Book review: 1606

In a brief change from the fiction I usually read, another of James Shapiro's histories of the events that influenced Shakespeare's writing. After 1599, we get 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, with the plays that premiered that year being King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. There's lots of outside elements big and small that seem to be reflected in those plays but inevitably most of them come back to the Gunpowder Plot of the previous year. I knew that Macbeth carried a lot of echoes of that, but Shapiro also finds possible links in King Lear, which would probably have been written by November 1605, but might have had amendments before it reached the stage, acknowledging some of the current events everyone was paranoid about at the time (the anonymous letter Edmund plants to frame Edgar might have given people flashbacks to one that revealed the plot to Parliament in time for it to be stopped.) The two very different versions of Lear in quarto and folio form are also discussed, changes which might have been made as the parameters of what was and wasn't appropriate to be staged changed.

There's also a little-known story of an alleged assassination of James I, a rumour that spread with amazing speed throughout the country and sounds uncannily like the many false celebrity death rumours that make the rounds nowadays. Overall I found much interesting stuff here, especially since, as Shapiro points out in the opening, people seem less interested in exploring Shakespeare as a Jacobean playwright despite the fact that his company had a much closer relationship with James than with his predecessor.

Book review: The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell's (not that one) The Bone Clocks has some similarities to his most famous book Cloud Atlas, although it's got a more linear structure than the Russian doll format of that novel, and its story takes place over a single lifetime: That of Holly Sykes, who narrates the first segment as a teenager in the 1980s, and the final one as a grandmother in the 2040s. In between we have multiple other narrators, all of whom have some connection to Holly, whether it be a significant one or fleeting.

As well as following a human life from a distance, The Bone Clocks also has a supernatural element that reveals itself more and more as the story goes on: Holly is caught in the middle of a centuries-old war between two species of immortals, one group nicknamed Carnivores, who kill to maintain their own eternal youth, and the other calling themselves Horologists, who are eternally reincarnated while remembering all their previous lives, and who are determined to wipe out the murderous Carnivores.

It may have taken me a while but this was probably my favourite Mitchell book since Cloud Atlas, and it also seems to take place in the same universe as all his other books, including his dire warnings about a post-industrial future (assuming the penultimate Cloud Atlas segment in a high-tech future could have been taking place only in China, while the rest of the world succumbed to the events of The Bone Clocks.) I think strict literary fiction fans might be a bit nonplussed at how the gentle suggestions of the supernatural turn into full-on fantasy for the 2020s part of the story, but for me the personal stories were interesting (even when some of the narrators are far from sympathetic) and the fantasy element effectively blended into the more naturalistic framework.

Book review: All She Wants

As something of a break from the various urban fantasies I've been reading lately (and because it was discounted on Kindle, my usual reason for trying anything I hadn't already planned on buying,) I thought I'd give Jonathan Harvey's venture into comic novels a go. Harvey is course the playwright best known for Beautiful Thing, although for the last several years his day job has been as head writer on Coronation Street. And that informs the story of All She Wants, about a soap star whose career goes on the skids early on in the book, before we flash back to her earlier life in which all she ever wanted was to star in the Liverpool-set soap filmed near where she grew up. It's funny, although its story is every bit as soapy and random as those its lead character has to act in, and the attempt to add a more serious side with a wife-beating storyline feels a bit glib in the circumstances.

Book review: London Falling

Paul Cornell is another Doctor Who writer to launch a book series about a section of the Metropolitan Police dealing with the supernatural; presumably Ben Aaronovitch hasn't taken it as encroaching on his territory since he provides the cover quote. And London Falling suggests a different enough approach that it can happily enough coexist with the Rivers of London series - there's a bit of a darker, nastier edge to this book that's closer to the Mike Carey Felix Castor books that I still miss.

Here the team is a four-strong one that comes together largely by accident when a long-running undercover operation comes to an abrupt end, the crime boss they've spent years trying to take down dying suddenly in a supernatural (and very grisly) way. While investigating the death the head of the operation, two undercover officers and an intelligence analyst end up acquiring, for reasons they still haven't found out by the end of the first book, psychic powers that allow them to see into the supernatural underside of London.

It took me a while to get used to the way Cornell jumps between his four leads as point-of-view characters every couple of pages, but the story (featuring a curse on anyone who scores too many goals against West Ham) builds well, and kept me keen to go back to it. But it's probably the fact that Cornell manages at least two HUGE moments of pulling the rug out from under the reader that'll ensure me checking out the rest of the series.

