Tales from the Bitface

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.

The latest bookclub book. Kincaid’s brother died in 1996 of AIDS. Kincaid herself was estranged from her family for 20 years, so she saw her brother when he was three, and then again when he was 33, and dying.

Unsurprisingly this is more about her than about him. She looks at feelings towards her birth family: does she love her brother? Does she love her mother? ‘No’ is her conclusion for both. But she examines different kinds of love, different ways of loving.

Parts of it are kind of like cubist art in a way: examining the same place, person, or event, at different times, in the way the cubists would try to show a subject from different angles at the same time.

The writing flows very smoothly despite some impressively- if not excessively-long sentences.

I got this as a Christmas present from my beloved. I had no idea who Courttia Newland is. I assumed it was a woman, at first. It’s not, and it turns out I had experienced some of his work already, as he wrote some of the scripts for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series of films; specifically Lover’s Rock, Red, White and Blue , and Education . (I wouldn’t bother clicking those links, it looks like I didn’t write anything about them.)

I started the novel without reading any reviews or anything about it other than the blurb and quotes on the cover. The key one of those is this, from the Observer:

A vast and wildly ambitious piece of speculative fiction that asks what the world would look like if slavery and colonialism never existed.

Which set me up with some expectations. Sensibly, Newland doesn’t make this imagined world a utopia. Far from it, in fact. The world in which the protagonist, Markriss, finds himself, is pretty grim.

And to my mind, at least at first, the only thing in-universe that tells us about the absence of colonialism, etc, is skin colour is never mentioned. Yes, the world is different from our own, and it turns out (reading around the novel) a major reason is, instead of the weird monotheism of Judaeo-Christianity-Islam having the major religious impact on world history, African religions have the biggest influence.

What this means for our hero is he can have an out-of-body experience and it not exactly be unexpected.

Which takes us into the whole out-of-this-world part of this novel. All those blurbs talk about it as a novel of decolonisation and so on, which is fine. But that’s because Newland has a mainstream, literary reputation — he has published several previous novels. This, though is a genre work. Science fiction, you might say, or fantasy, looked at from another direction.

And what nothing prepares you for (well, the reviews do, but I didn’t want to read them first) is that this is a multiverse story. Because Markriss’s ability to leave his body in his astral form develops to the point where he can do so permanently; and then drop back down into a different tributary of the titular river.

This puts him in an alternative version of himself: another timeline. Some have very similar events and experiences; some are very different, such as one that doesn’t look at all removed from our own. He always has some of the people closest to him, though their relationships vary.

It’s effective and accomplished, but it can be unsatisfying. Because, when he leaves a timeline, he leaves its story incomplete. We don’t know what happened to the first version of Markriss, or the second, or…

Sometimes the language, the linguistic style, can be confusing. But it feels like a positive sort of confusion, the kind that stretches your mind.

On the whole, I enjoyed it.

This is a monster, behemoth of a book. At over 800 pages it’s not the longest I’ve read in recent years, but it’s up there. And it is… very strange.

I’ve read several of Keenan’s books before, and enjoyed them, but found them strange. This one is composed of three or four different narratives. They’re interlinked, or at least interconnected, but they’re very different.

A love story in France of a few years ago about someone who is studying cathedrals (sort of); a historical story about the Siege of Khartoum; a far-future science-fiction story supposedly written by two of the characters in one of the other sections.

And so on. It will bear rereading, I imagine, but I’m not sure I’ll dedicate the time. I started it just before Christmas and finished it this morning. With a few other books in between, but still.

The latest book club book for me, and I read it in a day. Short, easy, and supposedly the most popular crime novel ever, or something.

It was OK, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Murder on the Orient Express, which I read at Christmas.

Ten people are invited to a house on an island. Ten people die. But there’s no one else on the island! How can this be?

First, a disclaimer: the author of this book was on the same Creative Writing MA as me, and I read a prerelease PDF that she sent me.

That said, it’s a really good young-adult fantasy story set in the real world, present day.

Or I think ‘middle grade’ is the sort of level it’s marketed towards. The main character, Saffi, is about 12. Her younger brother is maybe eight or ten. Their mum has died tragically young and their dad takes them from London to live with their grandparents in a B&B by the sea in Yorkshire.

The titular house has been in the family for generations, and it has A History. The kids hate it at first, but Saffi tries to adjust and to keep her brother’s spirits up. She is helped by a slightly mysterious local boy they meet.

And then a group of guests arrive at the B&B. In the middle of the night. Without coming through the door.

Things get stranger after that. Will Saffi and Milo save the family’s legacy, themselves, and their new friend’s home, from the plans of these powerful figures out of myth and fairytale? Only by reading will you find out.

It’s great. Get it for your kids.