Tales from the Bitface

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.