michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

This is my second foray into Marcus Sedgwick's writing: White Crow, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal a couple of years ago was the other.

And this is by far superior, more beautiful, more powerful, more poignant.





This book is shortlisted for the Cilip Carnegie 2013 and tells the tales of Eric and Merle. Tales. Tales of eternal, death-defying love and - above all - the sacrifices we make for those we love; the love of husband-and-wife, lovers, parents-and-children, siblings. Sometimes, Eric and Merle are the protagonists of the story, sometimes they are protagonists of stories within the main story.

It is also a book of tales about tales and the power of stories: written in reverse chronology, tales become stories become myths sustaining and echoing and paralleling each other. There are obvious echoes here of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell in both the cycling of the narratives and the celebration of narrative.

Each individual tale has strengths - some in my opinion are stronger than others. Oddly, the opening and framing narrative of Eric Seven visiting Blessed Isle as a journalist investigating rumours of unnaturally long lives, was the weakest of the seven tales. The writing - in present tense - was languid and relaxed and there was some beautiful phrases. The island is

beautiful. It's so beautiful, it takes his breath away. It's not spectacular, it's not jaw dropping, it's simply a lovely sight, that makes his heart glad that such places exist. The greys and browns of the rocks, the trees and the wild grass, the sea, waiting for him and only for him; the place is utterly deserted, he can see neither people nor houses.

And when swimming with Merle, Eric

wonders if a few moments of utter and total joy can be worth a lifetime of struggle.
Maybe, he thinks. Maybe, if they're the rights moments.

Beautiful.

However, in my view, it is the second half of the book that becomes much more powerful which, oddly, coincides with a shift to the past tense and the story The Painter which opens with these gorgeous lines

On the girl's seventh birthday, her finest present was not the new smock, nor the carved wooden hare, though she loved those two things very much.
The best thing was not a thing at all, but a permission.

Wow!

From this tale onwards, Sedgwick moves his narratives up a gear. There are so many elements of the fairy tale in this one - dragons and stolen apples; of the ghost story in The Unquiet Grave which is, in my opinion the most beautifully crafted ghost story I have ever read and the strongest of these seven tales; of the gothic in The Vampire.

The Vampire has an undeniable power to it and it seems that Sedgwick embraces Norse alliterative literature in his own writing as he describes how

The feast flew. Soared into the night like a ravening bird, like a fire flame, like the spread of a plague, a party as wild as the night outside was long.

As a final comment, celebrating the power of language, there is one moment, a small moment, in The Vampire when a Viking skald sings the song of their voyage and Sedgwick says

his tools were words; those mysterious gifts from the gods , and while most men merely learned how to use them, Leif was one of those wizards who had learned the secret of how to make magic with them.

In Darkness is Nick Lake's debut novel and an extraordinarily powerful one at that.

Set in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, the novel is literally set in darkness: our narrator, Shorty, is entombed in the remains of a collapsed hospital as rescuers lose hope of finding any survivors. In the darkness and rubble, he tells us the story of his life.





The language here is poetical and lyrical despite the horrors of Shorty's world and history. The opening lines are

I am the voice in the dark, calling out for your help.

I am the quiet voice that you hope will not turn to silence, the voice you want to keep hearing cos it means someone is still alive. I am the voice calling for you to come and dig me out. I am the voice in the dark, asking you to unbury me, to bring me from the grave out into the light, like a zombi.

I am a killer and I have been killed, too, over and over; I am constantly being born. I have lost more things than I have found; I have destroyed more things than I have built. I have seen babies abandoned in the trash and I have seen the dead come back to life.

I first shot a man when I was twelve years old.

And Shorty's life and world are born of violence, trauma and death. The Haitian fault line - the cause of the earthquake - symbolises the division in society between black and white, native and foreign, rich and poor, the gangs named Boston and Route 9, life and death. He was born with his twin sister in a small earthquake in a political and delivered by Jean-Baptiste Aristride who went on to become president before being ousted. On their birth, it was prophesied that Shorty and his twin Marguerite would be "born in darkness and blood and that's how he'll die".

