Tales from the Bitface

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.

This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and I saw in a bookshop the other day that it’s now published just as Mistborn. Which is more sensible. I can’t help but imagine some potential readers were put off or confused by that ‘final’ in The Final Empire.¹

My son basically made me read this. He’s a Sanderson fan and I had read none. He (my son) also told me Sanderson wanted to write a fantasy where the good guys had lost. Like what would have Middle Earth been like if Frodo and Sam had failed on their trip to Mordor? Sauron would have got the one ring back and basically been all-powerful.²

So this is basically that, with quite a different setup. The empire is ‘Final’ because it has lasted a thousand years or more and is never expected to end. Most people live as peasants, near slaves, and few noble houses are allowed to exist because the empire needs trade and internal tensions and what have you. The emperor — The Lord Ruler, as he’s known — is basically all-powerful, invulnerable. He’s said to have survived various assassination attempts up to and including a beheading. Which seems… wildly improbable, but hey, this is fantasy.

But some people — the titular Mistborn, and others — have special abilities, and there are pockets of resistance.

Sanderson writes a good enough page-turner, but I don’t know if I’ll be going on with the series. First of all there are just too damn many. But more importantly, and surprisingly, this first book is actually quite a complete story, with an ending. Sure, it’s a reasonably open ending, with hints of the kind of troubles the characters are going to face, and so on. But if there were no more books, you wouldn’t feel unsatisfied to leave it there.

And I don’t care enough about any of the characters to want to invest my time in it. Which is probably its biggest weakness. I even left it at home when we went on holiday to Canada recently. I was about 100 pages from the end and didn’t want to have to pack such a huge book that I would probably have finished on the flight over. Which is not how I’d have treated The Lord of the Rings back in the day, just to give one example.

This was published in 2000, and my partner’s parents gave it to me that year or the next. I have a vague feeling I also knew about it from somewhere else. Maybe just saw it in a bookshop and thought it looked interesting. Either way, I never got round to reading it till now.

It’s the story of a Scottish family — clan, almost, and certainly they’re referred to that way in the Gaelic terms that pepper the book — that migrated to Canada some time after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s 1745 uprising. It’s simultaneously the history of that migration, and the story of a present-day descendent of the family, now a successful orthodontist in Ontario; and his older brother who is in less successful circumstances. And most of all, of how they came to be that way.

I decided, since we were taking a trip to Canada, that now might finally be the time to read it. I started it on the way to the airport, but I don’t think I read any while we were still over there.

I’ve finished it now, though, and it’s pretty good. Nice use of parallel storylines, various bits about Scottish history and modern-day (well, actually the modern parts are set in the 80s) Toronto, and so on.

MacLeod came up in conversation while we were over. Not apropos of this; I just recognised the name. He was mentioned as a poet, I think, and I believe that’s how he’s better known. Still, he’s a decent novelist too.

This is a strange wee beastie. The edition I have was published in 1998, and I must have bought it then or not long after. I vaguely remember reading a bit of it and finding it amazing, really powerful. And I obviously started it, because I had a bookmark in it, a few pages in.

But every time I’ve had a look at it since, it hasn’t really grabbed me. Until recently, when I started it again.

And… I’ve no idea what I saw in it back then. It’s a work of surrealism, but it’s just wilfully obscure. Every sentence is grammatically and syntactically sound, but semantically meaningless. It purports to be a catalogue or almanac of a society, with sections titled ‘Sleep’, ‘God’, ‘Food’, and so on. And within them chapters, or short stories, called ‘Sky Destroys Dog’,‘Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas That Contain Him’, ‘Hidden Ball Inside a Song’.

It can be strangely compelling in places, almost reaching the level of poetry. But mostly it’s a bit of a chore to get through. If I hadn’t had it and kept it so long I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

A very curious work.

I read one of the pieces from this, ‘At the Dam’, on my MA course. It didn’t make a huge impact on me at the time, but enough to keep Didion’s name in my mind, and eventually to stir up enough interest for me to get this.

It’s a set of personal essays covering various events around the end of the sixties and the early seventies. It struck me, reading this, she’s kind of a gonzo journalist, or at least gonzo-adjacent, in that the often puts herself in the narrative. Which is good and proper in my humble opinion. Not as intense as HST, but still.

There’s a lot of good, interesting stuff here, including one piece that involves her hanging out with The Doors, waiting for Jim Morrison to arrive. It’s not much about music, though, and I don’t know why she chose to call it The White Album.

One minor annoyance about at least this edition is, although the front matter credits the various publications the pieces originally appeared in (Life, The New York Review of Books, etc), it doesn’t tell us which piece appeared where.

But that doesn’t detract from the pieces themselves.

I remember seeing Brunner at a convention 30 years ago, or more, talking about ‘the death of the midlist’: how writers who sold their work steadily to publishers, and to readers, used to be able to make a living from doing so, but no longer could. I wonder what he’d make of the publishing scene today.

Anyway, this slim book from 1966 hides its science-fictional nature till almost the very end. Unless you’ve read the blurb. Or indeed, this post, or the wikipedia entry about it. A theatre actor, a recovering alcoholic not long out of a sanatorium, gets the chance to work with a hip writer and director.

They’re going to get a troupe together, coop them up in a house in the country, and work collaboratively to construct a play.

Or at least, that’s what they want the cast members to think.

It’s not bad, if a little inconsequential.