📗 Books 2025, 24: Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness, Translated by Magnus Magnusson

This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.

In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.

It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.

We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.

It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ‘the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.

📗 Books 2025, 23: How to Solve Your Own Murder, by Kristen Perrin

Most sites describe How to Solve Your Own Murder as ‘cosy crime’, which I suppose it is. It has a first-person protagonist, so the reader doesn’t think there’s much chance she’ll die. She does find herself in some danger, though, and hell, she might not inherit her great aunt’s fortune, if she doesn’t solve the mystery of her murder.

The great aunt’s murder, that is. Our heroine has never met the great aunt at the start, and never does, because she’s murdered right away. But we know from a prologue that the great aunt always expected to be murdered. A medium told her so — or at least implied as much — when she was 16. It became the defining fact of her life, which is quite sad.

The great aunt is a secondary first-person narrator, by way of her diaries. So we get alternating chapters of the past and present. It’s a good read.

I did something unusual for me at the end: I read the few pages fom the sequel that are included at the back. Usually I skip that kind of thing. Especially when it’s not from a sequel, but from another book entirely. Not this time, though, and I’ll be seeking out How to Seal Your Own Fate (‘Book two in The Castle Knoll Files’) at some point.

📗 Books 2025, 22: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

A Booker winner, no less. And a science-fiction novel, too. Well, of sorts. It’s set in space, but very much the non-fictional, real space of the International Space Station, and the present day. And nothing weird or fantastic (in the fantastika sense) happens.

Yet it is set slightly into the future. On the day it takes place — the whole story happens across a single day, sixteen orbits of the space station — a new mission to the moon is launched. A crew of four, scheduled to land on the moon a few days later. Is that enough to make it SF? Kind of. If it were up for SF awards, which I’m sure it must have been, few would quibble.

But none of that matters compared to how gorgeous the prose is. This is a very writerly novel. The language is lovely, almost poetic in places; yet with a lot of lists, oddly, both from the author and from at least one of her characters.

I was, however, mildly annoyed at times, in two aspects of my being. The physics graduate disagreed with some word choices. Right in the opening line, for example, a space station in orbit is described as ‘rotating’ round the Earth. While that’s not exactly wrong, it’s not how we’d usually phrase it. Orbiting or circling, we’d say. It might be rotating too, but that would be around its own axis. A tiny thing, though.

Then the writer and user of English was mildly disturbed by how the small amount of dialogue was presented: no quote marks. That’s not uncommon nowadays, but it can be distracting, and what purpose does it serve?

It’s a delightful work. There isn’t much plot, but there are fragments of all the six crew members' stories. We see them at work, performing experiments and maintaining the station; watching a typhoon building on Earth and worrying about the people in its path; and musing about and remembering their lives and families back home.

It’s incredibly skillful to conjure so much from so little text — it’s unusually short for a modern novel. A worthy winner, and very highly recommended.

📗 Books 2025, 21: The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

It’s a strange thing, or so it seems to me, to deal with a political event of your own lifetime, by writing a fictional version of a life. And not of one of the protagonists, but of an imaginary version of one of their children. Yet this is what we have here, and it’s on the whole successful.

Doctorow takes the story of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage against the USA, convicted, and executed in 1953. Changing their name to Isaacson, he tells the story of their son, Daniel, along with his younger sister, Susan. In reality the Rosenbergs had two boys, but their ages were similar, and some of what happened to them after their parents' arrest, according to Wikipedia, is similar to the experiences of Daniel and Susan.

As a novel it’s extremely well written, both readable and literary. It uses a number of devices — I might call them gimmicks, if that didn’t seem too dismissive, but I’m not sure I understand the reason for them. It switches frequently between Daniel’s first person and third — sometimes within the same sentence —, and also jumps around in time. One section is told from the point of view of the father and mother, which makes sense, as it’s when they are in prison and on trial, where Daniel would have no access to them.

