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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.