And darkness and blood describes the poverty of Site Soley (or Cité Soleil), the slum in which Shorty lives. We discover babies disposed of in the garbage, drugs, gang warfare, guns, murder, voodoo (or vodou). Lake captures this poverty and violence of twentieth century Haiti without sensationalising or becoming sentimental through the use of Shorty's voice. And Shorty has a fantastic narrative voice as he narrates his own story: he is utterly convincing and compelling despite the atrocities that he commits and which he describes unflinchingly.

Like many Young Adult novels, especially a number of Carnegie Medal nominees, Lake interweaves the modern story of Shorty's life with a historical narrative of the nineteenth century slave uprising against the French colonial powers. This side of the novel is narrated by Toussaint L'Overture, the slave leader who triumphed over the French and British and became Governor-General of the Island.

This part of the novel was less satisfying for me: Toussaint was portrayed as so unimpeachably noble that he didn't seem convincing as a narrator. His initial reluctance to lead the rebellion, his insistence that bloodshed and violence be kept to a minimum, his constant arriving to treat the French with magnanimity struck me as too good to be true.



What did impress me, though, was Nick Lake's use of vodou to cement these two lives together.

Probably like many of Lake's readers, I knew nothing about vodou save for the voodoo doll, which has nothing to do with this book at all! What I am aware of (alas through literature rather than travel!) is Nigerian culture. Texts like Things Fall Apart, writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are steeped in the traditions and beliefs that Haitian Vodou echoes. The veneration and worship of ancestors, the embodiment of the spirits of Gods and ancestors in religious celebration and the egungun were a strong echo of the vodou rituals which Lake describes remarkably sympathetically for a London-based writer. Papa Legba the Iwa of the crossroads, Baron Samedi the Iwa who ferries the dead to the other world beneath the seas which is governed by La Sirene, Marassa the Iwa of twins and Ogou Badgery the Iwa of war populate both narratives in the novel as much as historical characters such as Aristide and Toussaint and invented characters like Shorty and Marguerite.

Do you need to accept the truth of vodou religion to enjoy the novel? Of course not! Lake portrays the vodou ceremonies with a delicate balance of skepticism (neither Shorty nor Toussaint believe the ceremonies and view them as little more than theatrics) and belief. And the parallel between religion and theatre, belief and suspended disbelief is a deeply evocative and powerful one.

This is a challenging book and an uncompromising for a young adult book - perhaps bridging the gap between young adult and adult fiction - as it balances with a very deft hand the fictional, mythical and historical. The language of the book is heavily accented with Kréyol, the officially recognised creole language of Haiti which (like the people themselves and vodou) emerged from a commingling of West African and French influences.

For Patrick Ness' review of the book, click here

Papa Legba




Baron Samedi




La Sirene




Ogou Badgery




Marassa

This is an odd little gem of a book.

It is a debut novel by Sarah Crossan written in verse - free verse - rather than prose; but deals with the realities of a very credible modern situation. As such, the disjunct between a contemporary situation and the language does parallel the disjunction and disconnection of a smart girl in a foreign culture.





Kasienka is a thirteen year-old Polish girl and has migrated to England. There is therefore the whole political, European Union element to it. Particularly in the descriptions of the building into which Kasienka and her mother move. It is an immigration ghetto, populated by a range of immigrants to the UK living in tiny single-room, single-bed flats.

The political difficulties that immigration control poses to domestic populations - and the pangs it causes various political parties in the UK - is played out on a small-scale in Kasienka's school where she is alternately isolated from and victimised by Clair, the school bully. There is no fight, no violence, no confrontation but a more insidious campaign of

"the looks
The smirks, the eye rolling"

As a teacher, the book is eye-opening in the way that little acts - possibly done for the beat of reasons, such as entering Kasienka in Year 7, grouping of children in class activities - can become devastating. As Kasienka reads Sylvia Plath, it becomes clear just how insidious and appalling the effects of this snide bullying can be.

And a romance helps to pull Kasienka through - the first funny, poignant false starts and misunderstandings of first love. William, who Kasienka meets at the swimming pool, is no charging knight to rescue Kasienka but his presence gives her hope to be herself.

