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Monday 18 July 2011

Review: The Unicorn Crisis

Title: The Unicorn Crisis
Author: Jon Rosenberg
Nationality: British
Year: 2011
Publisher: Self-published
Length: 200+pp
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Brilliant debut fantasy



The outline

A light-hearted fantasy novel which follows ‘summoner’ David Ash as he tries to uncover who transported a deadly unicorn into modern-day Stratford-upon-Avon.

Sample

The Unicorn was going to be trouble. Just looking at it I could feel the world thinning around us. Worse still, one wrong move and the bloody thing would kill me.
"Okay," I murmured to myself. "What's the best counter to a Unicorn?"
"A virgin's always good."

The verdict

One thing is clear from reading The Unicorn Crisis – Jon Rosenberg has a powerful imagination. In this novel he has created a fully realised alternate reality, occupied by elves with an addiction to daytime TV, angry Hindu deities and a long-lived and magically talented version of Christina Rossetti.

The result is gripping and at times I didn’t want to put the novel down. Jon Rosenberg has a particular and rare talent for dialogue and can run a page of rapid fire speech without the reader losing track of who said what. On the downside, some of early sections dragged in pace a little, but this seemed to be largely down to scene setting and was made up for by absolutely brilliant final third with a final battle that reminded me of the Sword in the Stone.

I would definitely recommend this novel, particularly to fans of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or Doctor Who (and wouldn’t David Tennant make a great Ash?). I bought the sequel, The Digital Wolf, as soon as I had finished the last page.

Saturday 9 July 2011

Review: The Third Policeman

Title: The Third Policeman
Author: Flann O’Brien
Nationality: Irish
Year: 1940
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Length: 200+pp
Rating: 10/10
Summary: On your bike...

The outline

Delightful weirdness characterises this surreal early post-modern novel with a fixation about bicycles.

Sample

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby’s explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object-to the eyes of a man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye. So far, one may say, so good.

The verdict

The Third Policeman is a far from easy novel to describe. I could relate the basics of the plot – murderous Irishman comes across a rural police station where the officers have an obsession with bicycles – but that’s really not the point. It’s funny, its surreal, its clever... but then so are lots of novels. There’s just something special about The Third Policeman that makes it far more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a novel which should appeal to fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Laurence Sterne. At times it’s a bit like The Trial, rewritten by James Joyce as a Monty Python sketch.

Put simply, The Third Policeman is utterly brilliant. And I’m not going to spoil it by revealing any more.

Review: I, Lucifer

Title: I, Lucifer
Author: Glen Duncan
Nationality: British
Year: 2003
Publisher: Scribner
Length: 200+pp
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Not bad enough to be good

The outline

God gives Lucifer a chance at redemption, but the Devil must spend a month in human form in contemporary London to get his ticket back to Heaven.

Sample

I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-lala! - to tell all. All? Some.

The verdict

I, Lucifer is an entertaining novel, undoubtedly, and Glen Duncan is a talented writer, but it’s also a novel saddled with a major flaw that stops it from fulfilling its potential.

The problem is Lucifer himself. He simply isn’t bad enough to be a convincing Devil and his exploits on earth are somewhat adolescent. He has sex; he takes drugs; he eggs people on; he plots much worse things but never carries them out. This might have worked if the book was about a minor demon, but Lucifer himself...?

Duncan’s Lucifer is on a par with an annoying rock star rather than the nastiest villains of literature. Think Patrick Bateman, think Hannibal Lecter, think Clockwork Orange’s Alex – he doesn’t even come close. At best – or worst – he’s like a cruder version of Lestat at his most needy and irritating... but lacking the bite. Duncan tries to make him witty and intellectual, but if you know as little as a spattering about poetry, the Bible and Christian history his comments aren’t going to tax you. He’s Humbert Humbert lite, which is a shame because a self-justifying Humbert-inspired Devil would have been a really good proposition.

Still the novel kept me reading, it was just a shame that it missed out on much bigger and better things.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Review: Severin’s Journey into the Dark

Title:  Severin’s Journey into the Dark
Author: Paul Leppin
Nationality: Czech
Year: 1914
Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
Length: 100+pp
Rating: 5/10
Summary: Doesn’t reach its destination

The outline

This gothic novella explores the dark side of decadent turn-of-the-century Prague.

Sample

Death. Something in the rasping sound of the word seemed more exciting, richer in associations than all the sleepy utterances of a sheltered life. A small and perverse envy crept along the surface of his soul and left cloudy, lingering blisters. An envy for Nikolaus, who played with the opal ring on his finger with serene hands and discussed books and journals while it was possible that the carpet beneath his feet still retained the dried blood of the man who had died on it.

The verdict

I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of Severin’s Journey into the Dark. The start of this two-part gothic novella is dark, sinister and disturbing, with an impending sense of doom as the eponymous antihero, Severin, spirals downwards into his own hell. The conclusion of part one hinted at great things to come.

The problem was the part two simply didn’t live up to that promise. Several plot lines were never fully developed, opportunities were missed and the drama of  part one’s finale just fizzled out. After Severin had journeyed so far in part one, the start of part two brought him back close to the start of his travels and he never again got quite so deeply into the dark mysterious world around him as he did in part one.

Review: Twenty Tiny Tales

Title: Twenty Tiny Tales
Author: Willie Wit
Nationality: British
Year: 2011
Publisher: Willie Wit
Length: 467 locations (Kindle only)
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Wonderful Wit!

The outline

Twenty witty and thought-provoking very short stories with a twist.

Sample

The atmosphere, and mood in the temple was as it should be, calm and serene. A group of men clad in drab colours are spread across the main area, kneeling, intense with concentration. Sweat forms on brows, muscles flexing as great changes are taking place within. This daily ritual had been carried out over months and years.

The verdict

I first came across Willie Wit’s short stories on the Amazon Kindle forum and was instantly hooked. Each one of these twenty examples of flash fiction, or very-short-stories if you prefer, is a fine example of the genre. Every story in this collection has a unique and clever twist and guessing what it will be is usually impossible.

The range of stories here is particularly impressive. Most will make you laugh, but there are a couple of poignant ones in there, such as Keep Moving, which will leave you with something to think about. My particularly favourites were the Overtime series and Siddartha, which I thought had the most unpredictable twist of the lot.

As the title suggestions, this collection is very short, but each story is a real gem and the creative force behind each one is clearly apparent. A highly recommended read.

Review: Bluebeard

Title: Bluebeard
Author: Charles Perrault/Angela Carter
Nationality: French/British
Year: 1697/1977
Publisher: Penguin Mini Modern Classics
Length: 80 pages
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Perrault, not Carter, but magical all the same

The outline

Five of Charles Perrault’s best fairy tales, translated by Angela Carter and bundled for Penguin’s Mini Modern Classics series.

Sample

Curiosity is a charming passion but may only be satisfied at the price of a thousand regrets; one sees around one a thousand examples of this sad truth every day. Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment it is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.

The verdict

The title of this book is extremely misleading. This is not Angela Carter’s Bluebeard at all, but rather Carter’s translation of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard and some other fairytales. It’s a bit naughty of Penguin not to make this clear in the blurb, where the tales are described as “playful and subversive retellings”, rather than making it clear that they’re actually fairly faithful translations. I suppose it was the only way for them to include Carter in their Mini Modern Classics series, as most of her work (including her own set of fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber) is published by Vintage or Virago.

But leaving the fact that this is actually Perrault and not Carter aside, this is a little gem of a book and the fact that Carter kept close to his original works is a bonus. Most versions of Perrault’s tales are all too familiar, but Carter’s translation perfectly captures the satire, wit and elegance you would expect from a 17th century lawyer at the French court.

