flying_monkey's reviews
499 reviews

I just picked this up because it was a deal in the Kindle store, and because I saw Hutch race back when I was a semi-serious cyclist. This is an effective combination of autobiographical reflection and sports science, as the author, a former pro-cyclist seeks to understand why he, despite having extraordinary biophysical gifts (even compared to other pros), never quite made the top level. He reflects on his own career and discusses the fads and fashions in diet and lifestyle that athletes have pursued over the last 30 years, and talks to other athletes, coaches and researchers about what really makes a difference and makes you, well... faster. It's of interest to anyone who has ever been (or could have been) any kind of athlete or has taken any kind of sport seriously (but probably no-one else!). Hutch has a wryly amusing style and is never anything other than direct and honest about himself.

This novel brings the Sprawl Trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, and it's a lot more complex and fast-moving than Count Zero. It still stands up to scrutiny, and I love the computing-future-that-never-happened aspect of it all as much as the worst aspects of the world Gibson created, which are essentially where we are living now (or soon will be)

Continuing my sporadic (re)reading of Eco's work, comes this big novel from 2006, which is, like Queen Loana (above), one of those Eco novels in which the protagonist, facing some kind of crisis, re-examines his (and it is always his) life, loves and the nature of existence. The other type of Eco novel is the historical-conspiratorial shaggy dog story as in Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino or The Prague Cemetary. I have decided that I vastly prefer the latter. The Island of the Day Before starts in the mid-seventeenth century, with a still relatively young Italian, Roberto, marooned on an apparently empty ship, the Daphne, moored off a mysterious South Pacific island, that may be in the Solomon Islands or maybe not - either way Roberto cannot reach it because he cannot swim. His story is told by an anonymous and somewhat sceptical narrator who has supposedly acquired the papers upon which he set down both his real life story and his romantic fictions and philosophical speculations, despite being, as the narrator keeps reminding us, no real philosopher (and only weakly acquainted with writing fiction).

The story is anchored by two things: firstly, Roberto's failure in love and his continued desire for a perfect blonde woman he only vaguely knew (another tiresome late period Eco trope) while living in Paris amongst the natural philosophers and libertines, and who he comes to associate with a rare orange dove suposedly found on the nearby island; and secondly, the search for a reliable way of ascertaining longitude, a quest which obessed the amateur scientists and engineers of the period. The title comes from the notion that the international date line, upon or near which the Daphne sits, is the point at which yesterday becomes today or today becomes tomorrow, or both, a notion which starts to play an increasingly large role in Roberto's fevered imagination of his beloved and how he might be (re)united with her.

It would all be so good, were it not for the fact that the whole book is pretty much entirely diversion, and extended and not very profound reflections on everything from biology to space-time and god. And these reflections can't be that profound because Roberto, the protagonist, isn't that profound, and so we have pages and pages of mediocre speculation in verbose early modern fashion that read like the seventeenth century equivalent of a stoned undergraduate. 

Not his best.

In early 2019, my friend, Tim Maughan published his excellent novel of the end of the internet / technology, Infinite Detail. It got some attention, even appearing on a few book of the year shortlists. At the back end of 2020, almost 2 years on, we have two novels with a similar premise, one, The Silence, by increasingly pretentious twerp, Don DeLillo, and the other, this one, The Arrrest, by the former bright young hope of American literature, Jonathan Lethem. Both are being praised as unprecedented and 'original'. They clearly aren't either - even Tim's novel wasn't that original in the sense that the end of technology dystopia goes back at least as far as E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, published more than a century ago, in 1909. But are either any good? I didn't even get as far as buying the DeLillo because on looking at it in the bookshop, I burst out laughing. The 'novel' looked suspiciously small and thin to begin with even in hardback, and on opening it, you can see that they've used a very spacious font in a massive point size and huge margins. In other words this may not even be a novella. DeLillo apparently couldn't quite deliver on his promises, and I'm not paying novel price for an extended short story - I'll get it out of the library or wait until it inevitably appeats for 0.99 on Kindle...