Book review: Snow Blind

I really should try to remember, when I'm browsing books at various times of the year, that I like to have a ghost story (or collection of them) to read over Christmas. As it happens this year I already had one waiting on my Kindle so Christopher Golden's Snow Blind it was. The novel proved just right for the job, not exactly a traditional ghost story but with just about the right balance of darkness and hope.

It's set in a New England town that's used to snowstorms every winter but two, twelve years apart, prove particularly deadly. The first few chapters take place during the first storm, which claims a couple of dozen lives. Most of the book takes place twelve years later though, when the approaching second storm also brings with it some of the people who died in the first. There's a traditional ghost but most of them possess the body of someone living, with a warning that the storm contains an evil supernatural force, the real reason for the high casualty rate.

I thought the book nicely set up the various groups of characters, each of whom loses someone in the first storm only to have them come back in the second, with not all the returnees necessarily being welcome visitors. So there's plenty of people to feel invested in as they try to stay safe from the ice creatures, and maybe even save their loved ones' ghosts from their limbo state.

Headlong

The year is 5343 but Christmas street decorations are still those big bulbs made up of lots of little white lights, that turn up in high streets looking slightly tattier every year. Also, there's Christmas tree bulbs instead of planets in the opening credits NOW LET US NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN.

"The Husbands of River Song" by Steven Moffat, directed by Douglas Mackinnon.Spoilers after the cut.

Book review: The Basic Eight

Daniel Handler is better known as children's author Lemony Snicket, but has also published a few books under his own name. Before the Series of Unfortunate Events came his 1995 debut novel The Basic Eight, whose story is a bit of a high school transposition of The Secret History and Fight Club. It takes the form of a journal by San Francisco high school senior Flannery Culp, who's gone back to re-edit it for publication from the prison cell or mental hospital room she's ended up in a year or so later. So it's made clear from the start that she and the other members of the Basic Eight, a pretentious clique, will end the story with murder, and she even lets us know in advance who the victim will be. The unlikeable, delusional narrator device extends to Flannery pointing out to the reader when she's using literary devices like foreshadowing, dramatic irony and pathetic fallacy, and ending each chapter with a list of discussion topics and useful vocabulary. I found it generally enjoyable, although the plot feels well-trodden and Handler's use of barely-disguised real names for public figures (post-notoriety, Flannery's nemesis is talk show host Winnie Moprah, and she'll be played by actress Rinona Wider in the TV movie) was a bit twee for me.

Book review: Career of Evil

Writing under a pseudonym must do wonders for J.K. Rowling's writer's block, because unlike the big gaps we used to get between Harry Potter books, the Cormoran Strike crime novels she writes as Robert Galbraith have been coming out pretty regularly. The series is in part Rowling's way of talking about the weirdness of fame, and where the first two books saw the private detective solve cases involving famous people, in Career of Evil it's his own fame thanks to those cases that kicks everything off: A serial killer with a Blue Öyster Cult fixation has made it very clear he or she has a particular beef with Strike, who thinks his recent appearances in the papers have stirred up someone from his past with a grudge. And since his past was in the military police, he can come up with a decent shortlist of suspects just off the top off his head.

The book opens with Strike's assistant Robin receiving a severed leg as a special delivery, but despite early word being that this was the goriest of the novels so far, I'm not sure it quite overtakes The Silkworm's ritual eviscerations. The creepiest element is probably Robin delving into the world of acrotomophilia, investigating people either attracted to amputees or, particularly in this case, people who want to have their own limbs amputated. Having lost a leg in the Middle East, Strike is unsurprisingly unsympathetic, particularly to a very odd couple they meet during their investigation. Despite a fairly small pool of suspects this is another good mystery with a few red herrings and perilous moments - this being someone happy to kill off dozens of characters in a children's series, you can certainly imagine Rowling wouldn't hesitate to get rid of one of her popular leads in a grisly adult series.

Raven? See, moan.

So after Doctor Who Series 9's only single-part story we go into a concluding three-parter, but a stealth one, a bit like "Utopia" was a stealth way to reintroduce the Master. In this case it's the Time Lords who are reintroduced, and they're grumpy about... something, because the Time Lords are always grumpy about something.

"Face the Raven" / "Heaven Sent" / "Hell Bent" by Sarah Dollard and Steven Moffat, directed by Justin Molotnikov and Rachel Talalay. Spoilers after the cut.

