MORE THAN THIS BY PATRICK NESS

What’s It About

Following a horrible drowning, Seth Wearing wakes to find himself not in heaven or hell but in the town of his childhood.  He soon discovers that the town is deserted… or is it?

Should I Read It?

Yes – though with reservations.  Intriguing set-up aside, Patrick Ness is an engaging and accessible writer.  The chapters in the novel are short, the prose is fluid and easy to parse and the character of Seth (especially what we learn about him through flashback) is genuinely sympathetic.  I also appreciated that the other characters we’re introduced to (Seth is not alone) are not of the cookie-cutter white middle class variety.  It’s hard to say more about the novel without spoiling it, and my issues with the novel are related to its one major revelation.  So, under a cut…

[spoiler title=’Spoiler For More Than This’ collapse_link=’true’]The technology, though, that would require this sort of international VR system isn’t reflected in the VR World we’re made privy to.  More than that, the ability for this VR system to not only maintain its reality but also allow participants to give birth to real children seems a level of technology closer to magic than science.  The worlds we’re shown, both the old wasted one and the one existing in cyberspace, are essentially no different to the world we live in.  The idea, I believe, is that the VR world has been edited to remove any reference to itself or the technology that allows it to be.  But the advent of this technology would have been a major step forward with a knock-on effect in other sciences.  Editing out all those discoveries simply didn’t gel with me.[/spoiler]

The book does become a bit run and chase toward the middle, but Ness more or less maintains the novel’s momentum.  It’s an entertaining read that does raise some interesting questions about finding your place in a world that seems to have literally and figuratively rejected you.

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Some very nice writing.

And then, suddenly, a break in the clouds, shining starlight that’s faint but like the blowing of a trumpet compared to the darkness. Because it’s so dark, Seth can see more stars in the small rip in the sky than he thinks he’s ever seen in the whole expanse of it. The break widens, shining more, and Seth can’t quite figure out the strange streak of faint white he’s seeing across it, as if someone’s spilled –Milk.The Milky Way.“Holy shit,” he whispers.He’s seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.

RED DOC > BY ANNE CARSON

What’s It About

Apparently, this verse-novel is a sequel to Carson’s 1998 work, Autobiography of Red in that it takes the characters Geryon and Herakles from that book and puts them in the modern age.  Where Geryon (now G) is all world-weary, cynical and a herder of ox, Herakles (now called Sad But Good, or Sad for short) is a war veteran with PTSD.

Should I Read It?

Yes.

Better question is whether you’ll understand it.  I certainly didn’t.  Or more to the point, while I was able to pick up numerous threads – scenes set herding ox, scenes set in a clinic dealing with Sad’s PTSD, scenes set at the deathbed of G’s mother – the utter lack of linearity or conformity to traditional story-telling means that I struggled to join the pieces together.  I’m not sure I’m meant to though.

Having said that, at page by page level the book, broken up by gorgeous prose poetry and some of the funniest and natural scenes of pure dialogue I’ve read, is  accessible.  And funny.  There’s a sense of whimsy about the whole thing, highlighted by a scene where an ox takes flight.

In the end, Red Doc is worth reading because you’ll have read nothing like it before.

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Though I’m not sure any paragraph does justice to this fine book.  And Io is an Ox.

Sparkling along in the valley below is a car unaware it is driving directly into the path of the lava flow.  M’hek stands transfixed watching a black cloudform advance from the horizon toward the car its molten edge snarling its fiery paws eating steadily at the world ahead.  Moving about 40 mph.  The herd now breathing like a bellows has formed into a circle facing outward.  Io stands apart.  She dips her head to her knee momentarily.  Blood still buzzing with gorse she does not hesitate to believe that a masterpiece like herself can fly.  Should fly.  Does fly.  Without a sound and by the time M’hek turns around she is aloft.

STRAY BY MONICA HESSE

What’s It About

In the near future, children who are wards of the State are sent to a complex where they’re plugged into the life experiences of Julian (a real person) who is considered to have led a normal life and is therefore the perfect role model.  This is referred to as The Path.  For sixteen year old Lona, being on-Path is the only world she’s ever known until she’s kidnapped by a group of anti-Path rebels.

Should I Read It?

No.

