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.