And, beneath all this, is the tragedy of Kasienka's parents: her father having fled to Coventry - of all places in the country, why Coventry? - her mother and Kasienka have followed. Once they have found Tata, Kasienka's father, there is a beautiful phrase: that

Together they are tuneless;
The sounds they make are ugly,
Like knives being sharpened
Against stone.

Written in verse, there isn't the depth or development that you'd expect in a novel. It is a brief read. A read where individual lines resonate and chime. And Kasienka is a truly compelling narrator: clever, funny and strong beneath the desperation.

I personally didn't feel the poetry: it didn't seem to add anything having it in verse as opposed to prose. The novel was very pared down and poignant and much of Sarah Crossan's writing was beautiful and, yes, lyrical. But prose can be l

Roddy Doyle is a great writer.

He wrote The Commitments which is a fabulous book and one of my favourite films of all time!

He wrote Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha which is a fantastic evocation of a ten year old boy's childhood.

Roddy Doyle does voices extremely well. He creates the voices of children extraordinarily vividly.

So I was excited to see him on the Carnegie Shortlist. I was brimful of excitement and anticipation.





Alas, I have come away distinctly nonplussed. This is not a bad book - not at all - perversely I'd have preferred to have hated it - it just didn't grab me. Or I didn't get it, perhaps. It was sweet, it was pleasant, it was... okay. I came away from it thinking m'eh.

Now the book cover didn't inspire: that insipid yellow; the static, limp-looking girl; the rather unconvincing greyhound. But, as we are told, as I teach, one shouldn't judge a book by its cover so I ploughed on!

The tale revolves around Mary, a twelve year old girl. We are told repeatedly that she is cheeky and clever. Beyond her adding the phrase "I'm not being cheeky!" to half of her dialogue, I didn't feel her to be witty. Compared to Shorty in Nick Lake's In Darkness who never tells us he is intelligent but whose voice clearly is, Mary's didn't.

Mary is dealing with the fact that her grandmother Emer is poorly and has been hospitalised. Mary and her mother Scarlett go to see Emer every day. One day, Mary meets a strange old woman named Tansy who looks old but isn't and who turns out to be the ghost of her dead great-grandmother, Emer's mother, who died when Emer was just three.

Tansy, Emer, Scarlett, Mary.

There is (deliberately and consciously) an absence of men in this story.

Now, normally, the gender of the main characters doesn't terribly matter to me. But there are men here who have a story but who are given no chance to tell it: Jim, Tansy's farmer husband who is left a widower with Emer and a baby to bring up; Gerry, Scarlett's Dubliner father and Emer's husband; Paddy, Mary's father; and even Dominic and Kevin her teenage brothers who preferred to be called Dommo and Killer and skulk around the house.

Did I as a male reader feel excluded from the narrative in the same way as these characters were excluded? I think I did, actually, and I don't usually react like that. The sublime A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness - the 2012 Carnegie winner - showed that male characters can do emotion just as well as female ones in a similar context as the supernatural helps a child come to terms with a family member's dying. But Ness' book is raw and painful; this one is... sweet.

And a tad sentimental.

Twee.

Tansy has appeared to "help" her daughter in her final days. Apparently, her concern for Emer had kept her "lingering" rather than moving on. And the form that this ghostly help takes is a nighttime road trip from Dublin back to the farm where Tansy died and Emer grew up. Ok. I get that.

And then Tansy steals ice creams for them.

Then they go back.

No, I'm sorry, I don't get it. Perhaps I am lacking in emotion, lacking in empathy, lacking in x-chromosomes but I don't get it.

And little, silly, practical things in the book niggled and distracted me which I'd have let slide normally. Tansy goes through a locked door to get the ice creams but comes out with them through the chimney because the ice creams are too solid... But was not the money she took with her to pay for them solid? The doctor agrees for them to take Emer out to meet someone... But no one raised the alarm when they didn't return at all?

I wanted to like this book, I did; I expected to like it.

But I didn't.

I have been enjoying this series. They were nothing exciting, nothing terribly original.

But they were fun.

They were light hearted.

They were fast-paced and witty.

But niggles and worries are starting to mar my enjoyment of them now. The worse elements are coming to the fore and the books are becoming increasingly dark, violent and disturbing.