So it’s one star for Penguin’s marketing tactics, but five for Perrault’s original tales. Readers expecting Carter’s darker, modern retellings will be disappointed, but Perrault’s originals offer a surprisingly fresh outlook on all too familiar tales.

Review: The Phoenix Man

Title: The Phoenix Man
Author: Gary Kilworth
Nationality: British
Year: 2011
Publisher: Infinity Plus
Length: 100+pp
Rating: 4/10
Summary: Falls far short of the hype

The outline

Thirteen speculative fiction short stories from an author described by New Scientist as “the best short story writer in any genre”.

Sample

All would agree that history would have followed a different course if an unknown Galilean had not learned the art of walking on water. Not only did this remarkable man teach himself this now common skill, he was willing to pass it on to others. Just as the first firemaker handed the secret of the flame to his neighbour, thus did this early philosopher generously reveal the secret of his discovery to some fishermen on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. His name has been lost to us, but his talent is now universal. There are few of our children beyond the age of six or seven years who cannot now tread the waves. 

The verdict

I’m not sure what New Scientist was thinking when it described Gary Kilworth as “the best short story writer in any genre”. On the evidence of The Phoenix Man, that certainly isn’t the case.

Undoubtedly the ideas behind Kilworth’s stories are good – better than good in some cases – but they just don’t follow through. Countless times I began one of the stories in The Phoenix Man and was dazzled by the concept in the first few paragraphs only for the plot to peter out and the writing fail to live up to the initial idea.

12 Men Born of Woman bucked the trend and delivered a strong plot to match its idea and I also enjoyed On The Eyelids of a Wolf, but the rest simply left me frustrated with their unfulfilled promise. I certainly won’t be following fiction recommendations from New Scientist in future.

Sunday 5 June 2011

Review: The Wee Free Men

Title: The Wee Free Men
Author: Terry Pratchett
Nationality: British
Year: 2003
Publisher: Corgi
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 8.5/10
Summary: A great addition to Discworld

The outline

Tiffany Aching is a far-from-ordinary nine year old and when her younger brother goes missing she must learn to be a witch to rescue him. As the second Discworld book for children and the first of four about Tiffany, it’s inevitably a far cry from Harry Potter or the Worst Witch.

Sample

‘You’d better tell me what you know, toad,’ said Tiffany. ‘Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.’ 
‘Another world is colliding with this one,’ said the toad. ‘There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.’ 
‘Why?’ 
‘There’s no one to stop them.’ 
There was silence for a moment. 
‘There’s me,’ said Tiffany.

The verdict

Although I’ve read most of the Discworld books, until now I never got around to reading the Tiffany Aching series. I think it was down to a combination of factors: they’re children’s books, they’re focussed on new characters and The Wee Free Men is the only Discworld book where Death doesn’t appear, so it couldn’t be real Discworld, could it? However, after reading some very positive reviews for the fourth and final Tiffany Aching book, I Shall Wear Midnight, I decided to give the first of the series a go. I’m certainly glad I did.

It’s not quite the normal Discworld (the whole story is told from one character’s viewpoint - with chapters! - and many of the familiar motifs are missing) but that doesn’t mean it’s no good. Tiffany is an instantly likeable protagonist, a tough female character in the spirit of Granny Weatherwax. The Wee Free Men is witty, imaginative, creepy and made me laugh out loud on several occasions. It stands up in comparison to best of the Discworld novels and is a wonderful addition to the series.

Review: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Title: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Author: Italo Calvino
Nationality: Italian
Year: 1979
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Books That Are Not Quite As Good As They Should Be

The outline

Italo Calvino’s most famous work uses all the tricks of post-modernism to create a rare novel written in the second person, which consists mostly of the opening chapters of other novels.

Sample

Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. 
And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. 

The verdict

There are great ideas at the centre of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Italo Calvino’s most famous work is a cornerstone of post-modernism, a rare novel written in the second person which consists mostly of the opening chapters of other novels. It’s clever, it’s quotable and it’s definitely original.

Unfortunately while some of the novel sizzled with genius, some of it was just tedious. Some of the novel openings were electric and I would have loved to read on, but other parts were turgid. It’s also a novel that feels dated and must even have done so when it was first published in 1979 – stylistically it’s much more similar to authors such as Brecht and Beckett than other books of the same era such as early Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

Another problem with the novel, which is no fault of Calvino’s, is the translation by William Weaver which I found to be clumsy in places. An excess of commas and clauses in unusual places made it frequently obvious that I was reading a book that hadn’t been originally written in English.

However, I did enjoy reading the novel and found Calvino’s imagination impressive which is what saved it from a lower score. But ultimately, although we’re taught to think the original should be the best, If on a Winter’s Night was nowhere near as good as its literary descendant Cloud Atlas or Calvino’s own Invisible Cities.

Saturday 4 June 2011

Review: The Mall

Title: The Mall
Author: SL Grey
Nationality: South African
Year: 2010
Publisher: Corvus
Length: 300+ pages
Rating: 10/10
Summary: Buy it now

The outline

Disfigured junkie Rhoda holds mall-worker Dan at knifepoint so that he can help her look for her missing babysitting charge. But as they get deeper into the shopping centre’s network of service tunnels it quickly becomes clear that jobsworth security guards far from the biggest thing they have to worry about.

Sample

We've stumbled upon some kind of hideous, bloodless massacre. Naked female bodies are piled across the narrow passageway in front of us. There are so many limbs and torsos and hairless heads that it's difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Several severed body parts are scattered carelessly around the heap: there's a leg just half a metre away from us, and a hand seems to be pointing back the way we came, warning us to come no further. The bodies are stacked so randomly that they could have been vomited out of the ceiling, but this corridor's roof is sealed with water-stained ceiling board, and there are no doors or apertures in its walls.
'What the hell are they doing here?' I say.
Dan doesn't answer, but he must be thinking the same thing as me. Someone brought them here deliberately.
Far as I know we could be miles away from the mall. Not that I can imagine these particular mannequins being used by Truworths or any of the other chain fashion shops.

The verdict

Books as good as The Mall don’t come along very often. It certainly surprising that a book that at first glance appears to be firmly in the horror genre is actually one of the most inventive and refreshing novels of recent years.

The Mall’s strength lies in the fact that like all great novels it can be read on a number of different levels. On the face of it, it’s a modern homage to the great 1970s horror movies, part Dawn of the Dead, part  Westworld, part Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But it’s also an insightful character study on the moral disintegration of a middle-class teenager. Go deeper still and you’ll find a witty satire about modern life, consumerism, body image, identity and social alienation.

The star of the novel is Rhoda, the ultimate anti-heroine. Who better to take on the horrors of consumerism and the fashion world than a tough, scarred, flat-chested drug addict who gets mistaken for a man on page one? Rhoda lights up the page and is far more fun than emo-kid Dan, who narrates alternate chapters with her.

The Mall is a novel that leaves you wanting more and wishing when you reach the end that there’s another chapter and not just the acknowledgements on the last page.

Review: Dead Until Dark

Title: Dead Until Dark
Author: Charlaine Harris
Nationality: American
Year: 2001
Publisher: Gollancz
Length: 300+ pages
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Lacks bite

The outline

The first in the highly successful True Blood series, Dead Until Dark charts the early adventures of telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse and the Deep South vampire Bill Compton.

Sample

Anyway, his lips were lovely, sharply sculpted, and he had arched dark brows. His nose swooped down right out of that arch, like a prince's in a Byzantine mosaic. When he finally looked up, I saw his eyes were even darker than his hair, and the whites were incredibly white.
'What can I get you?' I asked, happy almost beyond words.
He raised his eyebrows. 'Do you have the bottled synthetic blood?' he asked.
'No, I'm so sorry! Sam's got some on order. Should be in next week.'
'Then red wine, please,' he said, and his voice was cool and clear, like a stream over smooth stones. I laughed out loud. It was too perfect.