Evil dust or something

I've got so used to this series of Doctor Who being made up of two-parters I wasn't really prepared for this week's to be a standalone. I'm still not convinced next week's apparently unrelated episode won't turn out to be some sort of sequel after all.

"Sleep No More" by Mark Gatiss, directed by Justin Molotnikov. Spoilers after the cut.

Book review: Lamentation

C.J. Sansom's Lamentation is the latest Shardlake novel, and as becomes quickly apparent the last one to take place during the reign of Henry VIII - it's obvious to everyone that the king has months left to live at best, but nobody can mention this because to do so is treason. Of course most things seem to be treason, or heresy, in the last year of Henry's life: These books have always really backed up the idea that England has never come closer to Stalinist Russia than during Tudor times, and it's a particularly heavy atmosphere in the sixth book. Having changed the official religion for his own ends, with his death approaching Henry seems to be trying to hone in on what his actual beliefs are. To have any religious beliefs other than the king's is treason, but with no clue what the king's beliefs will be from one day to the next anyone toeing the party line one day could find themselves burned at the stake the next day for espousing the exact same tenets - Shardlake himself is regularly being threatened with a heresy accusation by anyone with the slightest grudge against him.

There's a number of story threads going on but the main one is based around a real-life book written by Queen Catherine Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, a proclamation of faith the like of which a lot of people wrote at the time. In reality it was published after Henry's death, in the novel the manuscript has been stolen at a time when its contents could have been used against her. The storyline is interesting but as usual what I most enjoy about the novels is the atmosphere of the time, which at this point has become even more threatening than before.

Zygon and done it again

It's all gone a bit dark again chez Doctor Who, although fortunately nowhere near as dark as the David Tennant Specials a few years back.

"The Zygon Invasion" / "The Zygon Inversion" by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat, directed by Daniel Nettheim. Spoilers after the cut.

Arya gonna go my way?

I'm pretty sceptical about this rumour of Maisie Williams as the next Doctor Who companion. Apart from the minor detail that she's got other filming commitments for the foreseeable, most of the time all this speculation gets drummed up and then the new companion is a completely new character. (Jenna Coleman had already been announced as Amy's replacement when Clara made her surprise early appearance.)

"The Girl Who Died" / "The Woman Who Lived" by Jamie Mathieson, Steven Moffat and Catherine Tregenna, directed by Ed Bazalgette. Spoilers after the cut.

Book review: Foxglove Summer

In Ben Aaronovitch's last novel, police constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant considered himself well out of his comfort zone in having to cross the river and work in South London, but Foxglove Summer sees him leave London completely and investigate the case of two missing schoolgirls in the countryside. He also ends up somewhere even further away for the big finale, and in the process figures out the true nature of The Folly's vampiric housekeeper (it's not what he thinks.) Most of the usual characters stay behind in London so Aaronovitch gets to play around with a new dynamic, with Beverley Brook, the river goddess and Peter's on-off girlfriend, getting a more active role in the story; there's a new gay character whose sexuality is entirely incidental as well, so that's good.

It's one of the more enjoyable stories in the Rivers of London series, although some of the conceits of Aaronovitch's prose are starting to grate on me a bit: I know people are likely to say "me and Beverley" in normal conversation when "Beverley and I" is correct, but using it so much in writing really annoys me, especially when it's such an easy rule to learn. And I do like the way the writer points out, via his mixed-race narrator, how western literature tends to assume a character is white unless told otherwise, and in contrast Peter always describes a new character's race regardless of what it is; but at times he's so obviously making a point it defeats the object, like when Peter walks into a room and it's made clear everyone in it is white, and he then goes on to individually tell us each of the characters is white as well.

But while I'd like the books to have a slightly stricter editor sometimes, I'm still enjoying them for the most part, and the change of location brings a fresh touch to this instalment, while keeping the series' ongoing story on hold, presumably for a big finale in a book or two's time.

Fisher Priceless

So it looks like this whole series of Doctor Who is made up of two-parters with matching titles? I approve - a nice throwback to the original series without actually going back to four- and six-part stories that spent the middle bit running around corridors because they ran out of story. And the tenth anniversary of the new series is a good time to go for it. But I can't have read the series preview in the Radio Times that carefully because I totally missed that this was what they were doing.

"Under the Lake" / "Before the Flood" by Toby Whithouse, directed by Daniel O'Hara. Spoilers after the cut.

