Category: Longform
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📗 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.
The Naked Gun, 2025 - ★★★½
Remakes can be just as much fun as the original, it turns out. I note I gave that four stars, which seems high, but you know how it is: we award these things in the moment.
Anyway this new version updates the old without losing any of its zany charm and laugh-out-loudness. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.
The Ballad of Wallis Island, 2025 - ★★★★½
I forgot to write about this when we saw it a couple of weeks back. I went in knowing nothing about it but the basic setup: rich guy invites faded, formerly popular, folk duo to his island for a private gig.
I didn't even know it was a British film. The above description gives kind of Glass Onion vibes when you tell it to people, but this is nothing like that. It's much more gentle and charming and sad yet happy.
The music's great too. Highly recommended.
📗 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.
📗 Books 2025, 15: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
Slightly oddly, I bought this in a bookshop in Canada on our recent trip. I mean, it’s not that odd. Toronto is an English-speaking city, with decent bookshops: why wouldn’t I get it there? Just that it’s not in the least Canadian, and it gave me extra weight to carry home.
But it was such a nice bookshop I wanted to support it (BMV on Queen Street West, if you’re interested), and this is a book I’ve meant to read for years.
Does anyone actually reach the titular maritime safety device/residence? That’s one of the things I wanted to know, as well as what else the story was about. Well, it’s Woolf, so as I wrote about Mrs Dalloway, it’s mainly about the inside of people’s heads.
Not in a gruesome way; not like that thing they do in House, where the camera goes up someone’s nose and into their brain (we’re watching the first season at the moment). I mean their minds, obviously.
Slightly to my surprise, it’s set in Scotland. Specifically, a Hebridean island, generally taken to be Skye, although there’s no lighthouse like the one in the story there. A family with about four (five, six?) children — ranging from young adults about to be married off, down to a boy of five or six — have a holiday home there. and spend the summer, along with various guest they’ve invited along.
Conversations happen, walks are gone on, and many thoughts are thought. Will James, the young boy, get his desired trip to the lighthouse? Only if it’s fair tomorrow, which his father assures him it won’t be.
In fact, we never learn if he goes there on that visit. Part two of the book is entitled ‘Time Passes’, and it certainly does. Ten years, in fact, including the First World War. Several characters die offstage. Woolf is content to tell us, in her inimitable style. Showing that kind of thing would not make sense here.
Then in the third section, what’s left of the family and invited guests visit the house again. Suffice it to say the weather is fine enough to make the trip, but the sixteen-year old James and his sister Cam do not want to go with their father, but are dragged along anyway.
I’m making light of it (ha ha), but it’s a work of complete genius in the way she takes us inside people’s thoughts. It is so convincing, even — perhaps especially — the teenage James. It can be difficult at times, but not in an unreadable way. Just in the complexity of the thought processes. Woolf was all about the interiority. It wil bear another reading, I’m sure. Probably several.
📗 Books 2025, 14: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson
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.
Clue, 1985 - ★★★½
This was daft, but quite fun. A film based on a board game. Specifically on Cluedo. Which in America, strangely, seems to be called 'Clue'. Why would you not use such a great, clever name as 'Cluedo'? Unless they don't have Ludo there? But that seems impossible.
Anyway, it's probably the second-best thing I've seen Tim Curry in. Hmm, he was in Times Square, wasn't he? I remember enjoying that, but not much about it.Right now I'd have to but this ahead of it. He plays the butler, and since one couple turn up in the same car, and it's a stormy, rainy night, I was getting serious Brad & Janet vibes. I was disappointed when they had an umbrella on getting out of the car, instead of a newspaper.
Anyway, the writers had to struggle a bit to fit the conventions of the game into an actual story, but they did OK. There are shenanigans, murders, betrayals, multiple endings. All in all, not bad.
📗 Books 2025, 13: No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod
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.