michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

5 stars are not enough for this book.

Giving this book 5 stars makes me want to downgrade every other 5 star book to 4 stars. This - with perhaps A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness - is utterly sublime.





There is only really one word to describe this book.

Perfect.

Absolutely and undoubtedly, a perfect book.

Powerful, moving, honest.

A true book.

A summary of the plot here will not serve to convey its power. Go out and read this book.

In my own small way, however, here goes. The adult narrator returns to his old childhood home for one of his parents' funeral, visits his neighbour's farm and recalls his experiences as a seven-year old child. And, as you would expect of Gaiman, those experiences are dark, dangerous and otherworldly. His lodger's suicide leads him to the Hemstock farm which seems itself to be part of an otherworld or an old world or a pre-reality world. Other remnants of the old world are embedded in the fabric of the farm which find their way through the narrator into the 'real' world. The remainder of the book revolves around the Hemstocks' attempts to banish the remnant back to where it came from.

The Hemstocks - Lettie, her mother Ginnie and old Mrs Hemstock - seem to owe much to (or be a strange hybrid of) both a witches' coven of maiden, mother and crone and Doctor Who. The sympathy Lettie shows the remnant, the offer to return her home before destroying her, even some of the cadences of her speech all seem to owe a debt to Gaiman's involvement with Doctor Who. Tasting a coin to determine its age from the layout of its electrons was very Doctor Who!

Having grown up myself as a reader on the Kent-Sussex border to professional parents and having spent most of my weekends on my grandmother's farm - on which my grandmother also lived in a caravan - the situation that Gaiman creates was very authentic and credible. The taste and texture and smell of milk drawn straight from the cow and of porridge made from it and of early morning milkings leapt from the page. The setting breathed in a way that the settings of Coraline, The Graveyard Book and Stardust - all brilliant books in their own right - didn't.

It was authentic.

And the horror beneath it is all the more horrific because of that authenticity.

And there is horror here. Monsters are there to be banished. Not entirely malign but monstrous and horrific.

The most disturbing elements though, as often with Gaiman, come through the less monstrous and more familiar elements: the housekeeper who wasn't quite what she seemed and violated the sanctity of the family; the father who tried to drown his son in the bath in possibly the most horrific and chilling scene I have ever read in a book.

These scenes are uncanny - unheimliche - in that the familiar and homely and familial becomes other. In Coraline, the other and the unheimliche was relatively safe behind a door which could be locked. In The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, the child himself becomes the door and it is his own home (his own Heim) that becomes unheimliche. His home - his place of sanctuary, his inviolable domain, his sense of family and of identity - is turned into a prison.

At its heart, in my opinion, this book is about childhood. The terrors of childhood but also its value. And the value of not knowing things and of play. Lettie Hemstock tells us that she

"used to know everything."
She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play."
"To play what?"
"This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars"

That - and the glorious epigraph by the late lamented Maurice Sendak that "I remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew them. It would scare them" - puts me in mind of a conversation I once had with a fellow teacher about our children both being scared of monsters at night. "I just told them," said the other teacher, a science teacher, "that there's no such thing as monsters and they were being silly." Myself, as an English teacher, I grabbed a plastic sword, leapt under the bed and slashed through the wardrobe to kill the monsters threatening my son!

Anyway, I digress.

This is a fantastic book. Everything is spot on. Everything is authentic. It is horrific, beautiful, mythic and true.

I really cannot praise this gem of a book enough!

Do a book club, they said!

It'll be fun, they said!

We'll call it Addiction to Fiction, they said! Okay, fair enough that's cool!

It won't take much time, they said.

Oh. Right. Of course not.

So now, at 3:15 every Thursday a group of book hungry students descends on me. Seriously, it's fabulous: a group of teenagers asking to read! Fantastic! It is every English teacher's dream!

So, their choice to kick off was...




Set in a futuristic and post-apocalyptic world, the book is basically divided into three parts:

1) a depiction of extreme poverty and deprivation in District 12; until

2) Katniss is selected or volunteers to be a tribute at the Hunger Games and her training at the Capitol; until

3) the Hunger Games themselves.

In my opinion, the first section was very strong. The poverty in District 12 was very strongly described: the bare canvas mattress in the opening paragraphs; Katniss' recollections of being at the point of literal starvation until Peeta throws her a loaf of bread; Katniss' mother's breakdown after her husband's death; Prim's delicacy, vulnerability and need for protection - her name is Primrose and we first see her cocooned in her mother's embrace - are all beautifully depicted.