Book review: The Long Mars

Terry Pratchett's final novel has been published, but I'm still a couple of books behind, including the series he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter. To be honest I've never felt that Pratchett had a huge amount of input into the actual writing of the Long Earth novels - I know the idea of parallel worlds that could easily be visited was his, so that could be the only reason his name remains on the books. It makes sense that with Pratchett's failing health while the series was being written, Baxter would do most of the heavy lifting, and there's never been much hint of Pratchett's style in them - either in terms of humour or of story. Instead the books seem primarily concerned with creating a universe based on the initial conceit, rather than having particularly involved stories take place in it. So as the name suggests, the third book The Long Mars expands that further to include a trip across the various versions of Mars. But these don't run parallel to the Long Earth, instead stretching out into yet another different series of alternate universes. As usual there's also various storylines going on across the Earths as well, including the rise of a possible new evolution of humans. With the series nearly over I might as well continue to the end (although I guess Baxter could keep going on his own, in which case I'll bail out) but this sweeping look across the whole of a new universe doesn't really leave much room for the kind of story development I was hoping for.

Your face looks Familiar

Everyone got - rightly - excited about Michelle Gomez returning so quickly to Doctor Who, Missy's "death" hand-waved away as promised, but there was another returning name I was excited about: Beautiful Thing director Hettie Macdonald also came back for the opening two-parter. Given her only previous episode was "Blink," you'd think it would have been commented on more.

"The Magician's Apprentice"/" The Witch's Familiar" by Steven Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald. Spoilers after the cut.

Book review: Revival

As with the murder mysteries that dominated my early teens, my reading nowadays rarely revisits the horror novels that I loved in my late teens. So it's many years since I last read one by the biggest name in the genre, Stephen King. I only even downloaded Revival - one of three new books King published in 2014, so I guess he's as prolific as ever  - when there was a cheap kindle deal for it, and I figured I'd get a good week or two's worth of commuting reading matter for a couple of quid. And that's true enough; King's not exactly known for being concise and Revival is a rambling story that only really starts to build to its point about 80% through. The narrator is a rock guitarist who's spent a lifetime playing in small bands. Every few years he also bumps into Pastor Jacobs, a figure from his childhood. When he lost his family in a car crash Jacobs also lost his faith, but later in life he cynically starts a moneymaking career as a healing preacher with a revival ministry. The cures he carries out are real, but they're part of a mysterious lifelong experiment, and for some there's frightening side effects. After such a long buildup the revelation at the end of the story is something of an inevitable anti-climax; I might have felt differently if I had been reading other King books all these years and was tired of his rambling style, but as it is even if the destination was on the disappointing side, I enjoyed the journey.

Book review: Who is Tom Ditto?

Danny Wallace is best known for non-fiction books in which he takes on high-concept challenges; this venture into fiction also has a bit of a high-concept edge, as the lead character of Who is Tom Ditto discovers a subculture of people who literally follow and mimic strangers to try out their lives for size. Tom is a radio newsreader whose girlfriend disappears, leaving a cryptic note, and in the middle of trying to figure out what's happened to her he also has a number of high-profile mishaps at work. In the process he discovers that his girlfriend was part of this subculture of stalking and copying, and that he never really knew that much about who she really was. Enjoyable enough with a couple of good comic setpieces but it's not one that's likely to stick in my mind for long.

Book review: King of Hell

The seventh book in Christopher Golden's "Shadow Saga" series is also the final one; of course the third book was meant to be the last one as well and Peter Octavian still came back so you never know. After a sixth volume that didn't do much for me this conclusion is a lot better, as Peter travels across dimensions to free the friends who got trapped in Hell in previous installments, and in the process finds out who the titular King of Hell is.

Golden's been writing fantasy and horror novels for decades, and the twist here is that he uses the conceit of multiple universes to mix together every other novel or series he's ever created, each having taken place in a different dimension that Octavian and his newest companions go through. A couple of them become quite central to the plot, like characters from Soulless, his zombie uprising novel from a few years ago, and there's major players from one of his series that I haven't read, the "Menagerie" books; while others are more fleeting, like a tongue-in-cheek reference to his early novel Strangewood. It probably doesn't matter if you don't know any of the other series, although this being the last in the Shadow Saga it'd be a bit silly to read it without having read the previous six. I enjoyed this one more than the last couple but I think it's probably the right time to leave this particular universe be.