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: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway: Catabasis for Democracy, with Shark

I'll admit up front that Harkaway's debut, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favourite books and his subsequent novels aren't too shabby either, but his fourth is quite remarkable. It is set partially in a near-future Britain run by the System, a data network that both organises the citizenry into an active direct democracy and keeps their lives efficient and safe. Data privacy is a thing of the past; you can query someone's identity and life by direct access to the System and Harkaway skillfully shows how this affects social mores.




This set up, of course, immediately makes the hairs of discomfort prickle on the napes of our necks; whether liberal or conservative or whatever mix, such phrases as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", "Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither" and "Panopticon" cannot help but spring to mind, thought the author does an excellent job of being even-handed in his presentation of the view.




The book starts with a death of a subject in interrogation by the Witness, the security arm of the System. This is presented as a unique occurrence, and immediately taken seriously and handed to the talented and driven Inspector Mielikki Neith. The manner of the interrogation is disturbing and reinforces fears about the ubiquitously invasive arm of the state, but this is leavened over time by the seriousness with which this event is treated and, well, by the fact that the System seems to work, and seems to be benevolent and effective.




I had said the book is set partially here. We soon are introduced to narratives which seem entirely unrelated - centred around a brilliant Greek mathematician who, following personal tragedy, has turned his skills to the stock market; the former lover of the 4th/5th century Bishop Augustine of Hippo, herself a philosopher and alchemist; and a talented Ethiopian artist who (barely) escaped his country for England in the political chaos following the fall of Haile Selassie.




Each thread is superbly written, capturing the differing voices and setting and moods. The writing contains a density of allusion and meaning and texture - yet with a lightness of touch - that immediately brought to mind Umberto Eco or Neal Stephenson at his more focused, and Paul Auster. It seems clear that these stories cannot be divergent and Harkaway indeed begins to weaves threads between them, though some of the clues turn out to be fish that, at the least, seem to be scarlet in certain light.




In weaving the threads together we are treated to an exploration of liberty versus safety and convenience, public transparency and the dangers of the malicious hacking of the democratic process (I cannot possibly imagine where that last idea came from...) but, as well as the clues to the central mystery, the nested narratives also show real human stories of tragedy and love and loss and betrayal and reconciliation and hope. There are also some beautiful metaphors about books, and the power of good ideas and arguments to succeed by literally changing the person who hears them.




This novel is a tour-de-force, brilliant and important and a bloody fantastic read. It could be argued that, toward the end, Harkaway explains things a little too clearly and leaves less ambiguity than Eco or Auster would, but this is, I think, due to the wider audience for whom he is writing; frankly, this book already asks a great deal of the reader and such ambiguities on top of that are not to the taste of a lot of people. However, this book deserves plaudits and huge sales and awards scifi and literary alike. It will stay with me for a long time and I am sure that, when i re-read it, I will find layers I missed this time around.




A word on format. I read this on my Kindle, partly as the 700 page paperback appears to be printed in 8-point font (yes, the info page says 11.5-point, but I suspect that to be the System gaslighting me) and found this all the more useful as I could immediately check unfamiliar words and references. If you are reading a hard copy and don't have a thorough knowledge of Greek mythology, I suggest keeping close to wikipedia.



( originally published on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2059658585?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1 )

Book Review: Voices (Annals of the Western Shore 2) by Ursula K le Guin

Le Guin is rightly famed for her novels of the late 1960s and the 1970s such as the Earthsea books, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, but she has never let up and has been a force in science fiction, fantasy and indeed literature for almost 60 years now. This, the middle volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, shows just why; she writes prose as lucid and powerful as almost any writer I can think of, characters that walk the line between tale-tellers archetype and fully three dimensional human beings, and infuses the whole with a humanity and relevance that is breathtaking. She writes great stories that are made epic by the inclusion of a meaning that is apparent but never heavy handed, that never overwhelms the tale but lifts it.



Voices finds a great, ancient city of learning that has been subjugated for seventeen years by a foreign power whose singular god considers any other deities to be demons and any books or writing blasphemy, and a girl - child of a violation during the invasion - who has grown up tending the remains of a secret library and is witness to, and instrumental in, a great change.



As wonderful as the first volume, Gifts, leaving me a little sad that there is only one book remaining.

Book Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski: may's amazing maze, a paradox of pages

Wow. Where to start?


Very little can clearly and definitively be stated about Mark Danielewki’s book; it is dense and confusing, it is playful and frustrating. It is a work of either genius or a huge illusion of smoke and mirrors. I certainly lean toward the former.


The story of the main text is that of a supposedly famous film by Will Navidson, a celebrated photojournalist, settling down from his travels on assignment around with world with his partner and children in a house in Virginia, only for a strange hallway to open up in the house that seems to defy both the dimensions of the building and the laws of geometry. It is this central plot that leads the novel (some would even argue with that noun although, while he plays with the form and stretches it, a novel it certainly is) to be filed under ‘horror’.


This text, however, is being presented as an unfinished manuscript by a blind author Zampano, discovered and edited by one Johnny Truant, an Angelino apprenticed at a tattoo parlour in the city. Johnny’s footnotes become longer and more invasive, appearing often to have little to do with the text and frequently running on for pages at a time - on top of footnotes by the mysterious Zampano, so Johnny’s footnotes are often secondary, and become increasingly nested, to the point of absurdity, in some cases leading to appendices which are footnoted “missing”.


This textual confusion is furthered by the inclusion of many quotes from cultural arbiters and experts - interviews with Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick, criticism from Jacques Derrida and Camille Paglia and Hunter S. Thompson - and many others more obscure and, indeed, entirely fictional. Actually, while this film is written about as being a defining cultural moment, Johnny himself has never heard of it. The text and Johnny’s footnotes are presented in presented in different fonts and, as the impossible labyrinth within the house is explored Danielewski introduces increasingly bizarre text layouts - text directionality changing on the page, being printed upside down, notes embedded in the middle of the main text, words being as important for their pattern on the page as their meaning.


So, what is the book about? It could be read as the story of the impossible house, although the reader would have to ignore a massive amount of the book (there is actually a wonderful radio adaptation which does an admirable job of dramatising this aspect), the hallway and labyrinth to which it leads can be read as a metaphor for the problems in the relationship between Navidson and Karen - but Johnny’s story is even more interesting and obscure. One of the appendices is The Whalestoe Letters, correspondence from Johnny’s institutionalised mother, which makes (some) sense of  some of his own background. Do the rest of the appendices add to the tale? The odd poetry and notes and quotes and sketches? I don’t know, but it all feels like it belongs. Is everything David Lynch includes in a script meaningful, or is he sometimes just fucking with us? Even if he is, if it still adds to the stor, it still belongs.


Some of Danielewski’s influences are clear - I see Borges and Calvino and Alasdair Gray, and I know there are many, many I miss - but the book is so beautifully constructed, so much its own thing (and so knowingly self-referential) that reference spotting never spoils the ride. I have no doubt that this is a work of utter genius to which i will return, if only to see what I’ve missed on a first reading.