “milk-face” northerner, facing prejudice and legal restrictions amongst the dark-skinned Robur ( especially due to a scene at a drinking fountain, I’m confident that this is purely an artistic choice and definitely not some “whites are the real oppressed people!” shtick. This shouldn’t even need saying, but have you seen the world? ) and, especially, the meaning of loyalty and friendship and belonging.




Perhaps secondary characters are well-sketched rather than fully formed, although this can be excused as the whole book is from Orhan’s first-person viewpoint - and the author cleverly plays with our expectations when we find he has, indeed, been dictating the story to a scribe - but this is a fine example of modern fantasy, exciting and referential and thought-provoking. I reckon any expectation of style is entirely on me and, frankly, it must be pretty bloody difficult to keep up the level of grimness from the earlier KJ Parker trilogies.

Book review: The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane: poetry of the outer and inner landscape

In The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane sets out to find if there are any such environments left within the British Isles. The book begins contemplatively, with the author journeying to one of his favourite local places, a beech wood outside the city of Cambridge where he lives, climbing a tree as is his wont, so he can sit and observe, and be part of, this sylvan idyll.



This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality of MacFarlane’s prose is quietly spectacular, largely understated but with the rhythms of good poetry and this, combined with his eye for detail and a mind that connects the landscape and the animals and our inhabitation along with more personal experiences, make the book extraordinary.



Over fifteen chapters MacFarlane travels across Britain, and to Ireland, to experience the places he considers most “wild” and natural, initially using as a guide the travels of the legendary Irish King Sweeney, who was made to wander the wild places as a beast following an act of betrayal.



From the island of Ynys Enlii, off the Lleyn Peninsula, where Wales reaches it most Western point toward Ireland, on to Scotland - to Coriusk on Skye, Rannoch Moor, Coille Dubh ( The Black Wood ), Strathnaver and Ben Klibreck, Cape Wrath and Ben Hope before crossing the Irish Sea to the desolation of the Burren. MacFarlane finds even more poetry in these places than their evocative names suggest - along with the rest of his journey, to the high ridges of the Lakeland fells, the Kentish Holloways, the storm-lashed beaches of Norfolk, Essex saltmarshes and, finally, my own back yard, the moors above Hope Valley in the High Peak. His writing conjures the landscape like nobody I’ve read, the individual feel and sense and rhythm of each place, drawing the reader to it - even when, as in attempting to spend the night on the frozen Ben Hope in Northern Scotland, for the first time he feels how truly hostile a place can be and is genuinely afraid.



Each section of travelogue is also woven through with skeins of history - both of the regions, and more personal history. This becomes more pointed when MacFarlane’s friend Roger, with whom he has discussed many of his trips, have shared ideas and thoughts like the oldest of friends, who has accompanied him on several excursions, falls suddenly ill.



The final trip to the Peak District brings the book full circle, as he is shown where to find snow hares by John, who had piloted the boat out to Ynys Enlii, and then a final coda where MacFarlane returns once more to the beech wood. He may have found that there is, perhaps, no true wilderness in the British Isles, in that there is no land that has not been shaped by humanity and our works, but that the wild is still there to be appreciated and respected, should we wish to look for it, that we need to protect it for our own health and benefit, but it the wild places will be there long after we have gone.




5/5, and an instant addition to the Favourites shelf