The whole thing is presented as the thesis (or part of it) that Daniel is writing for his PhD, so there are several levels of meta involved. The main problem I had with it was the adult Daniel is at times a thoroughly objectionable character. There are a couple of early scenes where he sexually humiliates his young wife that nearly made me throw the book across the room.

Protagonists don’t have to be pleasant characters, of course, but this seemed prurient to me. I suppose we’re meant to understand he’s been damaged, if not abused. by his experiences, and goes on to abuse in turn. But I’m not sure the two sides tie up that well. The scenes of the young kids trying to make their way after their parents are gone, running away from an awful children’s home and returning to their now-empty house, are very moving.

Susan is in a mental institution at the start, and apparently dies there. Her story is the one that’s missing from this, in fact. We learn about her as a kid, certainly, and there are some interactions with Daniel when they’re older, then they’re estranged for a while. Then he visits her at the institution and she dies offstage. It feels like a gap, but again, maybe that’s how life feels sometimes.

As I say, it’s an unusual choice. Doctorow could have written a story about children torn from their parents and all that implies, without making it so closely tied to real events. Or he could have written a biography of the Rosenbergs. The latter would be a different kind of thing, though, and probably have a different readership. You’d only read such a biography if you were specifically interested in the case or the people, while you can read this as a novel without even knowing it’s inspired by real events. And maybe that’s the reason for using the events as the seed.

📗 Books 2025, 20: The Hallmarked Man, by Robert Galbraith

The mighty JK Rowling’s latest reaches us, at long last. After the bombshell ending of The Running Grave two years ago, we have the next installment in Strike and Robin’s story. (That should really be ‘Strike and Ellacott’s’, or ‘Cormoran and Robin’s’, but sometimes you’ve got to write things in the way that feels right).

The case is way complex. I’m not sure I followed all the twists, or even quite had all the characters figured out — especially actual and possible victims, even more than culprits. That’s partly because of the speed I read it at, and the late nights my reading caused.

Anyway, I’ll not say too much more because of spoilers, but I think The Ink-Black Heart is still my favourite.

180 pages in, and it’s only publication day. My local bookshop got my preorder in early and let me collect it.

Took the dustjacket off because it’s fiddly to hold.

📗 Books 2025, 19: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

It’s unusual to get a science-fiction novel that was also longlisted for the Booker, as this was. The question, though: is it science fiction?

It certainly has science: most notably marine biology. Also space travel to the edge of the solar system via a new, unexplained drive; something which might be a first contact event; possible time travel; and a kind of ascendence. In fact there’s a section near the end that had strong resonances of 2001: A Space Odyssey for me.

So yes, it’s SF. But it feels somehow incomplete. Not unfinished, except in the way you might say that about 2001 itself. It keeps the pages turning OK, but I’m not entirely sure exactly what it’s trying to achieve, and (therefore) whether it’s successful.

It tells two stories at once. And I do wonder whether MacInnes was similarly torn between his desire to write a mainstream, literary novel, and one diving deep into fantastika.

Leigh, the marine biologist who ends up on a space mission, had a physically abusive father, which not surprisingly affects much of her life. Though her sister appears not to have suffered similarly, and there are hints that Leigh is not entirely a reliable narrator. (But then again, who is?) The adult Leigh is torn between her career and her desire to visit her mother, who is showing signs of dementia.

As a marine biologist Leigh experimentally engineers algae which is intended to feed, oxygenate, and cheer up the small crew of a year- (or more) long voyage. But there’s a lot going in the background of the story, that Leigh and most of the other characters are not privy to. Secrets kept by companies and governments. We, the readers, are also kept outside the walls of secrecy.

So it’s very good at evoking the situation of someone who is a cog — albeit an essential one — in very complex machine, but who has no picture of the machine as a whole.

All of which leaves it convincing, but frustrating, especially if you’re looking for a nicely wrapped-up story.

