flying_monkey's reviews
499 reviews

Set in the world of Borne, this is a typically lyrical, sometimes oblique and always melancholy tale of a genetically-engineered bird-woman who escapes from the laboratory where she was created into the even more dangerous post-apocalyptic world outside. It seems that you either like VanderMeer or you don't. I do. 

Surprisingly fresh and highly sociological South American set new wave SF novel from 1965, with a transport planning consultant - not many novels feature planners as protagonists! - getting caught up in corruption, murder, mayhem, class war and... chess, in a supposedly ideal purpose-built city built by a dictator. Only slightly dated and recommended.

The latest New York-set Leonid McGill PI novel delivers a reliably hardboiled crime story. Full review to come.

Banana Yoshimoto was one of my favourite authors when I was younger, when Kitchen and NP came out in English, and she's produced sporadically interesting books ever since. Broadly speaking they all contain a combination of love, loss, community and food, often with a dash of the supernatural. Moshi Moshi was originally written as a newspaper serial, which explains some of the repetition / periodic updating that takes place in the story. It is narrated by a young woman in her early 20s called Yoshie, whose musician father has recently died, killed in a murder-suicide by a woman neither she nor her mother knew. After the loss, she ups and moves from her privileged neighbourhood, Meguro, to the a grimier, hipper area of Tokyo, Shimokitazawa. One feature of the book is that most of the characters and places are only very thinly fictionalized versions of real people and places. The cafés, restaurants and even the neighbourhood itself are all based on the real Shimokitazawa, or at least the Shimokitazawa that was: Yoshimoto makes it clear in her afterword, which is as political as I've ever seen her be, that the neighbourhood is being destroyed by the march of chainstores and gentrification, like so many other similar neighbourhoods in Tokyo or any other major world city. Yoshie, who has trained in food service, finds a job in a perfect little bistro run by an older woman she admires, and then just when she thinks she's finding herself, her mother pitches up at her tiny apartment and announces she's going to live there with Yoshie for a while. In fact, her mother, who had lived all the time Yoshie has known her as a "Meguro madam", the kind of pefectly-groomed, upper middle-class Japanese wife and mother you'll immediately recognise if you've lived in Japan, seems to fit even more easily into boho Shimokitazawa than Yoshie does, and is soon wearing funky 2nd-hand threads and working in a tea shop. Yoshie gets involved with a man she thinks she loves, and then all kinds of events force change and reconsideration on her.
 
 So far, so mundane, right? This sounds like a typical Japanese 'woman's novel.' But it's really not. Banana Yoshimoto has always had more than an edge of the perverse and the creepy. She's not, as some of the goodreads reviews seem to think, in any way 'cute' (I wonder if these people just think everything Japanese is cute). The weirdness starts with the whole situation with Yoshie's father and the mysterious women, who is not only portrayed as having some kind of supernatural power over men, but also quite early on is revealed to be a long-lost but close blood relative. The suggestions of ghostliness and incest don't end there either. Yoshie's father may or may not be haunting their old apartment. Yoshie's sexual relationships in the novel both have a direct connection to her dead father, one of them, because of the way in which Yoshie knows the man concerned, seems almost more incestuous then her father's relationship with the 'devil-woman'.
 
 None of this really goes anywhere, and it's all treated as simply part of Yoshie growing up, but I think it would be a mistake to treat this novel as superficial as some reviewers do. Like a lot of Japanese art, it's the space inbetween that says a great deal, and what is left unwritten, what is not admitted by our narrator (why does everyone trust her account anyway?) is as interesting as what is written and said. There are hints of this throughout - the bright and hard-working Yoshie makes several references to her 'other' side, her darkness and perversion, and its intriguing to imagine a whole shadow novel that narrates things entirely from this side.

 

Probably the most challenging and socially conscious of this series so far that deals with some difficult issues as Finland struggles to cope with immigration and its place in the world. 

Over the course of novels 6 to 10 in this series, Maria Kallio grows as a character, and the themes also get more socially conscious and more politically pointed. In many ways, while Lehtolainen is still not a Scandi-noir author, she's clearly been influenced by the international success of the darker and more serious tone of fiction from other Scandanavian countries. However, she is also not a simple moralizer and she doesn't offer obvious ideologically-driven answers. The latest novel in particular, which deals with a number of cases involving young immigrant girls tries doesn't offer us a serial killer or even one kind of crime, rather each girl represents a different way in which immigration has changed Finnish society and impacted both Finns and immigrants alike. It isn't quite as satisfying as the author would like, but it's a valiant attempt at using crime fiction as constructive political dialogue, while also maintaining enough tension and mystery to make it readable within the conventions of the genre.
 
 Kallio herself has changed too - we no longer get the mentions of her reading old British detection fiction - it's like she's finally become a real character who isn't just made of aspects of the author's interests. Kallio's progress through these novels is quite fascinating, although not always convincing. In Book 6, she's about to come back to the Espoo Violent Crime Unit from maternity leave and gets involved in a murky mystery involving the apparently accidental death of an environmentalist, who happens to be an ex-boyfriend (overlaps between cases and personal life continue to be a feature of these books, to the point where Finland starts to seem like a village rather than a country...). By the next book, she's the Commander of the VCU, and has to deal with the murder of a local councillor. In Book 8, it's the media and rally car racing in the spotlight with the murder of a sports journalist, but the reveal is something of a letdown and doesn't seem like anyone would really care enough about the great secret to actually kill anyone over it. Book 9 is where things start to get darker with Kallio having to deal with the sex trade, which ends up being so traumatic that she quits her job. So in Book 10, she's a researcher for the Minstry that controls the police but is forced back into policing but in a special role that brings her into conflict with her successor as Commander of the VCU and some of her former colleagues. This book is probably one of the worst of the series because everything seems a bit contrived. The most telling parts are really in the relationships we have with her family - her partner and, eventually, two children and two cats. I don't actually know of another good crime series that puts a woman raising a family at the heart of things and so carefully balances the domestic against the often traumatic realities of life as a specialist in violent crime.