The plot focuses much more on Valkyrie Cain than the previous books: the threat doesn't come from an escaped convict or a malicious gaggle of vengeful past characters; no one is attempting to return the Faceless Ones to power. Instead, the novel continues the quest to identify the new threat Darquesse and develops Valkyrie's final realisation from Dark Days that her true name is Darquesse and that she is herself destined to kill her own family and destroy the world.

Two parallel plots develop: Valkyrie seeks to have her true name sealed in order to stop anyone from forcing her to become Darquesse by using the power of her name; and the Necromancers accidentally release two thousand 'Remnants' into Ireland. Remnants, which had been introduced the Dark Days are slivers of dark power capable of inhabiting human bodies and accessing their skills, powers and memories.

It is the first strand of these plots that I balked at: in order to seal net true name, Valkyrie had to enter a state of conscious death, had to watch and observe her own dissection, the removal of her heart and the etching of symbol magic into the flesh of her heart. And the dead / undead surgeon Nye then proceeds to imprison Valkyrie and continue to dissect her organ by organ. And she lies there and watches the procedure in a state of inertia.

I'm sorry.

That's grim.

There's a lingering on it which hadn't been there in the darker aspects of the earlier novels . Yes, to be sure, Tanith Low is regularly tortured (I think as revenge on the editors who thought it was too dark to kill her off in book one); Skulduggery is tortured. But these are brief moments, usually off stage, referred to but not seen. Here, Landy lingers and describes and we see the heart. And, whilst dissected, Valkyrie contrives to escape her bonds, standing up, organs removed, folding her sternum and chest back onto itself, chucking her own heart and removed organs into a carrier bag.

This is almost torture-porn.

And for children.

I'm not the sort of chap who thinks children's books should be sentimentalised and anodyne. I like gritty young adult books: I thought Between Shades of Gray, fir example, was wonderful in its honest unsentimental realistic horror of the war. Violence, loss, death are, in my opinion not inappropriate for young adult fiction, if there is a point to it.

But this, like Darren Shan's Demonata series revelled in gore for its own sake and there was no other point. The gore did not make the situation tense; it did not add to the plot; it did not develop any character - although apparently Nye, the 'doctor' who performed the procedure will be brought back in future books.

In retrospect, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I object to the pointlessness of Landy's torture-fest.

When we got the books for the Carnegie Shadowing in school, there was a lot of excitement that this was a book about a dyslexic, in the voice of a dyslexic, written by a dyslexic. Obviously, in an educational environment, it was ... enticing. And, whilst that is all true, that is only minor part of the book: the is a novel with a dyslexic protagonist; it is not a book about dyslexia.

The main character was Standish Treadwell: dyslexic and heterochromatic, 15 year old schoolboy and orphan.

Standish world is an unusual one: he lives in Zone Seven in some post-apocalyptic alternative universe. There are elements that are familiar here in Standish's school days, elements that are Fascist and echo the Nazi obsession with purity - which makes the different coloured eyes and different intelligence of Standish dangerous and subversive; and elements of Soviet Russia. Gardner does not develop the political or historical roots of the world; instead she just plants the reader directly into it. Many reviewers have found that difficult, which I don't understand: there are enough recognisable elements for the world to make sense and Standish' story operates in that world.

The story is actually rather complex: alongside Standish' life at school, his need to deal with bullies (both fellow students and teachers) and his developing friendship with new neighbour Hector, his parents have been removed by the tyrannical Motherland and his grandfather is part of an underground resistance group. And this is within the context of The Motherland attempting to land a man on the moon on order to demonstrate its scientific, strategic and technological superiority in the style of the American-Soviet space race. Possibly inspired by the moon landing conspiracy theories, Standish becomes embroiled in a theatrical reconstruction of the moon landing which has proved to be impossible.

The language of the novel is a tad unusual: on the one hand, Standish comes across as childish in some of his language; and at other times the rather sparse prose becomes almost lyrical with phrases like

One thing bled into another. The wound kept oozing grief, no matter how many bandages of 'it will be alright'.

There are some moments in the book that may upset done younger readers: Sally Gardner seems not to believe in patronising her young adult readers, especially in the final chapters of the novel.

