Tales from the Bitface

I saw Tendai (as is his name) interviewed at Worldcon last month. Went along without knowing anything about him or his writing, and the interview was interesting enough that I went and bought this in the dealers' room immediately afterwards. Or maybe the next day, but you get the idea.

It’s the first of the Edinburgh Nights series, which I think is currently at three books with a fourth on the way and a fifth planned. Which means it kind of violates one of my personal guidelines to have bought it, but what the hell, you know?

Anyway, it’s set in an alternative Edinburgh where there’s magic. The time is approximately the present day, because there’s things like smartphones. But our heroine, Ropa, can talk to ghosts, which tend to hang about when they’ve got unfinished business back on the plane of the living.

And a whole lot more happens besides. It’s a pretty bleak environment that she lives in, essentially a shanty town of caravans on the edge of the city, very much hand to mouth. It feels kind of post-apocalypse, but I don’t think there’s been anything quite as disastrous as that, just a slow decline. Not sure, though, there are hints at things. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.

As far as the ‘Don’t start a series that the author hasn’t finished writing’ guideline goes, it’s pretty standalone, thought with plenty of setup for more.

I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.

It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.

Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.

Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.

It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career is over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.

I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.

We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.¹ But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.

Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?

When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.

And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.

But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.

I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.

I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.

Not going to say much about this here, as I’m already well into the next (and final) volume, and they’re very much a single story.

You will, I think, be far from surprised to learn that this is a reread. At least the third read, in fact. I suggested it as a possibility for my book club, and when it wasn’t chosen I decided it was time anyway.

There are still books that should be in The Great Banksie Reread that I’ve only read once: Stonemouth and The Quarry. But I’ll get to those eventually.

One oddity about The Crow Road is that I’ve never blogged about it before. Yet I’ve loved it since I first read the opening line, at a convention in Glasgow in 1992, if memory serves.

‘Just read the opening line and you’ll buy it,’ my friend Steve said, when I was hesitant about shelling out the huge £10 price for the hardback. I had already read all of Banks’s earlier books, so I was definitely planning on getting it, but waiting for the paperback was the norm.

‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ Steve was right. I bought it, and all he subsequent books, in hardback.

Memory does serve, but not all that well: I’ve written all that before, it turns out, after Banksie died. Though it remains slightly unclear which convention it was that year.

A book is more than its opening line, though. The Crow Road is a family drama, set mostly in a fictional Scottish town not far from where I grew up. Also in Glasgow, a non-fictional city where the titular road exists. The metaphorical one is everywhere, of course: it means death, in the vernacular of that exploding grandmother.

I read it with more of a writerly eye this time, I think, and I wondered whether the structural games really add anything to the whole. I don’t mean the parts that are effectively speculative: the main character, Prentice McHoan, trying to work out what might have happened to his missing uncle. Nor the flashbacks in third-person, when the main narrative is in first. That makes sense, as they’re showing us Prentice’s childhood, or things that happened to other family members when Prentice wasn’t there.

I’m more thinking about a couple of flashes forward, that hint about where the main narrative is going to go. They aren’t enough to really make the reader speculate, and they happen when we’re already well into the story, so they aren’t needed to make us keep going.

They do no harm, though, and maybe Banksie needed to use them to keep his own interest up. And there’s nothing wrong with them, or that.

I do find it hard to explain why this book is so compelling. I think it’s probably his best non-SF book. It’s probably not quite my favourite, though it’s up there. I’ve long thought it was partly cultural for me, in that the characters and locations feel like people and places I knew growing up. But that can’t explain its broader appeal.

I guess Banksie was just a great writer.

Ken finishes his wonderful Lightspeed Trilogy with a flourish. Not all the problems are solved or mysteries explained, but that’s life. All the main characters get good conclusions. And a yellow submarine in space is still an astonishingly cool idea.

Forget I hadn’t posted about this. I finished it almost two weeks ago. The latest book-club book, and not the sort of thing I’d choose normally. It’s the story of a financier around the time of the Wall Street Crash in the 1920s, told from four different points of view. Which one do we trust? (See what he did with the title?)

It’s pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the praise heaped upon it by reviewers, as quoted all over the cover, would suggest.

Actually finished this a few weeks ago, and forgot to write about it. I don’t know why, because it’s absolutely fantastic. Space opera of the biggest scope, yet a tightly-focused character-driven story, and a bildungsroman.

The Earth has already been destroyed when we start reading. Our heroine, Valkyr, or Kyr for short, lives on humanity’s last outpost (or is it?), where they train for revenge.

But there’s so much more to it than that.