In fact the opening three paragraphs have provided a great resource for an annotation exercise at school.

On a side note... this irked: in the film, how are we meant to accept Jennifer Lawrence who is patently healthy, well fed and somewhat chubby of cheek as a character on the verge of starvation?!





Anyways...

The contrast between the earthy and natural privations of District 12 and the gaudy artificiality of the Capitol was also great. The ostentation of the genetic manipulation for vanity amongst the population - save for Cinna with whom we latch onto as the sole source of normalcy - and the casual horror of the Avoxes was very effective at alienating us from the Capitol.

The Games themselves I found slightly disappointing. I liked the ambiguity of it being a performance for the sponsors: at various times, Katniss suppressed expressing how she felt because she didn't want to seem weak; the romance between her and Peeta was nicely judged and balanced between genuine emotion and cynical performance. There was an echo - for me - of the film Starship Troopers where reality and propaganda were spliced together.

But let's deal with the violence. My Addiction to Fiction group were disappointed - seriously disappointed - that they didn't see more violence. There were, really, only three of the 22 deaths portrayed: Glimmer, Rue, and Cato's and there is no real gore in any of them except Glimmer's. Stung to death by mutated wasps, her corpse is raided by Katniss to obtain the bow who - also stung and hallucinating - seems to see

Her features eradicated, her limbs three times there normal size. The stinger lumps have begun to explode, spewing putrid green liquid.... the flesh disintegrates in my hands.

Rue's death was genuinely moving and emotional and far better handled by the book than the film.

Cato's, however, was just tediously dull: being clad on armour and falling amidst genetically mutated dogs ("muttations" was not my favourite neologism in the book!) he took ages and pages to die.

This really is a first class YA book!

The language is nowhere near the language of Philip Reeve or China Miéville but the concept - derived from channel hopping between Survivor and child soldiers in the news - and characters and pace are cracking!

Well, that was a quick read!

I was browsing various book lists with a view to spending some Christmas money and The Guardian's Independent Bookshop review of 2013 cropped up with this book.

It is, at heart, a romance novel which is certainly not a usual genre for me. The main character, Don Tillsen in a genetics professor; he is searching for a wife; an entirely unsuitable woman, in this case the eponymous Rosie, crosses his path.

The predictable course of such novels progresses: obstacles appear; problems are overcome; wrong turns are taken... The predictable solution occurs.

What drew me to the book were two factors: firstly, I wanted a change from the rather horror and fantasy based reading that I've been in recently; and secondly the main protagonist, Don, has Aspergers and Autistic Spectrum traits. As my daughter also has such traits, and I teach many children who display them too, I was interested.

In fact, the review from The Guardian had mentioned a customer's comment that

all teachers should be made to read it to give them a better understanding of students with this syndrome. Another customer has simply told us that is the only book that has made her laugh out loud all year.

I'm not quite sure how successful the portrayal of Don Tillman was. He didn't seem to encounter as many difficulties and problems as a true ASD or OCD or Bipolar sufferer might and those he did encounter seemed to be overcome with relative ease in comparison.

And there was a familiarity to the structure of the story: Don Tillman could have stepped from the the script of The Big Bang Theory, sharing many traits of Sheldon Cooper; his best friend Gene, equally, could have come from How I Met Your Mother being an almost carbon copy of Barney Stinson. Having a teenage bit at home for whom both these generic American sitcoms (even on the third, sixth, twentieth re-run) is compulsory, unless I put my foot down to watch The Great British Bake Off, this is familiar but somewhat two-dimensional territory.

There were some opportunities for genuinely painful moment - Gene's open marriage and it's impact on his wife for example - which were only tangentially touched on. Maybe that's a reflection of Don's single mindedness but, as a reader, I would have been more interested in exploring that.

However, it was a decent read: entertaining, funny in places, sweet. It's ending was predictable and just a little too easy somehow but I did care about the characters and wanted them to be together.

Looking at the reviews here, it seems that this book is getting hammered because it cries out to be compared with other powerhouses of books.

Set in the 1500s of Henry VIII, it clearly bears parallels with Wolf Hall which is set two wives earlier. It has to be said that it lacks the beauty of the language of that novel or its subtle, multilayered realistic characterisation. Mantell's Cromwell is a far more engaging and convincing narrator than Sansom's Shardlake.