It’s not an actively terrible novel, but it’s utterly unengaging, which is a shame because the central conceit and theme of the novel – how should society deal with dispossessed kids – is an important one.  The problem I had with the book is its main character, Lona.  She’s meant to be a fish out of water type, given that she’s only ever experienced life through the eyes of Julian.  Aside from the alienness of existing in a world that’s not been carefully modulated and governed for her, just the act of thinking for herself should be a knee wobbling experience.  And yet Lona is uber competent, quickly adapting to her new circumstances.  She even has the wherewithal to get into a love triangle with an 18 year old boy (and old friend) who was also on Path before he graduated and the woman who is working hard to save his life and those of other ex-Pathers.  In fact just to show how competent she is, not only does Lona end up baby-sitting a group of children who had once been on the Path and then rejected, but she has the nous to organise the takeover of the compound she came from.

Hesse does attempt to explain why Lona adapts so quickly to the outside / non-Julian world (we discover that it might have something to do with her lineage), but I’m bored with exceptional characters in genre fiction.  While I didn’t want to see Lona go catatonic the moment she’s kidnapped, I’d have liked more of the natural uncertainty and, frankly, outright fear that comes from being forced into an environment you’re not accustomed to.  In addition, more insight into what pushed this society to take this approach toward the care of dispossessed children, would have been appreciated.

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Foster Care is BAD!!!

Lona shuddered.  She didn’t technically remember – none of them did – but she had learned about Before, in one of the presentations that sometimes happened during Calisthenics.  Path History.  Emotional Well Being.  Proper Calisthenics.  In this particular presentation, they learned about Before Path.  Before Path, Lona would have been beaten or neglected by parents who had been declared unfit.  If she had been lucky she might have been put in something called ‘foster care’, but even that was dangerous.  The presenter showed pictures of a shrunken boy locked in a dog cage, staring through the bars with huge eyes. ‘That’s how the authorities found him’ the presenter said.  ‘That’s where his foster parents kept him.  He didn’t know how to read.  He spent every day in his own filth.  This is what it used to be like, for everyone like you.  You have all been given a very special gift’.

MR PENUMBRA’S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE BY ROBIN SLOAN

What’s It About

A 24-hour bookstore.  It says so on the front cover.  If you’re expecting a magical bookstore, impossibly large and filled to the brim with all the fiction and non-fiction ever written (including works that were only ever a sparkle in the author’s eye) then you’re going to be disappointed.  That’s not to say it’s an ordinary bookstore.  As Clay Jannon discovers, hidden among the extremely tall shelves hides, possibly, the code to immortality.

Should I Read It?

Yes.  Very much so.

Sloan’s début novel is an enormous amount of fun.  I was suffering pneumonia while I was reading it (I’m fine) and the fact that it maintained my attention, says something about the story-telling on display.  It helps that the book feels fresh and original.  The first person style is conversational and vibrant and (as seems always the case in these post-Buffy days) very self-aware.  The story-itself does that smart thing of feeling like a genre novel – you expect magic… or something magical to happen on every second page – and yet having a rational explanation for everything that occurs.  Clay Jannon aside, the book is peopled with the sort of quirky characters that don’t entirely feel like real people but rather plot tokens.  Every challenge Clay faces can be dealt with because he knows someone rich enough or smart enough to get him past the obstacle.  Sloan characterises this as Clay’s super hero power, his ability to network and bring the best out of people.  For me it felt all a bit too convenient.  And yet, these other characters have enough life about them beyond their plot significance that they’re genuinely enjoyable to read about.  The best example is the housemate who works for ILM and is building a miniature city in the living room.

With the book set in San Francisco, Google (and its programmers) feature heavily.  I’m glad Sloan avoided the temptation of making up a tech-firm and instead took advantage of Google’s (controversial) plan to scan every book in existence.

I haven’t said much about the plot itself because it’s something that’s meant to be discovered rather than told.  But other than the aforementioned Google, it does involve a 500-year-old cult, the Gerritszoon font, the secrets hidden in a much loved fantasy series and the search for immorality.  All packed into 78,00 words.  Which is how it should be.

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A neat description of the tall bookshelves you’ll find in Mr Penumbra’s bookstore.

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest—not a friendly California forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight’s reach. There were ladders that clung to the shelves and rolled side to side. Usually those seem charming, but here, stretching up into the gloom, they were ominous. They whispered rumors of accidents in the dark.