This is one of those books which will remain with the reader after the final page. There is a haunting beauty to it and to its characters. It didn't grip me the way some novels do, but I feel that it will linger and haunt and echo inside me for a long time, maturing in the memory.

Some books are born great.

Some books achieve greatness.

Some books have greatness thrust upon them.

This book is not one of them. It's not great. It's not beautifully written. It's not literary.

But it is immensely fun!





Mark Hodder propels us into Victorian London: the search for the source of the Nile, Stanley, Livingstone, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne, Darwin, Babbage and Isambard Kingdom Brunel; smog, hansom cabs, Penny Farthings. And giant, genetically engineered swans pulling kites in which people can sit.

Yes, giant swans. Yes, genetic engineering. Huge elephantine megadrays. Trained parakeets for delivering verbal messages - spiced with additional swear words of the parakeets' own choice. Werewolves. Flying steam powered armchairs. Even the Penny Farthings are motorised.

There are two basic sects in Albertian London: Libertines who celebrate freedom, art, poetry and sexual experimentation and their slightly more extreme brethren the Rakes for whom every law is an undue limit on their freedom; and scientists who are split between Engineers and Eugenicists.

Hodder's London is a steampunk alternate history world which gives Hodder plenty of opportunity to be playful and inventive. At times, I felt he was at risk of becoming somewhat self indulgent in his creativity and re-interpretation of Victoria's London into Albert's but there is a cracking yarn at the heart of the story which knots it together.

Our hero is Sir Richard Burton - soldier, explorer and linguist - scarred physically and mentally from expeditions in Africa and the debate with his friend John Speke over the source of the Nile - adrift in a world that seems to be turning its back on him. Until he is offered the position of King's Agent with the brief to investigate the weird and unusual. Yes, there are weirder and more unusual things in the world than giant swans. Werewolves or loup-garou for example; and Spring-Heeled Jack.

Burton is accompanied and assisted by Algernon Swinburne, the poet whose incarnation here is a libertine influenced by de Sade but small and childish he gives the infamous and deadly Burton something of a foil ... and an opportunity to infiltrate the chimney sweeps of London. He was the weakest character in the book for me: he didn't offer much and the humour he added was a tad puerile and focused on his sexual enjoyment of some of the beatings he received. Whereas the were elements of Holmes about Burton; Swinburne didn't balance him the way Watson balances Holmes.

The explanation for Spring-Heeled Jack was one that I guessed pretty quickly but is, I guess, a spoiler. Perhaps it will suffice to say that 10th of June 1840 is the critical date in the novel: the day in (true) history when Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. It has to be true: its in Wikipedia! Imagine the effect of that assassination attempt on his descendants, the shame forever attached to the family. Imagine them wishing that he had never made that attempt...

As I said at the beginning, this was not a great book; it was a fun, well imagined, romp through a steampunk alternative universe. It is creative and well paced; it works as steampunk and it works as an action/thriller.

Good. Clean. Fun.

No real thinking required.

And there's nothing wrong with that!

This is a debut novel and clearly - whilst self contained - anticipated to be part of a series: not all the antagonists are captured or disposed of and it is a rich world full of potential and two further books have been written The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man and Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon.

Worth a look?

Hell yeah!

I have used the metaphor of food to reading for many years now. Some books are hearty, healthy and honest like a rare steak; some are delicate and fragile, like over-wrought sugar work in a pretentious restaurant, beautiful to look at but whimsical, self-indulgent and lacking taste; some are fun, entertaining chocolates and candies; some are a cornucopia of textures and tastes. Poetry is a sauce, pungent and heady and rich.

And Dan Brown? What analogous foodstuff might he be?

A pot noodle perhaps: factory-produced, mechanically put together, somewhat gelatinous and mono-textured. With a tendency to repeat on you.





In this, the fourth Langdon novel, the Harvard symbologist is once again caught in an international crisis. Unlike the other books, Dan Brown opens this one in medias res: Langdon awakens in a Florentine hospital room, a bullet wound to the back of his head, retrograde amnesia and assassins stalking him. He is rescued and assisted thereafter by Sienna Brooks, his attending physician and erstwhile child prodigy. In fact, nothing at this point adds up for Langdon, but that is par for the course of Dan Brown. Nothing ever makes sense.

