michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

Mieville's ideas and imagination are great and I love the linguistic depth breadth and playfulness of his language and all of these positives are here. The Tattoo is a fantastic image and symbol of the power of ink, of language... but somehow a rather disappointing villain who after a great introduction was far too easily disposed of.

I found it a rather heavy going overall and felt that there were too few characters that I actually cared about. There was a small part of me that wanted the apocalyptic end that was so often promised and never arrived.

Fantastic book which, as I mentioned before, has strong echoes of Moby-Dick, Life of Pi and Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Jaf has echoes of Victorian England urchins, living a precarious life amongst the sailors and whores in London when he is (rather tenderly) mauled by a tiger. Birch describes his rescue from the tiger as his second birth and it is with this moment that the book opens. The tiger is an escapee from the eponymous Jamrach's Menagerie and, as recompense, Jamrach gives Jaf a menial job in the menagerie. Making friends with another lad, Tim; falling in love with his sister; meeting Dan Rymer and becoming involved in his voyage to capture and bring back a dragon rapidly unfold.

For me, this was the moment when the book really got going. I have a huge weakness for maritime literature and was gripped fully from this point on. The sea is such a huge and powerful symbol of life, the world and of the threat of the unknown lurking beneath the surface of what we can see.

Jaf's ship is a whaler and the connection and comparisons with Moby-Dick are obvious, although the Captain is about as far from Ahab as it is possible to imagine: avuncular, accommodating and jolly English!

The dragons after which Jaf and Tim and Dan are searching are far from the mythical creatures of Tolkien: they are the Komodo Dragons and described by Birch in beautifully visceral and repulsive prose. The sheer bulk, power and alienness of the creatures both on their island and the one captured and brought to the boat is utterly compelling.

The capture of the dragon brings about another change in the tone of the novel: the ship enters what the somewhat fey or mad character Skip (who has echoes of Simon in Lord of the Flies and Pip in Moby-Dick) describes as "Dragontime" and the novel enters a phase where reality and dream and vision become more blurred and the dragon is seen as having cursed the ship.

This, in my opinion, is the strength of Birch's writing: she is able to create a world in which reality, memory, imagination, vision, dream and fantasy weave in and out of each other and in the final chapters of the ship where Jaf, Tim, Skip and Dan face increasingly horrific and appalling situations and become more and more detached from reality, her writing acquires the tone of the Ancient Mariner. The sea becomes a living character in its own right, the dragon or some other demon seems to be following the ship. For me, this Romantic quality of her writing overshadows even the hugely moving and harrowing events which Jaf faces.

This was a fantastic book and, in my humble opinion, well deserves its place on the Man Booker shortlist; and could well have been a deserving winner!

I was torn between three and four stars on this but came to the view that having read through it in 4 days it was a four, but I do have reservations about this book.

It is without doubt a great read, fun enjoyable and lighthearted. It evokes the atmosphere of the 1800s in the Wild West style Roughs in which Wax and Wayne act as lawmen; and also the atmosphere of Victorian England, setting the majority of the book in the city emerging into modernity, almost reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, the two protagonists Wax and Wayne are very much a Holmes and Watson double-act, Wayne specifically deferring to Wax's powers on deduction on at least two occasions. They also reminded me very much of Batman and Robin: Wax is the discredited heir of a great house returning to the City and Society to assume the mantle of the head of house, but disappearing into the night and the mists with his mistcloak flapping about him. Is the decision to use the name Wayne an homage to Bruce Wayne? There's even an old retained butler! The other writer that it reminded me of in its lightheartedness undercut by darkness was Pratchett: Wax seemed to have echoes of Sam Vimes at times.

I think the biggest problem I had with this book was the expectations I had of it. I was looking for the same character building, mythologising and originality that Sanderson had displayed in the original trilogy. The most intriguing and satisfying moment in this book was, unfortunately, the cameo by Marsh from the original trilogy as Ironeyes, who has evolved in the mythology of the world into a demonic Lord of the Dead figure.

The book suffers from the inevitable comparison with the original series. There was a definite arc to the original: the characters developed from rebels and urchins to statesmen and finally reached apotheosis. This feels much more static in its momentum: as a member of the society created by the events of the Mistborn trilogy and, therefore, one that we have to have faith in, Wax is interested in maintaining a status quo rather than overturning it which has inherently limited the scope of the novel. It is interesting that even Wax himself seems to recognise this: he tells the reader that in the Final Empire, his nemesis Miles would have been seen as a hero.

Nor is it in any way as original as Mistborn. Again, this is not the fault of Sanderson's writing but of the premise. The book is set in a previously created universe and therefore cannot be original without being unfaithful. I did like the combinations of the allomancy and feruchemy to produce a different style of skills (magic doesn't seem to be the correct term for a power system based on science and metallurgy).

Apparently conceived as nothing more than a personal creative writing exercise without the intention of being published, the book does have that feel of derivative fan-fiction rather than mythologising high fantasy, albeit done extremely well and by an extremely competent story teller. Great fun though.