The verdict

Until reading Dead Until Dark I had missed out on the current vampire craze. But having enjoyed Interview With the Vampire in my teens I decided to give it a try and Dead Until Dark seemed like a good place to start. I was disappointed.

The flaws with the novel are numerous. The plot holes are plentiful, the pacing erratic and the mid section of the book is dominated by one bad sex scene after another. You can spot who the murderer is the moment he saunters onto the page and the vampire love interest Bill Compton is so bland that Sookie Stackhouse can happily take him home to meet her grandmother.

So why didn’t I score it even lower? There’s something curiously addictive about Dead Until Dark that keeps the reader turning the page. Charlaine Harris’s ideas are good, even if the execution is shaky and there are some genuinely funny and exciting moments.

The main problem with the novel is that it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. With its theme of vampires ‘coming out of the coffin’ in small town Louisiana it would have made a great satire, but it just takes itself too seriously. On the flip side, it could also have been a dark and sexy vampire classic, but it just isn’t edgy enough.

I won’t be rushing out to buy the next in the series, but I saw glimpses of why the books are so popular.

Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Title: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Author: David Mitchell
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Sceptre
Length: 500+ pages
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Good but not great

The outline

It’s 1799 and Japan is closed to the world apart from the Dutch trading island of Dejima. Jacob de Zoet arrives on the island seeking his fortune in what unfolds as an epic tale of love, betrayal and Machiavellian politics.

Sample

Jacob breaks off a half-dozen young springs. 'Here you are.' For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb, witnessed by a dozen blood-orange sunflowers. 
I don't want a purchased courtesan, he thinks. I wish to earn you.
'Thank you.' She smells the herb. '"Rosemary" has meaning?'
Jacob blesses his foul-breathed martinet of a Latin master in Middelburg. 'Its Latin name is Ros marinus, wherein "Ros" is "dew" - do you know the word "dew"?'
She frowns, shakes her head a little and her parasol spins, slowly.
'Dew is water found early in the morning before the sun burns it away.'

The verdict

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a patchy novel, shifting between the tedious and the inspired. I’m not surprised to see that several readers gave up during the first third of the book as this is by far the weakest part. It’s little more than a series of anecdotes and overwrought scene setting and you need some patience to get through it.

However, the book really picks up in the middle section, when Aibagawa Orito takes over from Jacob as the central character, and the ending is also strong. The problem is by the time you reach it there’s just been too much meandering and you can’t help but feel that Orito would have been a far more interesting character to focus on than Jacob.

The novel is almost like a draft of a much better book that needed a thorough revision by the author before reaching the shelves. It didn’t stay with me and a couple of weeks after finishing it, it certainly hasn’t stuck in my mind.

Should it have made the Booker shortlist? It’s a better novel than some that did, but it certainly isn’t the classic that Cloud Atlas was. It’s a good read about the era, but ultimately I much preferred Alessandro Baricco’s magical Silk on a similar subject.

Thursday 14 April 2011

Review: Lolita

Title: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Nationality: Russian
Year: 1955
Publisher: Odyssey Editions
Length: 300+ pages
Rating: 9/10
Summary: The inner workings of the criminal mind

The outline

One of a rare group of books in world literature which is famous (or infamous) enough to need no introduction.

Sample

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The verdict

Everyone knows that Lolita takes the reader inside the mind of a paedophile, the psyche of a criminal who kidnaps a young girl and takes her on a debauched road trip across the United States. But the novel itself is about so much more than that.

Humbert Humbert’s witty and lyrical, yet snobbish and evasive, narrative forces the reader to reconsider the nature of evil. Humbert is both likeable and monstrous creating a more complex and probably more realistic portrait of a depraved mind than you will find in most works of fiction. This is a difficult book, not only in terms of content but also in style. Humbert’s intellectual flourishes give a crucial insight into his character, but there will be few readers who can pick up on more than a fraction of his cross-references, puns, in-jokes and verbal gymnastics.

Humbert is the archetypal unreliable narrator and the reader is never sure when he is lying, deluding himself or succumbing to the madness that has plagued him for most of his life. This is most crucial in the depiction of Lolita, a poor Dolly who we only ever see through Humbert’s eyes and who never gets to speak for herself. Readers are left to decide for themselves how much Humbert says about her is true. This is not a love story as some people have claimed. This is a story about possession.

The subject matter means that Lolita is not a book for the squeamish or easily offended reader, or anyone who will take Humbert’s narration at face value. But for the more mature reader who can cope with the incongruity between Humbert’s wit and his crimes it is an undoubted classic.

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Review: Replica

Title: Replica
Author: Lexi Revellian
Nationality: British
Year: 2011
Publisher: Hoxton Press
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Lexi Revellian does it again

The outline

Unassertive secretary Beth is persuaded to become a guinea pig in an experiment at the government lab where she works. But when things go wrong and she is accidentally duplicated, both Beths find that their lives are in danger.

Sample

"I'm not going to do it, Professor." She picked up her handbag.
He saw she meant what she said, and the spark seemed to go out of him; he sighed deeply. With a visible effort, he squared his shoulders, smiled and patted her arm. "Quite understood, Beth, I hope I haven't pressured you unduly. You toddle off home. It'll keep till tomorrow afternoon when the Fubars come back."
His hand went to the on/off switch and hovered reluctantly over it. As he stooped, she saw with a pang the lines in his middle-aged face, obvious now the animation had left it, worse after a week of late nights working in the lab.
She felt mean.
"I guess an hour wouldn't really make any difference."
She took out her ear studs, removed her watch and lay down inside the machine.

The verdict

A second novel is always a tricky prospect. It’s difficult for an author to find the right balance between creating something familiar enough to appeal to readers of the first novel, while making it original enough that it gives readers something fresh and new.

Thankfully, with Replica Lexi Revellian has achieved just that. Replica retains all the fun and excitement of Remix while swapping rockstars and rocking horses for MI5 and sci-fi technology. Like Remix, it’s in a genre all of its own – a quirky fast-paced adventure story with a likeable, realistic female lead and a bad boy love interest, that never tries to take itself too seriously. It’s a kind of Bridget Jones meets The Bourne Identity.

It’s a real pageturner that you won’t want to put down. In my opinion, it wasn’t quite as good as Remix, but is still one of the best books of the year so far.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Review: The Girl with the Bomb Inside

Title: The Girl with the Bomb Inside
Author: Andy Conway
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Self-published
Length: Novella
Rating: 5/10
Summary: Lacking that special something

The outline

It’s 1981 and on a run-down council estate 15-year-old Tony is trying to come to terms with life, death and the news that his girlfriend is pregnant.

Sample

There's some good books in the school library, actually. No one reads them. I never look at them either, that'd be dead stupid. I just nick a few now and then. No one notices. The worst thing about nicking books from the school library is you have to take something really shite when your mates are there, otherwise they think you're a spastic. So, if you want a decent book you have to wait till there's no teacher and no kids either. This doesn't happen much, so you just have to risk it sometimes. It's safer when there's a teacher but no kids, to be honest. I've nicked a few like that. I could just borrow them like normal, but I don't want anyone to find out I think.

The verdict

There’s a very good concept at the heart of The Girl with the Bomb Inside, a novella that takes the form of the literary ramblings of a 15-year-old who plans suicide when he discovers his short-term girlfriend is pregnant. His quest to make sense of life, the false starts of his ‘novel’ and his attempts to separate fact and fiction are the perfect canvas for an author to really explore this unfortunate character. However, for me there was something missing, a spark, a flash of genius, something that would have made this story stand out from the crowd.