And please, Robert Langdon with your eidetic memory, when will you learn? You're in a tense situation? Someone is offering you help and guidance? Have you not leant yet that every helpful person you meet betrays you? Leigh Teabing? The Camerlengo? Pur-lease!

The writing here is appalling: childish simplistic, clichéd, repetitive phrasing, characters repeatedly explaining what was happening over and over. It's not that difficult! We can follow! Trust your reader to join the dots, Brown!

The plot is utterly absurd. Zobrist, a genius geneticist has convinced himself that mankind is on the brink of collapse due to over crowding. Fair enough, I trust Dan Brown's research more than his writing. I'm sure his purported facts are broadly accurate. He devises a virus to combat the over-population of the planet. Langdon becomes embroiled with Elisabeth Sinskey of the World Health Organisation in the race to reach the virus before it is released. No echoes at all of the hidden phial of dark matter in Angels and Demons.

There. Job done. No need to read the book. Save yourself the time.

Bizarrely, this same mad scientist has drafted and written a series of codes to lead his enemies directly to the virus' location. Why? Seriously, why? In The Da Vinci Code, the existence of the codes made sense: they were a fail safe guide in the event that the Priory of Sion was compromised; they needed to be obscure but they needed to lead to the right place. Here, they are pointless: why draw your enemy to the site? Being generous, the animosity between Zobrist and Sinskey may have been such that he was toying with her as a cat does with a mouse... Or the author just needed a fragile and cynical plot device to shoe horn Langdon in. I can't help thinking that it may have been a better book without it being in the Langdon series. Sinskey could easily have carried the protagonist role.

And in the final dramatic denouement... Nothing happens. I have never read such an anticlimactic book. I'd love to warn you of spoilers here, but there are none! There is no plot to spoil!

Like a pot noodle, this book leaves you feeling emptier than when you began.

Dan Brown, if hanging upside down like a bat causes you to write this drivel, stop. Just. Stop. Stop it now.

Fantasy is my (not so) secret (not so) guilty pleasure in reading. Fantasy introduced me to reading through The Hobbit and Tolkien. Fantasy was my escape from teenage tedium ... my family was far too middle class to have angst!

And I still enjoy a healthy dollop of fantasy, as readers of this blog will realise. It's comforting and secure to read; a familiar cast of characters whose joy is not hindered by their being clichés but rather derived from their being clichés. The dark mages drawing sinister powers; the green warlocks and Druids steeped in nature lore; white healing clerics; a dark focus of malevolence seeking to subdue the world; wise old men; gifted young disciples; innocent maidens. The quest. The Force, the Dark Side, Jedis, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke, Emperors... formulaic and predictable but comfortable.

Nowadays the fantasy world is dominated by giants: Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin (is it possible for anyone with an alliterative double-R. middle name not to write fantasy in a post-Tolkien world?), Steven Erikson, Robert Jordan... Even J. K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer.

And where in this world does Clarke fit?

Off to one side I think.

She does not simply shake the dice of fantasy writing elements (no doubt dice hewn from the bones of some chthonic beast whose ribs even now tower over the city of New Crobuzon) and roll to see what combinations appear. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is utterly unique and enthralling.



The first thing Clarke tells us is that magicians exist in England and, specifically, in Yorkshire. Not just one but an entire Society of magicians. Note: the Learned Society of York Magicians. No coven, no cabal, no caste. Not even a fellowship. A "Society". Because these "magicians" perform no magic but study magic. Magic has died out centuries before.

What Clarke gives us is in fact a rather authentic sounding Austenesque pastiche of social satire. Even when Mr Gilbert Norrell is discovered as a practising magician he is neither the Dark Lord nor the Wise Mentor nor the precocious Apprentice. He feels as if he has stepped from the pages of Dickens: a

a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone... a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

These words of Dickens describing Scrooge could just as easily be applied to Norrell in his Regency powdered wig, his jealous covetousness of all things magical - especially books and knowledge - and his tendency to tire his listeners with long, tedious and not-terribly interesting historical accounts.