📗 Books 2025, 18: Glory Road, by Robert A Heinlein

I had a sudden hankering to reread this old Heinlein book (even older than me, it turns out, being first published in 1963). I read it as a kid, from the library, and if I ever bought a copy it isn’t accessible now.

I searched my local library’s catalogue. No joy. But the excellent World of Books duly had an old copy or two, and one was soon here.

It is almost exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it’s a tale of derring-do, sword-and-sorcery adventure, where the sorcery is sufficiently-advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how it works, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fun story, very much of its time.

The first-person male protagonist is one of those highly-capable men beloved of that era’s male American SF writers. But he is relatively lacking in self-confidence at times, which is surprisingly refreshing for the type. The female lead is mostly great, and considerably more capable than the guy, even if he doesn’t exactly realise it.

Anyway, loads of fun, and I’m glad to have read it again after all these years.

📗 Books 2025, 17: Theophilus North, by Thornton Wilder

I had never heard of Wilder until a year or so ago, but I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey toward the end of last year, and now I’ve read this one. I picked it up at a secondhand book stall at our local market a few months ago — at the same time I got Blitzkrieg Bops, actually — and now here we are.

It’s 1926. The twenties are undeniably roaring, for some people at least. The titular Theophilus, or Teddie, as he prefers to be known, starts the story by leaving his job teaching in a boys' school. He goes on the road, buying a car from a friend, and at first you think it’s going to be a pre-Kerouac kind of thing. But within a few paragraphs he’s reached Newport Rhode Island, sold the car, and settled down for the summer.

Well, ‘settled down’ is not quite the right term. In fact, in modern terms, he has to hustle to make a living. Staying at the YMCA at first, he manages to get various jobs teaching kids tennis, tutoring languages, and reading to people. It was long before audiobooks, obviously.

But really, what he’s doing is sorting out relationships. Various kinds of relationships, but not that varied kinds of people. Newport is a summer home for the wealthy, the kind of people familiar from that other book about the twenties. You know, the one I’ve never managed to like. This lot have more problems, and are more interesting, than Gatsby’s crowd. And some of them are kids, too.

He is astonishingly capable, and since the story is told in the first person, it can come across as a tad self-serving, almost boastful at times. But North is so charming, so thoroughly good for people, that it’s hard to criticise.

Oh, I should add, it’s a comedy of sorts. Among a certain class of reader, myself included, mention Rhode Island and you’ll conjure up soul-sucking, squamous, cosmic horror. But there’s nothing even vaguely Lovecraftian here. The only horrors are the fear of social ostracism, and one house that is supposedly haunted. North finds a way to remove that stain from the house and ensure that servants will stay there again.

Oh well.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it’s a strange little one. It does just about dip into hints of magic realism at a couple of points, but those are mainly North (or Wilder) criticising the kind of people who prey on the vulnerable by offering healing and such.

It’s maybe not fair to compare it to The Great Gatsby, just because it’s set around the same time. Fitzgerald was writing about his own time, while Wilder was writing fifty years later, making it just on the border of a historical novel for him (though he lived through the time, so not exactly). But I couldn’t help drawing the comparison, and I enjoyed this much more.

📗 Books 2025, 16: The Cracked Mirror, by Chris Brookmyre

I’ve read a few of Brookmyre’s over the years, and always enjoyed them, but I don’t seek him out. So when I chanced on this in Waterstones a week or two back, I had a look. The title immediately made me think of Agatha Christie, of whose books I’ve read a few recently, and my partner and I have watched all of the Poirot series, and several of the Miss Marple TV adaptations.

So when the blurb said this:

You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.

You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.

Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide.

there was no way I wasn’t buying it. Yes, it’s a mashup between Miss Marple and a hard-boiled detective. How? Why? These are questions you’ll have to read it to find out.

It’s good. A gripping read, a page turner. The ending maybe falls a little flat but that might just because I’d guessed (or worked out) something fairly early on. I think you’re meant to, though.