Swearing alone doesn’t make a story gritty. Neither do references to punk music. What it really needed more was more edge, more danger. I never cared too much what happened next and although the experimental idea at the centre of the novella was good, it wasn’t enough on its own to carry the story for me.

Review: House of Skin

Title: House of Skin
Author: Kiana Davenport
Nationality: American
Year: 2010
Publisher: Kiana Davenport
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Wonderfully evocative short fiction

The outline

Kiana Davenport’s award-winning short stories about life on the Pacific islands are brought together in a single volume for the first time.

Sample

They ran silently in single file, the bush so thick they moved by intuition. By morning they would be missed in their village, and by noon they would dwell in the mouths of elders as curses. Darkness hid a wall of matted spider webs that flung them backwards to the ground, and Kona wept because she was young and terrified. Eva comforted her as they lay watching flying-foxes like rags in brief ellipses through the trees.
"We are going to die," Kona said.
Eva shook her gently. "No! We are going to be famous." What she meant was that they were going to be remembered and hated.

The verdict

This is a wonderful collection of elegant literary short stories that seamlessly transported me to places I have never been. Davenport is Hawaiian and her stories focus on women’s searches for identity across the Pacific, revealing life stories that are exotic in their setting and customs while remaining familiar in their emotional resonance.

I enjoyed all the stories but my favourite was The Lipstick Tree, about a young woman’s quest to break away from her tribe in the forests of Papua New Guinea and become part of the westernised world. I would also strongly recommend, War Doll Hotel, about a Hawaiian woman’s battle with her past in New York, and Her Walking Stick, about a Vanuatuan woman’s revenge on her lazy daughter-in-law.

This is a very good introduction to Davenport’s work and I am keen to now read one of her novels.

Friday 1 April 2011

Review: Coombe’s Wood

Title: Coombe’s Wood
Author: Lisa C. Hinsley
Nationality: British
Year: 2009
Publisher: Darkling Press
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Decent horror story, spoilt by silly elves

The outline

Izzy is a newcomer to the village of Cedham and quickly realises that everything is not what it seems. Faced with bleak warnings about the local woods and the possibility of her violent ex tracking her down, how long will it be before her life starts to fall apart all over again?

Sample

The glue behind the wallpaper was old, brittle, and the paper fell away with little effort. Their initial playfulness evaporated, as they found more scribbled pictures, of animals, humans and violent deaths, like modern cave drawings. Eyes were a theme; they were everywhere, sometimes as a frame to other sketches. Under the last strip, they found a tally that counted to nineteen.

The verdict

Coombe’s Wood is a highly readable and well-paced novel. Hinsley builds up a powerfully creepy atmosphere which makes the novel a real page turner as one scene moves effortlessly to the next.

However, this was also a book which failed to reach its full potential. The later stages in particular read like an early draft of a better novel. The main problem for me was the silly and unnecessary subplot about elves which took the sharp and dangerous edge off the story and brought a clumsy element into the ending. Without this and with a bit more attention paid to the more sinister elements, Coombe’s Wood could have been seriously disturbing horror thriller. However, the elves element made it difficult to take seriously, just as it was reaching its climax.

Adding to draft-like quality of much of the novel was a proliferation of typos. It really did need at least one more proof-reading session before it was publishing. It’s a shame as there really is a very good novel in here if only Hinsley had focussed her writing talent.

Friday 25 March 2011

Review: Varjak Paw

Title: Varjak Paw
Author: SF Said
Nationality: British
Year: 2003
Publisher: David Fickling Books
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 9/10
Summary: If only grown-up books were this good

The outline

Pedigree cat Varjak Paw is the only one of his family who dreams of the great outdoors but the Mesopotamian Blues have never left the safety of the Contessa’s house. You can probably guess what happens next.

Sample

Varjak could see for miles and miles. There were no walls or trees to block his view any more. Just open space, rippling out ahead of him, beneath him, above him. He was standing in space, and it was a long way to fall.
He peered down the inside of the wall. He could see nothing through the trees. The Gentleman's cats and the Elder Paw were hidden by the tangled net of branches. There was no way back. He was truly on his own.

The verdict

I certainly wasn’t expecting this fairly obscure and underrated children’s book to be anywhere near as good as it is. Ignore the clichéd and pedestrian opening chapters – from there onwards the narrative opens up into a breathtaking and powerful coming-of-age story, by turns charming, sinister and exhilarating.

Said knows how to keep a narrative moving effortlessly and it’s a shame that few adult novels manage to be so frightening or uplifting. There are strong female characters, dastardly villains and glorious set pieces and it’s no insult to say that parts of this novel reminded me of both Watership Down and Kafka on the Shore. An added bonus were the atmospheric illustrations by Dave McKean, who really understands how cats move.

Personally, it impressed me far more than Harry Potter or His Dark Materials and would be my personal pick for best children’s story of recent years.

Saturday 19 March 2011

Review: The Dresskeeper

Title: The Dresskeeper
Author: Mary Naylus
Nationality: British
Year: 2009
Publisher: Prospera Publishing
Length: 200+ pages
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Wickedly funny

The outline

Thoroughly modern teenager, Picky, is transported back in time to Restoration London when she tries on a old dress in her Gran’s attic. No, seriously.

Sample

'Get ya bets. Make a packet. Which hefty is heftier?'
There are three of us in the running but the odds on Edwina the wheelchair kid are so bad no one places a bet, so it is between me and this girl in Year 11, who brings a roast chicken, complete with chips and gravy, to school. Everyday.

The verdict

I loved the opening to The Dresskeeper so much that I bought the book before I’d even finished the first page of the Kindle sample. Despite its title and cover, which imply a fairly straight-laced historical romance, The Dresskeeper is for a large part a darkly comic look at such modern perils as dementia, body image and absent fathers. In fact, the scenes that are central to the plot where 21st century teenager, Picky, travels through time to the London of the 1600s rarely live up to the sheer wit and exuberance of the sections set in the modern day.

That’s not to say that the past sections don’t have their strong points. Naylus succeeds where many better-known authors have failed and makes the past a living and vibrant place. The past is also where the most moving and poignant sections of the novel take place.

However, despite being the funniest thing I’ve read in years, I wasn’t able to award The Dresskeeper top marks. The novel is littered with plot holes, anachronisms and implausibilities. Some leeway can be given because this is a comedy and a young-adult novel, but they were so numerous they did intrude on my enjoyment of the book. It’s easy to criticise Naylus for this, but her publishers should take some of the blame as they really should have pointed these out.

Thursday 17 March 2011

Review: The Girl on the Swing

Title: The Girl on the Swing
Author: Ali Cooper
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Standing Stone Press
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Beautiful and emotive

The outline

A middle-aged doctor who has lost her son and lost her job is caught up in visions of what she believes are her past lives. But are they true or is there a more rational explanation?

Sample

I am standing on the seafront, on the southwest corner where the road meets the sea, where the steep ramshackle streets meet the crumbly cliff. A cold, brisk, sea breeze burns my skin, stings my cheeks with salt. The sunlight is piercing, icy blue, glaring on the water; it lacks the yellow fullness of summer. The salty fishy smell of the harbour penetrates my nostrils. I wrinkle my nose. I am counting. One. Two. Four. Six. It is a game. I count some more as I stare out towards the streak of purple which lines the horizon. Ten. Twelve. Fifteen. Seventeen. Do I not know my numbers or am I deliberately cheating? Mostly the latter, I think. Suddenly and unexpectedly I reach one hundred. I call out. 'Coming! Ready or not!' My voice has a lilt, an accent that surprises me, as though it is not my own.