I wasn't that enamoured of this, second Shardlake book. I liked the fact that Sansom took us in a very different direction and allowed us to see Shardlake at home in London rather than in the confined claustrophobic abbey of Scarnsea. Unfortunately I didn't find his London convincing. Perhaps I have been spoiled by Dickens and Sarah Waters so that I was expecting to see, feel and experience the filth and squalor of Tudor England and, in fairness to Sansom, he mentions it... But I didn't feel he managed to create it.
The plot also seemed a mark weaker than the first book by way of being more far fetched. The search for the apocalyptically destructive Greek Fire didn't ring true and I was far more interested in the sub-plot of Elisabeth Wentworth's trial for murder. The denouements and crises of both plots also failed to impress... It was too dramatic and too over-the-top.
It was still a decent read but not as intriguing or engaging as Dissolution.

Ok, so when I read this book it was called Rivers of London....
It's a decent book, focussing on a senseless murder, from which the narrator, Probationary Constable Peter Grant, is drawn into a world of magic, ghosts, revenant spirits, vampires and river gods. It's a perfectly enjoyable book, decently paced and plotted, populated by engaging characters - some of whom, particularly the somewhat ambiguous Molly and to a lesser extent Nightingale are intriguing enough to make the second book a definite to-read.
In fairness, it's not the best written book in the world but thoroughly enjoyable and readable

Having read Scar Night some years ago and noticing it and it's sequels online, I downloaded them.

I had memories of the city of Deepgate, suspended over an Abyss like the gaping maw of some vast creature (urban planning council had a lot to answer for!). I recalled a scarred feral angel whose monthly bloodletting was simultaneously vampiric and werewolf-like.

It was a bit of a shock then that Deepgate had collapsed into the abyss entirely and the scarred angel Carnival appears to have been dispatched within two pages of her reappearance. The main protagonists remain Rachel and Dill but they have now become separated at a metaphysical level: Dill, having sort of died and been reborn in Scar Night is dispatched to Hell once more in Iron Angel as another angel usurps his body; and his body and Rachel disappears into obscurity for the central section of the book.

In my view, this novel suffers from typical mid trilogy issues. The original novel did hint at a wider mythology but was firmly rooted; this novel expands on the mythology often using dialogue to expand develop and explain it to us readers. And in the process, character and empathy is lost. It is like Campbell zoomed out from a manageable citywide focus to a continental one in which we just lose sight of characters - even the ones he doesn't kill off. Those that remain do so in an utterly passive state: they are placed into a scenario and wait there for another character to tell them what to do. It is a rather frustrating read!

On the plus side, there is a potent imagination at work here. The descriptions of a Hell (or the Maze in the book's mythology) created out of our own souls was intriguing and the fluidity of form in Hell both in the malleability of the world around the characters and on the characters own forms (bodies is patently the wrong word but the dead tend to retain the form of their erstwhile bodies) was fascinating.

In conclusion, I think Campbell's own games designing Grand Theft Auto background is visible here. He is a world builder, his backgrounds and settings have potency; but I do not think he is character driven and, consequently, nor is his novel and for me that is a huge let down.

I'm not sure why but I had high hopes for Kurt Wallander. Perhaps it was the fact that it had been adapted for TV, wherein he was played by Kenneth Branagh; perhaps it was because I'd read some good reviews. And certainly the opening chapter of Faceless Killers looked set to fulfil those hopes.

An atmospheric farmyard, the dead of night, an increasing sense of unease that things were not right at the neighbours; a prose style that, whilst somewhat terse, had an understated quality to it; a murder with just enough hints of incredible violence without the lurid details and embellishments that a writer like Jo Nesbo may have felt tempted to dwell on.

All seemed well and looked promising.

But never quite delivered for me.

Perhaps it was the fact that this was in translation but I found that the prose was too clipped and too laconic. As the novel progressed, swathes of action were summarised in a matter of paragraphs; months passed within fractions of a sentence; an infatuation became an affair and seemed to fizzle out within two lines.

Perhaps Mankell was trying to accurately capture the sometimes tortuously slow pace of police work; whilst simultaneously maintaining the pace of a novel but, speaking personally, it grated.

Nor did the Big Ideas work. The characters would at times become mouthpieces for political questions. The murders are blamed on foreigners, that being the last words of one of the victims corroborated by a strangely knotted noose. An immigrant camp is firebombed, racist threats are made, an Somali is shot in revenge. And we are treated to a few pages of stilted dialogue about immigration. A known criminal is arrested on a completely unrelated burglary and another couple of pages of dialogue decry the modern police system where we cannot lock people up just because the police think they probably did something or might do something else.

By the process of time, coincidence and luck, Wallander solves the crime.

I will probably persevere with the series in due course. It is on TV after all so must be good! And I am informed that later books are better ... But my high hopes are now considerably reduced.