And Strange? Strange, on something of a whim after hearing a prophecy to do with magic, decides to become a magician too. Strange is perhaps the closest to the clichéd Precocious Apprentice. Norrell teaches him but, whereas Norrell's knowledge come from books, Strange has a more intuitive and perhaps more innate magical touch. He is younger, more dashing, more daring in his exploits in the Napoleonic Wars, more charismatic. More Byronic. Whom he meets and doesn't terribly like in the latter part of the book.

These two eponymous gentlemen meet, bicker, admire, fall out with, fear and reconcile throughout the novel and their relationship is fascinating. And they surround themselves with a vibrant cast of supporting characters: Lasselles and Drawlight, the disreputable gentleman-friends of Norrell; Arabella Strange, Jonathan's wife; Lady Pole; Vinculus, the ambiguous street magician and vagabond; Stephen Black; the Johns Childermass and Secundus; Flora Greysteele. Even the shopkeeper who is in love with Stephen Black and plays absolutely no part in the drama is beautifully written and wholly credible.

The heart of the novel, though, lies in neither them nor their relationship but in their work: English Magic. And the noun is preceded by the adjective almost exclusively. Divisions and antitheses abound in the novel: north and south; master and servant; Christian and Faery; Norrellite and Strangeite; reality and fantasy; sanity and madness; black and white; day and night. At its heart, however, is a core of Englishness.

An Englishness represented by an utterly key character: John Uskglass, The Raven King, The King of the North, The Nameless Slave. Uskglass, stolen to faery as a babe and returning as a youth to conquer and rule Yorkshire and Northern England for centuries through magic is spoken of, sought, sworn by, denigrated and discussed so much in the text that he feels ubiquitous. He is a legendary figure. Arthurian. Not quite trusted.

He does appear as a character. I think twice. Possibly for a total of three or four of the thousand or so pages of the book. I struggle to recall a character who is so monumental in a novel but so (almost) entirely absent from it. Even when he does appear, his presence is ambiguous: he is no returning saviour, no hero; he does not defeat the enemy nor aid either Strange or Norrell.

But then, is he absent? The trees and birds and hills and snow and (inevitably) rain of England are woven into the fabric of Uskglass as they are parts of the fabric of English magic and the very landscape of England and landscape of Englishmen is a character in its own right. It is this which defeats the enemy in the end: the country of England. Not its magicians nor its politicians but its own self. There is no pseudo-scientific system of magic here as some (more often American) writers tend to labour - and I'm not knocking that, Sanderson, Rothfuss et al, there's a clear and genuine pleasure in your creation of and our exploration of your systems - but here the magic is so much more effective for remaining mysterious, mythical, not always even useful. It is so English that the final defeat of the threat is achieved by a combination of mistakes, misnomers and misconceptions.

And Clarke's antagonist, the Gentleman With The Thistledown Hair is remarkable. She manages to create a genuinely creepy and potent antagonist, clearly extraordinarily powerful and dangerous, without making him evil. He is just himself: avaricious, capricious, self-centred, fearful and utterly lacking in empathy but also generous and to an extent loyal. He is faery and possibly mad by human standards and wholly amoral with no conscience. But he is as astounding a character in his self-centred loquaciousness as Uskglass is in his self-effacing quietude.

One of Clarke's stylistic features which I loved but many have been irked by us her use of copious footnotes. Every chapter bears up to a dozen, which by the end of the novel become self-referencing. They also reference folklore (which is where a lot of the depiction of John Uskglass derives), historio-magical texts, collections of letters and articles and even future biographies of the main characters. I can understand why there was a danger of them becoming tedious and gimmicky but, for me, they worked extremely well and created the illusion of a massively extended, immersive and patently English universe.

And I have to say that listening to this was a pleasure with the dulcet tones of the wholly apt Simon Prebble! Extremely good casting from Audible!

In education, there is a chap by the name of Dylan Wiliam who espouses the theory that one shouldn't give grades out. Children look at their grade and either think "yeah, that's good enough" or they think "I'm a failure and there's no point in trying". Dylan Wiliam tells us that we should just give advice with no grade attached.

Perhaps that's why I tend not to give star ratings on my reviews.