Similarly, set in an isolated monastery, narrated by an articulate first person narrator who is investigating a murder, comparisons with Name of the Rose are easy to make. I may be mistaken, but I wonder whether the reference to the (fake) lost Comedy of Aristotle in Scarnsea's library was a deliberate echo (or Eco?) of Name of the Rose.Again, however, Dissolution comes off worse in the comparison: it lacks the intensely almost arcanely intellectualism of Eco, who I love hugely; the language comes across as being broadly modern with the occasional nod towards the period whereas Eco's writing has always struck me an amazingly authentic.

This said, look at the writers with whom Sansom is being compared: I cannot think of any writer who would come off better in such a contest! It is the fact of the parallels that almost demand the comparisons to be made which is the problem, not the writing or the plotting itself. Sansom has so far succeeded in engaging and entertaining me, creating a universe which feels reasonably authentic. That seems to me to be worth a good 4 stars...

Its odd how my book reading lurks in certain genres for a while: after a crime spree, I notice a range of horror books collecting on the pages of this blog - with more on my to-be-read list.

I wonder what it is with Scandi-Lit.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy; Jo Nesbø; Mons Kallentoft ... There seems to be a certain sensibility that they share; a sensitivity for the darkest recesses of the human psyche; an unflinching a sense of social responsibility; a sympathy for the effects of the environment surrounding their characters; a keen eye for the intricate details of domestic life; and a spareness and economy of language.

And Lindqvist's vampire novel, Let The Right One In fits into exactly this milieu.



This is the story of Oskar, 12 year old boy, whose divorced parents struggle to keep him on the straight and narrow in the suburb of Blackeberg.

It is a typical - slightly pretentious - English teacher thing to say that the setting is a character in its own right but it is so infrequently actually true. James Joyce's Dublin od Ulysses and The Dubliners manages it. Lindqvist's Blackeberg also breathes and seethes throughout the novel, as dark, poisonous and insidious as the vampire itself.

The novel opens with The Location:

Blackeberg.

It was not a place that developed organically of course. Here, everything was carefully planned from the outset. And people moved into what had been built for them. Earth-coloured concrete buildings scattered about in green fields.

Only one thing was missing. A past. At school, children didn't get to do any special projects about Blackeberg's history because there wasn't one. That is to say, there was something about an old mill. A tobacco king. Some strange old buildings down by the water. But that was a long time ago and without any connection to the present.

Where the three-storied apartment buildings now stood there had been only forest before.

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn't even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

That tells you something about the modernity of the place, it's rationality. It tell you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and if terror.

It explains in part how unprepared they were.

No one saw them move in.

Blackeberg - soulless and bereft of history - is an echo of the vampire itself - equally soulless and utilitarian in its hunger. It is the home of glue-sniffing teenagers, broken families, a community of drunkards, vicious bullies and the mentally disturbed.

And it is into this environment that the waif like and mysterious Eli and the hopeless hapless lumbering paedophile Hakan Bengtsson move.

And children start dying.

The plot in the novel moves with an horrific sense of inevitability. The situation is achingly familiar to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of vampirism. We know the hunger. We know the inevitable conflict that that hunger creates.

But the heart of this novel is Eli and the relationship between Eli and Oskar. Eli has endured two centuries of being twelve years old. Vampire. Manipulator. Killer. Innocent.

She is not the monster of Stoker's invention - indeed Hakan is possibly the closest to that role - nor is she the insipid and limp fairy of Meyer's Twilight series. Somehow the balance between her feeding - as with much Scandinavian Literature, explored without blushing from the visceral - and her childish innocence is maintained throughout. She is a remarkable achievement and a haunting creation. She is not dissimilar at all to Amy Harper Bellafonte in Justin Cronin's The Passage (click here for my review) and The Twelve

And some of the dialogue between her and Oskar is heart-achingly realistic and beautiful.

As indeed is some of the dialogue and interactions between the drunkards, especially Virginia and Lacke. Isolated and alone, seeking comfort in alcohol and one-night stands, their helpless inability to communicate and their self-protective barbs needling each other to maintain the protective bubbles whilst simultaneously clinging to each other was painful.

The book is not without flaws - the almost inevitable attempt to explain the vampirism in medical terms - that the infection causes a tumour of brain cells to develop on the heart (and recalled unpleasant memories of ovarian dermoid cysts being opened up on some Channel Four documentary to reveal teeth, eyes and hair). There is also at one point a rather clumsy attempt to verbalise some of the implicit connections between the environment and the disease at the heart of the novel.

It is, however, quite simply one of the best, most haunting books - certainly one of the very best vampire books - that I have read.