The verdict

This is an absolutely wonderful novel and Ali Cooper’s lyrical and elegant writing will stay with you long after you’ve closed the final page. The story expertly mixes modern day tragedy with past life drama which results in a poignant and moving novel. It addresses big themes such as our relationship with the past, relationships across the class divide and the affects of loss and it never fails to hit the mark with them.

Cooper is particularly adept at creating a believable and multi-faceted central character. Every word is written exactly as you would expect it to be by the central character, Julia, a middle-aged doctor who has long self-censored her feelings and ideas in order to conform with her domineering husband and the society that she moves in. I found it extremely refreshing to read a book where a middle-aged woman was the central character.

This is the kind of novel which, if it had been published by one of the big publishers, would have been nominated for a string of awards. That it hasn’t been is undoubtedly the fault of the award-givers and not Ali Cooper.

James Frey turns to self publishing

A fairly significant story for the publishing industry on The Guardian's website today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/15/james-frey-new-book-published-art-gallery Best selling author James Frey is self-publishing his latest novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a story about the Second Coming taking place in the Bronx.

Just 10,000 leather-bound printed editions will be available at a cost of $150 each. Those who can't afford the steep price will be able to download the ebook version for a few quid.

Frey said that we are currently experiencing the "greatest revolution in publishing since the invention of the printing press. Everything about how we make and consume books is changing very dramatically."

Frey is the master of self promotion and it really is a significant turning point that a major author has decided to ditch his publisher. He will certainly not be the last.

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Do we need a literary prize for women?

The Orange Prize for Fiction longlist was announced yesterday to the usual fanfare. There are some great novels on the list, such as Emma Donaghue's Booker shortlisted Room and the National Book Critics Circle award winning A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. However, there are a great deal of good books that are not on the list because they were written by men.

Founded as recently as 1996, the Orange Prize is curiously anachronistic and, in my opinion, misguided. Fiction is one of the few areas where there is no trace of a glass ceiling and women can visibly and consistently compete and better men without the additional burden of having to overcome prejudices. The most successful author in the world is a woman, the world's most famous bookclub is run by a woman and even a casual reader would probably not struggle to name 10 female authors (try naming 10 female artists with the same ease).

Rather than supporting fiction written by women I would argue that by segregating it off like this the Orange Prize is harming it. It makes it look like the Olympic 100m final, implying that women's novels can't easily compete against those by men so need a category of their own. We should be celebrating women's writing by watching women win awards where men are also competing, not awards where only women can compete.

In my opinion, the only argument in favour of the Orange Prize is the curious failure by the Booker reward women as often as it should. Since the Orange Prize was founded in 1996, the Booker has been won by women on only five occasions. It's an issue that really needs addressing, but that should be the job of the Booker judges (who may have already started to address the balance as women have won in three out of the last five years) and not require a second prize.

I think that there is room for a women's fiction prize, but that it should be awarded to books about women not by women. If the Orange Prize was awarded to the novel which made the best contribution towards issues of women's rights and feminism, regardless of the gender of its author, I would feel much more comfortable with it.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

When is a bestseller not a bestseller?

A very interesting post today on the blog of US thriller writer JA Konrath: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/lol-nyt.html He notes that although the famous New York Times Best Sellers list now includes ebooks in its sales calculations, it still excludes self-published writers, regardless of the number of sales. Konrath calculates that he has sold enough books to make the list, as have authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke. In fact on Amazon.com, Konrath's The List is currently outselling the Kindle version of the New York Times itself!

I can understand why the New York Times would want to exclude free books from its list of 'sellers' (many of these are self-published) or even why it might be sensible for it to exclude any book priced under a certain amount. But I can see no logical reason for excluding self-published authors. A sale is a sale, regardless of the book's publishing arrangements.

Sunday 13 March 2011

Review: Never Let Me Go

Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Nationality: British
Year: 2005
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Eerie and thought-provoking

The outline

This rare foray into sci-fi territory by an author of literary fiction relates the discomforting tale of three friends growing up in a dystopian alternative to the late twentieth century.

Sample

I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we'd walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn't been ready for that.

The verdict

Never Let Me Go is a haunting novel. Often mistakenly labelled as science-fiction, it keeps discussion of science to a minimum and instead focusses on the moral and philosophical issues that surround its central plot device.

The greatest example of Kazuo Ishiguro’s skill in Never Let Me Go is the way that he expertly crafts the voice of his narrator, Kathy. The language and style he uses is perfect for this young female character, inexpert and naïve but vivid and creative, and there was no occasion when the tone of a middle-aged male literary novelist intruded. Her banal descriptions of situations that the reader will find sinister are what create the eerie atmosphere of the novel and enable it to rise above standard dystopian fare.

Never Let Me go is an enigmatic novel. There’s plenty of sense that it’s an allegory for something much deeper than the mechanics of its plot. It’s up to the reader to puzzle it out. Is it about memory? Parenthood? Growing up? Life itself?

The only real problem with the novel is that it failed to engage me on an emotional as well as an intellectual level. Given its storyline, it should have moved me much more. However, overall this is a very powerful novel and one I would definitely recommend.

Saturday 12 March 2011

Review: Anna Karenina

Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Nationality: Russian
Year: 1877, translated by Constance Garnett
Publisher: Project Gutenberg
Rating: 8/10
Summary: A novel of two halves

The outline

Widely proclaimed as one of the greatest novels of all-time, Anna Karenina follows the eponymous heroine’s adulterous affair in the Russian high society of the 1870s.

Sample

With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady's appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

The verdict

Anna Karenina is a wonderful novel. Its tragic tale of adulterous love in 1870s Russia is deservedly a classic the world over. Tolstoy excels at grasping the psychology of his characters and his depiction of Anna and Vronsky’s love affair is moving and captivating as a result. He also wraps into that affair a cutting commentary on the society of his day, which is what separates a great novel from a merely good one.

However, as much as I liked Anna Karenina’s story, the novel as a whole was let down for me by its parallel narrative following the trials and tribulations of countryside landowner, Levin. The sections involving Levin, a proxy for Tolstoy, are preachy and long-winded. Levin can do no wrong in Tolstoy’s eyes and it’s easy to get irritated by his idealistic views of peasant life and his sentimental courtship of saccharine Kitty.

The Levin sections, which take up around half the novel, cause the story to drag in places which is why I felt I couldn’t award it a perfect score. Anna’s story may be a great one, but as a whole novel it failed to live up to other nineteenth-century stories of adultery, Madame Bovary and The Scarlet Letter.

Everybody Hates a Tourist, or the Problem with Levin

This post contains minor spoilers for ANNA KARENINA and DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON.

It was the summer of Britpop. The sun was always shining and I had hours to spare lazing on a grassy field, chatting to my friends about life, literature and the musical revolution. The media was fixated with the battle between Blur and Oasis, but we were working class and from Yorkshire so we preferred Pulp.

In our A-level English class we were reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. To fill in the subject matter for those unfamiliar with it, the book recounts the time that Orwell decided to live as a tramp in the two capital cities, in order to experience what life is like on the other side of the tracks. At the end of Down and Out, Orwell grows tired of his life on the streets and casually writes home to ask for the cash he needs to return to his middle class existence.

Orwell’s underworld excursion reminded us strongly of the lyrics of Pulp’s most famous song, Common People. The lyrics relate the story of a rich Greek girl who while studying St Martin’s College asks one of her less well off co-students to show her how the ‘common people’ live and help her pretend to be one of them. “Everybody hates a tourist,” sings Pulp frontman, Jarvis Cocker, adding that “the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath”. He concludes that “you'll never get it right, cos when you're laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all.”