But sometimes, just sometimes, a star rating might be useful. Having read Deadline immediately on top of finishing Feed, a nice clear and visual indication that I didn't like this one as much as the first could be useful.





Okay, so this is book two of the Newsflesh trilogy in a post-zombie apocalypse world. The dead rose. The living shot them. Our heroes are the same team of intrepid bloggers that we followed in Feed. Link here to my review of that one.

Well, almost the same team.

Well 33.3% of them. No spoiler alert here. I'm assuming if you're reading this, you'll have read Feed already. Georgia Mason, our first person narrator, and Buffy the tech-geek died in book one. I applaud that. It's a brave move and unexpected - rule one of a first person narrative is almost that your narrator has to live! Georgia's final blog post in Feed, as the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus took over her body and her brother Shaun held a gun to her spine, was effective and moving.

But it left Grant with a problem. Shaun Mason, Georgia's adopted brother and an adrenaline junkie Irwin and, to be honest, a bit of a prat, took over the team and narration.

And he really wasn't up to the job.

Various beta-characters that had been mentioned in Feed re-appear in Deadline as the new team. But the team was pointless. Georgia had been driven, the political campaign in Feed had given direction. Shaun's team appeared to drift somewhat aimlessly from one disaster to another. But maybe that was the point, to emphasise the enormity of the loss.

And he hears voices in his head.

Well, one voice. Georgia's.

He is self-diagnosed as 'crazy' and repeatedly referencing the fact that he talks to her and how others reacted to it became... tiresome. And continually threatening to punch people or walls was... tedious.

The plot - which I had praised in Feed - has become razor thin. A minor doctor from the CDC who we'd met briefly in Feed arrives at Shaun's home / office with sensitive information. People with a form of the zombie virus which affected only a certain organ, such as the eyes, were dying more frequently than people without these so-called reservoir conditions.

Almost immediately, zombies appear on the roof of the building and an air strike wipes out that section of the city. Obviously, our heroes escape and re-group at the fortified home of one of their fiction writers - because all writers of doggerel and aficionados of George Romero zombie movies are also the heir to mega-fortunes.

Various road trips ensue. To an underground zombie virus laboratory. To the increasingly shady CDC. Twice.

More clunky plot devices are rammed at us.

More statistics are uncovered remarkably easily.

Zombies are used as weapons to try to thwart our increasingly unplucky and occasionally downright annoying heroes.

An awkward love moment happens for no real reason whatsoever.

The strength of Feed's drive and shape is lost here, although it remains a fairly taut conspiracy thriller. The credibility of the world created by Grant does wear a little thin here. The blogosphere becomes nothing more than background noise: under Shaun's narration, it is little more than a revenge novel. Shaun's time on the successful presidential campaign and the fact that his friend has become vice-president was sidelined. The fact that there may be organisations that would seek to benefit from a zombie-based opportunity and the fears it engendered I get... but I'm not so sure that releasing zombies into city blocks in order to level the area to kill a renegade scientist and a couple of journalists seems a rather blunt and ineffectual assassination technique.

I'd also have liked more on the statistics and more on the epidemiology. Another weakness in Shaun's narration was that he didn't understand the science and we were reliant on rather artificial and clunky dialogue to explain it. Which was a shame: Grant seems to have put a lot of effort into devising a credible viral pathway to zombiehood ... and I'd have liked more.

And more on the evidence that was found that showed the extent of the corruption and manipulation of the reservoir conditions.

For a book revolving around bloggers and containing excerpts from their blogs both published and unpublished, I wanted to see this evidence first hand. As bloggers, I would have thought Shaun would have put the original figures online - or at least in an unpublished blog or secure server - alongside the interpretation. And it wouldn't have been a huge effort for Mason to have mocked that up for us, his reader. Ideally colour coded. With graphs.

Overall, I do feel slightly disappointed. I have some faith that Mason will be able to bring things back together. The repeated reference to Georgia's retinal KA in Feed makes more sense as one of the reservoir conditions brought up in Deadline. I'm hoping President Ryman and Shaun's hearing and seeing the dead Georgia will all be knitted together in book 3. As well as Dr Abbey.

Clearly, in the world of the undead, death may not be the end of Georgia Mason.