But I did buy The Arrest. It too is a short novel, in bite-size chapters, some no more than a page. The protagonist, Sandy Duplessis AKA Journeyman, is a superannuated delivery boy in a post-technology society, which is maybe a reference to Fry from Futurama - it wouldn't surprise me, because as with all Lethem novels, The Arrest is stacked with pop culture references. This isn't hard science-fiction: the way in which the end of the internet and fossil fuels and everything has came about is vague and magical  in a 'just don't ask' sort of way. Instead the novel plays with being a meta-dystopia, which might or might not be the product of a film script that Journeyman had been writing off-and-on for years with his college buddy, later employer and highly irritating Hollywood somebody, Peter Todbaum, from an idea at least partly suggested by Journeyman's sister, Maddy. Now after the Arrest, Maddy, and in his lesser, ineffectual way, Journeyman, are both part of self-sustaining organic cooperative township way up on the Maine coast, away from all the turmoil that is apparently going on elsewhere. And then suddenly Todbaum turns up... in a nuclear-powered chrome supercar-cum-tunnelling machine that looks like something straight out of a 1950s Popular Mechanics fever dream, that he has apparently driven all the way from Malibu, complete with the world's last espresso machine. And guess what? He's still a major asshole. 

Anyone who's read Lethem will know that he can write. He's still got that smart-alecky thing going on that he's always had, but it's dialed back a bit these days. However he knows enough about genre writing and his forebears in this particular enterprize not just to make reference to other dystopian and post-apocalyse novels and films, but also to deal with that little issue that always seems to haunt such works - why don't any of the characters ever seem to know anything about science-fiction etc.? Well, in this novel they do. Journeyman and Todbaum have been writing an SF script for years after all, and Journeyman has become quite the expert on the disaster novel. George R. Stewart's classic, Earth Abides, is mentioned a couple of times, I think to emphasize that in this reality at least, we don't have the super-patriarchal society of that novel, but a strongly feminist one: the women are by far the most capable characters in The Arrest, with the main make characters a mixture of posturing, irritating, or pathetic. 

But is the book any good? I don't know. While if flirts with various SF tropes of alternate worlds and so on, it doens't actually go there, and the story is actually quite linear and while somewhat unlikely in the specifics of its denouement, it won't come as much of a surprise in any general sense. It's okay, I think is my verdict. Not challenging or shocking. Certainly not Lethem's  best. A little bit more boring than I was expecting, but a well-written, engaging read that doesn't outstay its welcome. 

Another Eco I hadn't read before, this one is a dense collage of imagery that takes place largely inside the mind of Yambo, an ageing antiquarian book dealer who has suffered some kind of aneurysm and has been in a coma, which has left him without much of a memory of anything in his life. At the urging of his wife (who of course he also can't remember), Paola, he takes a trip to his childhood home, a palatial country house that he still owns but rarely visits, leaving most of it, likes his memories, locked up and inaccessible. As he sorts through his and his family's books, records, comics, photographs and diaries, his mind wanders in all directions, fictional and real, a palimpsest of personal, cultural and political history, tracing the subjects of childhood, often obscure Italian and American pop-culture, sex and fascism. It even has illustrations. It's all of Eco in one book and it should be great but even though the writing can at times be sublime, too often it's just lists of things and Yambo's directionless musing and his frankly tedious obsession with his 'perfect woman'. And the ending is such a cliché that it really puts a cap on it. A long way from his best.

Apparently this guy in the 'king of Helsinki Noir', but this, his third novel, is supposedly a dark comedy crime caper. The set up is that a clueless entrepreneur, Leivo, has converted an ailing Baltic beachside motel into a Miami Vice-inspired resort, which is about as ridiculous as it sounds. To make it perfect he wants a marina and for that he needs the land next door owned by a lovely and stubborn middle-aged divorcée, Olivia Koski. Unfortunately his useless minions' clumsy attempts to persuade her result in a man being killed and thus both an undercover detective from Helsinki, Jan Nyman, and the psychotic gangster brother of the dead man also get involved and come 'on holiday' to Palm Beach Finland. Unfortunately, despite the promising set-up, this is not Coen Brothers territory, nor is it much like Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard, the writers he is clearly trying to emulate. It's well-written enough, an easy read, and there are some farcial situations, but it's at once too nice and not ridiculous enough to generate much in the way of laughs. Or maybe I just don't like the comedy crime sub-genre.