This all came back to me when I recently read Anna Karenina for the first time. Although I loved the chapters covering the tragic romance of Anna and Vronsky, I was less enthusiastic about the parallel storyline dealing with the enthusiastic countryside landowner, Levin.

Many readers have disliked the Levin chapters of Anna Karenina, largely because they drag by when compared to the Anna storyline. This wasn’t my mine objection to them. With Levin I felt like I was reading Down and Out in Paris and London all over again.

In one famous scene, Levin spends a happy day working in the fields alongside the peasants of his estate. Like Orwell, he is a great friend of the workers and much prefers this day out to spending time among politicians in Moscow. At one level, his views seem refreshing for a Russian aristocrat in the late nineteenth century. Tolstoy relates that “if he had been asked whether he liked or didn't like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general.”

But this ability to see peasants in no different light to other men, does not extend to a wish to see them become anything other than peasants. “The man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman,” Levin says and he believes in a world where everyone knows their place and is happy with it. To him, anyone who wants to educate the peasants and take them away from their work in the fields is doing them a disservice.

Levin never stops to consider that what may be to him an enjoyable day of exercise in the country, is a chore if there is no escape from it. At the end of his day in the fields he can happily go back to his warm safe home and eat a good meal. There are servants to feed him and if his aches grow too painful he can always spend the next day in bed and know that a decent doctor will be there for him if he needs help.

For the peasants there is no escape and no choice. Levin is so wrapped up in his idea of a working class idyll that he never realises that. For him, the grass is greener on the other side and he mistakenly thinks that because he would rather be at work in the fields than behind a desk in Moscow then everyone else feels the same way.

Levin may see himself as the peasants’ friend, but as long as he doesn’t allow them to make their own choices, he’s actually their enemy. Disconcertingly, Levin is held as an extremely positive character in the novel and is widely believed to be a cipher for Tolstoy’s own political views, which are considered liberal for the time. With even the peasants’ supporters looking to deny them a choice, it seems little wonder to me that Russia came to revolution just 28 years after the publication of Anna Karenina.

Thursday 10 March 2011

Life begins at 40?

I'm currently reading Ali Cooper's The Girl on the Swing and noticed, to my surprise, that it has a middle-aged female protangonist. There shouldn't have been any reason for this to be surprising, but I can't actually remember the last time I read a book with a female lead who was over the age of 40.

Looking back over the last 50 novels and novellas I read, I get the following breakdown of the age and gender of the protagonists:

Girl - 2
Boy - 5
Younger woman - 6
Younger man - 22
Older man - 6
Older woman - 0
Ensemble - 2
Animal - 3
Other - 2
Man, various stages of the character's life - 1
Woman, various stages of the character's life - 1

Older women are almost invisible in the pages of fiction it seems. While this problem has been well-documented in the movies, I don't think it's often pointed out for books and I'd say it's an issue that needs to be addressed. It's certainly not just my own reading habits. A glance at any bestsellers list will confirm that.

So when did I last read a book with a middle-aged female protagonist? I honestly don't know. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which I read earlier this year has some older female leads, but no single protagonist, and The Poisonwood Bible, which I read around two years ago, has an older woman as one of the five leads. But a whole book about an older woman? I suspect it was around five years ago or more, when I last read one of the Discworld witches book.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is on my to-read list, but I'm keen to hear any recommendations.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

Review: Remix

Title: Remix
Author: Lexi Revellian
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Hoxton Press
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Quirky, old-fashioned and quite unlike anything else on the market

The outline

Rocking-horse restorer Caz Tallis wakes up one morning to find a handsome man and a cute dog asleep on her balcony. The story develops into a good old-fashioned murder mystery with a modern twist.

Sample

I didn't see the man straight away.
The sun was shining, so I'd taken my breakfast toast and coffee out on the terrace. I strolled to the far corner to admire a view I never tire of: a London roofscape, a glimpse of trees in Hoxton Square two streets away, and the distant Gherkin gleaming in the early morning sun. Already the faint hum of traffic competed with the coo of a courting pigeon. My blackbird hopped towards me, bright eye cocked, waiting for his ration of sultanas. I put them in the dish, and stopped dead.
There was a stranger asleep on my outdoor sofa - my new expensive sofa that I can't really afford and shouldn't have bought - a scruffy mongrel curled up beside him.

The verdict

This is a highly addictive novel, a good old-fashioned murder mystery with a dash of 21st century celebrity glamour. It’s a book that is worth far more than the sum of its parts – sometimes cheesy, sometimes predictable, sometimes naïve, but always a rollicking good read. I struggled to put it down. Lexi Revellian is great at crafting a plot that moves at speed but her biggest talent is in creating characters that the reader can really care about, characters that seem like old friends as the novel draws to a close.

Overall, Remix is great fun, extremely entertaining and – dare I say it – would make an excellent transition to the small or big screen.

Tuesday 8 March 2011

Are self-published novels any good? Part 4

My experiment to compare samples of self-published and professionally-published novels produced some interesting results, surprising in some respects, while predictable in others.

I expected that some of the self-published books would be good, but I didn’t expect that they would be as good as they were. Although, of the 12 samples I read, the three I liked least were by independent authors, two of the four books that I bought were also self-published. I would struggle to choose a favourite between Booker shortlisted Room and two self-published novels, Remix and The Girl on the Swing. Patsy Whyte’s independently published No Easy Road was also of a high standard, though not something I would normally read.

If this had been a blind test, I’m not sure I would have been able to pick out the six self-published books from the samples. Immortal, Elfhunter and No Cure for the Broken-Hearted would have marked themselves out as self-published due to the quality control issues I mentioned in my previous post, while I think I would have been certain that Parrot & Olivier, C and The Long Song were professionally published as they are written with a confident and sophisticated style that is usually only seen in authors of great experience.

As for the rest, I’m not so sure. I think I would have thought that In a Strange Room was self-published (something in the style and content reminded me of work from a creative writing class), but that No Easy Road was professionally published, due to the current craze for misery memoirs and Patsy Whyte’s assured writing style.

Categorising the remaining four – Room, Remix, The Girl on the Swing and Booker winner The Finkler Question – would have been more complicated. I don’t think any of them would have screamed ‘self-published’. Based on my pre-conceptions, I suspect that the originality of Room and Remix would have suggested to me that they were by relatively new writers and were therefore more likely to be self-published, leaving The Finkler Question and The Girl on the Swing for the professionally published pile. I suspect that it would have been even more difficult to distinguish between them if I’d chosen samples of six random bestsellers, rather than six prize nominees.

In the future, I’m certain that the number of quality self-published books will grow. The Kindle and its rival e-readers have made publishing more accessible than ever before as they have taken away the cost and logistics barriers of traditional print publishing. This has great potential for many types of writers who might otherwise not have made it to the shelves: unfashionable authors, self-conscious authors who can’t face the pile of rejections that have to be surmounted to get published in the traditional way, professionally published authors whose back catalogue is languishing out of print, and authors who have recognised this as a viable alternative business model.

In a post on her blog, The Girl on the Swing author Ali Cooper explains that “I hadn't tried very hard with the agent/publisher route. But what I had done was to keep a careful watch on other authors for the past couple of years. I noted who was signing publishing contracts, in what genres etc, and I decided that in my genre, in UK plus a number of other factors, it wasn't going to happen.” She adds that she is sure that she could have got published by a new or small press but “decided I was better off being indie”.

There’s a similar story from Remix author, Lexi Revellian. “I spent a year submitting Remix,” she told blogger Simon Royle in November. “Four agents requested the full typescript; two of them approached me. I was told I write brilliantly. Two said they would like to see my next book. They said Remix did not fit their list, they did not believe they could sell it to publishers, even that books about rock stars never sold. I decided a year was long enough.”

