Category: Longform
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📗 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.
Asteroid City, 2023 - ★★★½
Daft fun from Wes Anderson. The story isn't much here, but every frame is a painting, as that YouTube channel had it. Gorgeous to look at, filled with famous faces, highly mannered acting.
The film isn't SF, but the play within the film is very lightly SF. Nothing is made of the alien's visit, though, because that's not the point.
I enjoyed it a lot.
Mission: Impossible, 1996 - ★½
I didn't see this film when it came out, but I used to love the Mission: Impossible TV series back in the seventies.
So this really annoyed me. Why the fuck would you make Jim a traitor? The heroic leader of the IM team for years? The man to whom the self-destructing message was always given. Give him a peaceful retirement, for god's sake. Or just leave him out of it. Don't have him betray everything he ever stood for.
I mean Jesus fuck almighty. It's like if Star Trek: The Next Generation had come along, and they were like, oh yeah, Kirk? He was a Romulan agent all along. Blew up the old Enterprise and everyone on board.
That's the kind of betrayal this film starts with.
Anyway, some shit happens. Things explode. Restaurants, helicopters, trains. Fuck knows.
Crucial Track for 10 October 2025: Clash City Rockers
"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash
Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?
Today's prompt is:
A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.
Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.
What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.
I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.
Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.
'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'
📗 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.
Sliding Doors, 1998 - ★★½ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
Well my goodness, but this is a strange old film. I've known about it and kind of wanted to watch it for years, because I knew it was about alternative realities, paths not taken, that kind of thing.
What I didn't know is it's also a romcom. Or two. Of sorts.
And a tragedy. I mean, spoilers, but…
What were they actually trying to make here? Part of me thinks the idea was, 'Hey, what if we have a romcom but tragic, and the heroine dies at the end?' And the studio, or co-creators were, like, 'No way.'
'Unless…'
And you end up with two romcoms. Sort of.
📗 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.