I challenge anyone who has read this book not to come to the conclusion that it is an utterly repulsive novel, as disgusting as it's possible to be by the end, and worse because whatever has come before you were still rooting for the protagonist, Natsuki, until the last chapter. After Convenience Store Human (which is a better translation of the Japanese than Covenience Store Woman - I don't know why they did that, and the marketing and book design completely missed the point), I had Murata pegged as a champion of neurodivergent feminism, of noncompliant insider-outsiders all around us but not buying our neurotypical bullshit. It was a great book in all ways. Earthlings is for much of it, more of the same and just as interesting: we meet Natsuki as an elementary school student, a weird girl who feels she doesn't fit, who copes with her divergence from familiy and social norms by conjuring a life of secret magic and other worlds for herself. The only other person included in her word, and the one other person she knows who shares some of her traits and attitudes, is her male cousin, Yuu, who she only gets to see once a year at Obon (the Buddhist festival of ancestors). Natsuki and Yuu share an intense friendship which becomes physical (and as 'sexual' as undeveloped kids can be) after Natsuki has been sexually abused by her cram-school teacher, and this sparks what by the end of the book, we realise is a spiral to the worse kind of tragedy. But all the while, Natsuki still seems to be more of a catcher-in-the-rye type of acerbic and anarchic outsider, an unwilling participant in what she calls 'the factory' (the production line of birth-school-work death) than any kind of a monster. She seems to find a sort of balance with an asexual 'husband', Tomoya, who she meets through a 'dating' service for people who don't want a sex life, and they live what appears to outsiders to be a 'normal' existence, but it's not normal enough for her family or his, nothing it seems ever will be in 'the factory.' When people find out and try to break up the marriage, Natsuki and Tomoya and Yuu decide to make a genuine break from all social conventions and indeed from humanity itself, and from then things just get extreme. Really extreme. In fact so extreme, that it leads me to question my previous assessment of Murata's politics and commitments.

I have been having Scandi Crime withdrawal symptoms, and none of my favourite writers have published anything new for a while (some due to being dead...), so I tried another moderately well-recommended series from Sweden. This series features a Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka Martinsson, who gets in way over her head, when she returns to her far northern hometown after a friend from her teenage years is found brutally murdered and mutilated in the massive evangelical church which he helped to found. The book is atmospheric, redolent of northern Swedish small town and country life in the darkness of early winter and some of the players are memorable characters particularly a (heavily pregnant) local policewoman, Rebecka's odd friend Sanna, and the three pastors and their wives at the centre of religious life in the town. However the latter group are a little underdrawn, and worse the protagonist herself is not very interesting or engaging, and seems more described for potential TV or film adaptation (she's even said to look like an actress at one point) than actually developed as a person. In fact in many ways, the the most well developed characters are both dogs, which tells you something. Finally, the plot relies a bit too much on shock revelations from nowhere and a contrived climax, which always annoys me, and just seems too unlikely to make you suspend your disbelief. Will I read the next one? Well, if you know me, you know I'll refuse to until I find myself with nothing to read and then I'll give in and (maybe) be disappointed again...

PS: Be careful if you are looking for Larsson's books because some have been translated at least twice in to English under different titles in Britain and the USA, so read the description!

If you read my review of the first book in this sequence, and you'd probably be wondering why I read the second one. I can't really explain, other than to say that despite everything I found it original enough that I wanted to to know where the author was going to take things. 

In many ways, this book is very different. First of all, it is not predominantly focused on, or in the voice of, the cavalier, Gideon Nav, the eponymous heroine of the first book. This is a very good thing as Gideon's jarring Instagram teen personality was very, very annoying and not half as funny as the author seemed to believe it was (although I recognise that I am in a minority in feeling this). Instead, we're inside the head of Harrowhark, Gideon's necromancer, which is an altogether more serious and dreadful place. Instead of the boistrous lesbianism of Gideon, Harrow is basically a terminally anxious asexual necrophiliac, albeit one with apparently unprecedented necromantic powers. 

Secondly, the book is not set amongst peers but in the Mithraeum, a space station populated by just seven people, one of whom is (mostly) dead, and another is 'God', at least the god of this region of space, and the man (real name, err... John) responsible for the resurrection of humanity and its current state in the books. All of the others, including Harrow and the only other apparent survivor from the first book, Ianthe, are 'lyctors', John's personal guard and generals. The other three are 10,000 years old and about as cranky as you'd expect at that age. 

Third, nothing that happened in the first book seems to have been real. At least Harrow remembers an entirely different series of events with a different companion. Gideon simply no longer exists for her, if she ever did. This reworked account of the events of the first book is interwoven with developments on the Mithraeum, in a way that isn't as confusing as some reviewers seem to think. 

Finally, at least until the final quarter, this book is a lot slower, gloomier and for long stretches, more boring than the first book. It takes a long time to start developing anything that might be called 'plot' and then everything comes in a confusing jumble of revelations and action in that last quarter. In that sense, the book was poorly paced compared to the first. And I wasn't sure that any of the new characters (John and the lyctors) were actually in any way interesting, again, at least until the end. 

In many ways, this is a typical second volume of a trilogy, treading water before the set-up for the final book. That finale does indeed set things up for a revelatory final volume, and yes, I will read it, despite still thinking this really isn't written for me.