Remix has since sold 15,000 copies in six months and is a constant feature in Amazon’s Top 100 e-books list. In publishing terms that is a significant impact.

Compare Remix’s sales to those of the 2007 Booker shortlist. According to the Telegraph, in the run-up to the announcement of the winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the entire six-book shortlist had sold only  120,770 copies between them. A staggering 110,615 of the sales were of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, with the remaining five titles mustering just 10,155 between them. Indra Sinha's Animal’s People managed only 1,189 sales (a mere 231 of these before it got the publicity of making the shortlist). In contrast, Katie Price’s latest novel at the time, Crystal, had sold 159,407 copies – more than the entire Booker shortlist put together.

The statistics may seem galling, but self-published novelists should definitely take heart in the fact that a novel like Remix can manage as much as a tenth of the sales of a novel from the Katie Price marketing operation with its position on supermarket sales stands and promotion through TV and magazines.

Self-publishers who rant about celebrity books damaging their own chances of getting professionally published are way off the mark. I’ve seen a lot of this kind of talk on forums and it completely flies in the face of publishing economics. Publishers who make a fortune from celebrity bestsellers are in a far better position to take risks over new writers than publishers who must play it safe because they are struggling financially. Neither is Katie Price taking thousands of readers away from other books. Most of them I’m sure read Crystal and the rest of her portfolio because they are buying into the Katie Price brand, not because they are desperate for something to read. Very few of those 159,407 readers would ever consider reading Animal’s People.

Given the relatively small sales figures of even some of the most acclaimed novels, does this mean that it’s better for a new author to go it alone? Perhaps. An author who gets a royalty of 20% of the sale price of a £6.99 professionally-published novel will end up with £1.38 per book sold. And that’s quite a good deal. It’s more common for authors to receive 20% after costs are deducted, or even just 10%. Usually it’s necessary for an author to hire an agent to find a publisher for them, meaning that the agent’s cut will reduce that further.

In contrast Amazon’s digital text platform gives authors a royalty of 70% of the sale price. On a £1.99 self-published book that’s £1.39 per sale, 1p more than through the professional publishing route and with no agent to take a fee.

So what advantages are there for an author who gets published professionally? The obvious one is with printed books. A publisher will carry the costs and spend the time necessary to get a printed book to the shelves. But as digital books become the dominant form over the next few years, where will this leave the publishing industry?

Professional publishers will generally still be able to offer authors a better marketing platform than they can create themselves. This is not just in forms of traditional advertising (which is nowhere near as common in book publishing as it is for products such as DVDs or music CDs), but also in the relationships they have with newspaper arts sections and booksellers.

But this offering can vary between publishers. One author who had her first novel published by a small press told me that she was expected to do most of the marketing work herself and had to present the publisher with samples of press coverage before they would agree to a second print run.

However, the bigger publishers will almost always be able to market a novel better than the author can alone. Another advantage of being professionally published is that many book awards won’t accept entries from self-published novelists. This covers a range of awards from small prizes up to and including the Booker itself and to some extent I can see their point. It’s not worth the judges’ time to be deluged by self-published titles whose only qualification may be that the author thinks that they’re in with a chance. Perhaps in future literary prizes should consider approaching an authors association and ask it to put forward two self-published titles in the same way that each publisher is only allowed to submit two titles. This would give the best self-published titles an equal chance.

Another disadvantage that self-publishers face is that the major newspapers rarely, if ever, review or even mention self-published titles. However, this may become less of an issue as we journey deeper into the digital age. “Is the age of the critic over?”, the Observer asked in January, citing the rise of social media as a crucial factor in how consumers make choices. “Every single literary critic in the traditional media seemed to agree that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, his saga of a dysfunctional American family, was the novel of the epoch,” the article said. “Despite the deafening ballyhoo, the critical consensus didn't seem to make much difference to the larger public.”

So with the fickle and unpredictable public in the driving seat the traditional publishers may find that the e-book revolution wears away their business model in more ways than one. I don’t think it will be long before a self-published author with a great novel and really good self-promotion skills comes along and then there will be no looking back.

Saturday 26 February 2011

Are self-published books any good? Part 3

The Self-Published Novels

I have now read through all of the self-published samples and the verdicts are below. I’ll also post a summary of the results shortly.

Lexi Revellian – Remix

What a place to start! In terms of quality of writing, Remix is indistinguishable from a professionally published novel. Quirky, cosy and instantly likeable, the plot skated along, never faltering and managing to pull off a neat balance between originality and familiarity. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it
I’m not sure it was quite as good as the sample for Room, but it was close. I’ve bought the full book and would have done so even if it was 10 times the 49p price tag.

Lauren Burd - Immortal

After Remix gave me confidence in self-publishing, Immortal brought me crashing back down to earth. It was so bad I couldn't even finish the sample. Bursting with superfluous detail (we're told the main character's every movement, brushing her teeth, brushing her hair, lifting her bag...) and repetitive, cliched descriptions (everyone has ivory skin), this confirmed all my worst fears about self-published novels. There were also a litany of embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors. I gave up after reading 'faux pa'.

CS Marks – Elfhunter

Elfhunter is an unashamedly derivative fantasy, but one that is no worse than many of the professionally published tomes on the market. Alongside its imitation Tolkien setting, it suffers from some clunky sentences and the author’s eagerness to fill the reader in on the world’s history in the first few pages, but these are faults that are common across the genre and Elfhunter was certainly charming in places.
I read a lot of this kind of thing years ago, but not so much any more and there was nothing in this sample that really grabbed my attention. I imagine it would appeal to a lot of people, but it isn’t one for me.

Ali Cooper – The Girl on the Swing

After the two previous self-published mis-hits, my confidence was beginning to waver. However, the excellent Girl on the Swing has gone a long way to restore it. From the evidence of this sample, this past-life drama is elegantly written and expertly crafted and I got so lost in the story that coming to the abrupt end of the sample gave me a bit of a jolt.
Like Remix, this is easily better than most of the Booker contenders and is another self-publishing success. I'm keen to read the rest of the novel as I really want to know how this pans out.

Patsy Whyte – No Easy Road

Despite its listing in Amazon’s fiction section, this is actually an autobiography, albeit one with a very novelistic style. Whyte’s writing is very vivid and she creates strong images in the reader’s mind. Even just the few chapters of the sample were moving and insightful and I felt privileged that Whyte had chosen to be so open about her harrowing life.
This is not the type of thing that I would normally read, so I don’t think I’ll be buying the full book, but I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading ‘triumph over adversity’ true-life stories.

Kenneth Rosenberg – No Cure for the Broken-Hearted

I had fairly high hopes for this one as it was the highest-ranking self-published book that I selected from Amazon. Sadly, I was disappointed. For me, the writing in the sample was fairly pedestrian and lacked the wit or sparkle necessary to drive a romantic novel. Compounding this, the text was also hampered by basic grammatical errors, such as ‘principle’ for ‘principal’.
Not something I would recommend, but may be an enjoyable read for someone who doesn’t want anything too demanding and is willing to ignore the grammar.

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Are self-published books any good? Part 2

The Booker Shortlist

In my quest to compare the opening chapters of professionally published and self-published novels, I have now read through all of the Booker samples. The verdicts are below and the verdicts on the self-published books will be available once I have read through the samples in the next few days.

Emma Donoghue - Room

I didn't think I was going to like this and was a little perplexed as to what it was doing on the Booker shortlist. Given the subject matter I expected a barely fictionalised ambulance-chaser about the Josef Fritzl case, prurient and voyeuristic. On the strength of this sample, I was very wrong.
The technique of telling the story through the eyes of a young boy who knows nothing other than space inside the Room brought a very different dimension to the story to what I expected. It transformed what could have been a true crime cash-in into a very intriguing study of the mind of a human being whose entire world is defined by four walls. I will definitely be reading the full novel.

Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question

I didn't find this to be quite the stinker I anticipated after reading the reviews on Amazon, but neither did it seem to be the obvious choice for a Booker winner. The typical linguistic flamboyance of Booker winners wasn't present here and I found the prose somewhat bland and cliched, particularly when compared to last year's winner Wolf Hall. The sample worked better on an emotional level: it made me smile at times and some passages were rather poignant.
Despite this, I was a little underwhelmed and I'm not planning to read the whole book. The only reason I wanted to read on a little further was because the sample stopped midway through a paragraph mentioning the importance of windows in Czech history, something that has long struck me as particularly curious.

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room

This was the Booker nominee that I knew the least about. I didn’t even know the basics of the plot before reading this (very brief) sample. I was impressed with Galgut’s lyrical writing style, although at times he seemed a little too distant from the action. Nothing in this sample would have discouraged me from reading on if I had the full book in front of me, but at the same time I’m not particularly eager to buy it.
Had I been doing a blind test I suspect I would have identified this as a self-published novel. It has the feel of a university creative writing course to it, with its elaborate language and focus on backpacking, which would have led me to wrongly believe it was a first novel. I was genuinely surprised to find it was written by a 47-year-old with a handful of novels already under his belt.

Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America

I’m very glad that this sample was three times as long as In a Strange Room, otherwise I might have reached a very different conclusion. I didn’t really gel with the first half of this sample at all. It lacked incident, the sentences were formidably long and the vocabulary was difficult to the extent that it sometimes looked as if a dictionary had spilled onto the page (I think it was Orwell who said writers should never use a complicated word when an everyday one would do).
Luckily, it got better and by the end of the sample I was keen to find out what happened to Olivier and his dysfunctional aristocratic family. I found the latter half of the sample witty and interesting and I’m definitely keen to see how things develop.

Andrea Levy – The Long Song

A difficult one this. There was nothing wrong with Levy's writing and the situations she drew were interesting enough, but I couldn't help getting the feeling that I had read so much of this type of thing before. There has been a spate of slavery fiction in recent years, making it very tough to find a new angle. The opening paragraphs of The Long Song, with an old woman in the 1800s recalling her past as a slave, reminded me of similar opening paragraphs in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. Hill's novel came out just a year before Levy's so they were presumably writing them simultaneously, which just shows how common a theme this is becoming.
My problem with The Long Song is that I didn't find the writing in the opening chapters as compelling as that in The Book of Negroes or in Toni Morrison's Beloved or Alex Haley's Roots. It wasn't bad, but I felt it failed to bring anything new to this crowded genre and that alone didn't inspire me to read on.

Tom McCarthy – C

C was the sample that I was most looking forward to, but as it turned out it certainly wasn’t my favourite on the Booker shortlist. I enjoyed reading it, but it lacked the tension of Room or the vividness of Parrot and Olivier.
It’s a book I might read in the future, but I’m certainly not rushing to buy it at the current Kindle price of £7.80 (the paperback and no doubt a cheaper ebook will come in August. It certainly had potential and could develop into a great read, but for the moment it can wait.

Are video games literature?

Interesting article on the Guardian's website today asking why top writers are not writing for video games: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/feb/23/video-games-writers-novelists

In my opinion, there's certainly a lot of scope for a talented writer to produce a video game script that matches the quality of great novels. The problem is one of acceptance.

Check out the syllabus for a typical university literature course and you'll see that, despite now having over a century of heritage, film and TV scripts are still not widely considered literature at the same level as theatre scripts. Students of 20th century literature are likely to study Tennessee Williams or Harold Pinter, but not Woody Allen or Paul Schrader. There is little logical reason for this. Why should a play written for the big screen be any less literary than a play written for the theatre?

With little over a decade of serious scripting to its name, it will likely be a long time before the powers that be consider a video game script as literature and that itself will deter great writers. That is a real shame as the creative industries should be encouraging innovation.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Are self-published books any good? Part 1

The ebook revolution has had a perhaps seismic effect on the future of publishing in more ways than one. One of the most interesting developments is the proliferation of self-published books. Now it is easier than ever for an author to get their work to readers as the cost barrier surrounding printing books has been removed.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, as far as I know, I have never read a self-published novel. Admittedly, until I got my Kindle at Christmas I hadn’t really had access to any. Most of my book buying took place in bookshops where only the ‘proper’ publishers were on display.

I was also wary of the quality conundrum. I think that only the most fervent self-publishing advocates would deny that, on average, published books are likely to be better than self-published books. They have already been through several layers of acceptance, from agents and publishers, whereas anyone can self-publish anything as an ebook. With a traditionally published book you at least know that someone other than the author has given it their seal of approval.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all self-published books are bad, any more than it means that all traditionally published books are good. But the quality control process has been removed. You can argue that Virginia Woolf was self-published, but that certainly doesn’t make every self-publisher a Woolf.

So are there any self-published Woolfs out there today? Or perhaps to be more realistic, are the top self-published novels of a similar standard to the top published ones?

I’m not in a position to do a blind test, however, I have downloaded the Kindle samples of the six novels from the 2010 Booker shortlist and also six self-published / small publisher titles from Amazon’s Top 150 ebooks. I will read the samples then assess the books and rank them in order of the likelihood of me buying the full novel. I haven’t read any of these books before and all the authors are new to me so it will be interesting to see how this experiment turns out.

The books to read are:

Booker shortlist

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue, Room
Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Tom McCarthy, C
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Self-published

Lauren Burd, Immortal
Ali Cooper, The Girl on the Swing
CS Marks, Elfhunter
Lexi Revellian, Remix
Kenneth Rosenberg, No Cure for the Broken Hearted
Patsy Whyte, No Easy Road



Will any of the popular self-published books be able to match up to the Booker titles? I’ll post the results here over the next few days.

Monday 21 February 2011

Review: Ink in the Blood

Title: Ink in the Blood
Author: Hilary Mantel
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Entertaining, but I expected more for my 99p

The outline

Mantel recounts the unpleasantness of her recent hospital stay.

Sample

When Virginia Woolf's doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?

The verdict

Ink in the Blood is an engaging and thought-provoking account of a hospital stay which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Mantel vividly identifies the awkwardness and discomfort of a modern hospital, while touching on questions of the nature of being an author. However, it’s a story that quite literally falls short. It’s actually little more than a well-written newspaper article (at 287 ‘locations’ on my Kindle I estimate it’s only around 2,500-3,000 words). For 99p I would have expected it to be around three times longer.

Sunday 20 February 2011

The best books I read in 2009

The best of the best

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale 
Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm
Stephen Mitchell (translator), Gilgamesh
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

Special mentions to:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

The best books I read in 2010

The top three (in no order)


Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Special mentions to:

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis 
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety 
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World 
David Petersen, Mouse Guard: Autumn 1152 
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front 


Review: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Title: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Author: Tom Stoppard
Nationality: British
Year: 1966
Publisher: Grove Press
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Patchy and dated but worth it for the better parts

The outline

Postmodern drama follows the off-stage existence of two of Hamlet’s minor characters.

Sample

Guil: Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn't bring death home to anyone-- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says-- "One day you are going to die." You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death? 

The verdict

I wavered between giving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead both a higher and a lower score. The beginning and the ending are great examples of postmodern theatre, but much of the middle of the play seems to be little more than a Waiting for Godot wannabe. The comedy wanes - particularly when the players are involved - , the message gets repetitive and the concept starts to show its age. The sharpness of the beginning is lost and the play lurches forward before redeeming itself in its final act. In places it is indeed very funny and very insightful, but it’s far from consistent in my opinion.