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michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
5.0
I feel as if I've known of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for ever. The Headless Horseman. The midnight ride. The pumpkin.
I knew that - however much I loved it - the Tim Burton and Johnny Depp film took massive liberties... And even more liberties in the Fox network series Sleepy Hollow which was enjoyable enough brain candy.
But it was only when Audible offered me the audiobook for free that I came to realise that I'd never actually read the original.
It is only a small book - only just over an hour as an audiobook - and the Headless Horseman only makes a brief appearance. The story is, however, wonderful! Irving's language and description of both the countryside and his protagonist are exquisitely ridiculous.
The long descriptions of the abundance of the Van Tassel farmlands was fantastic: rich, sensuous and genuinely funny.
Ichabod Crane is neither a sceptical police constable nor a defecting British soldier. He is, in fact, a gangly, socially inept, romantically hopelessly ambitious school teacher. A pedant who revels in and wholeheartedly believes the dark and otherworldly stories that abound in Sleepy Hollow. Everything about Ichabod Crane was ridiculous: his gluttony, his appearance, his romance with Katrina van Tassell, his rivalry with Brom 'Bones', his superstitious credulity, his horsemanship. And yet he was quite touchingly mocked and satirised by Irving.
The end of the story of wonderfully balanced in that Irving never makes it clear whether the horseman is real or not.
A fabulously quirky, funny and yet genuinely quite chilling read.
I knew that - however much I loved it - the Tim Burton and Johnny Depp film took massive liberties... And even more liberties in the Fox network series Sleepy Hollow which was enjoyable enough brain candy.
But it was only when Audible offered me the audiobook for free that I came to realise that I'd never actually read the original.
It is only a small book - only just over an hour as an audiobook - and the Headless Horseman only makes a brief appearance. The story is, however, wonderful! Irving's language and description of both the countryside and his protagonist are exquisitely ridiculous.
The long descriptions of the abundance of the Van Tassel farmlands was fantastic: rich, sensuous and genuinely funny.
Ichabod Crane is neither a sceptical police constable nor a defecting British soldier. He is, in fact, a gangly, socially inept, romantically hopelessly ambitious school teacher. A pedant who revels in and wholeheartedly believes the dark and otherworldly stories that abound in Sleepy Hollow. Everything about Ichabod Crane was ridiculous: his gluttony, his appearance, his romance with Katrina van Tassell, his rivalry with Brom 'Bones', his superstitious credulity, his horsemanship. And yet he was quite touchingly mocked and satirised by Irving.
The end of the story of wonderfully balanced in that Irving never makes it clear whether the horseman is real or not.
A fabulously quirky, funny and yet genuinely quite chilling read.
Blackout by Mira Grant
I'm not going to write much about this book: it doesn't really warrant it!
This is the third in Mira Grant's post-zombie-apocalypse political thriller Feed trilogy - so I have that glow of satisfaction of completion having read it - but it is a trilogy that should never have been. The first book, Feed was, I thought, actually pretty good up to and including the death of the main character and narrator. Book two, Deadline lost the plot, both literally and metaphorically: without the direction that Feed had because it was following a presidential campaign, Deadline seemed to lurch from one disaster to another with no real momentum; and the change of narrator from Georgia to Shaun Mason did not work. Primarily the change of narrator did not work because Shaun became unstable, violent and heard the voice of his dead sister. All of that I could have accepted. Except that Grant kept telling me that Shaun was crazy. Over and over. And over. It became dull. Slightly offensive to anyone who has struggled with bereavement. And never really engaged with as a narrative device. There is a wealth of unreliable narrators in fiction - a rich vein of interesting perspectives to delve into - all of which were eschewed just to expound the fact that Shaun was "crazy". A waste of a narrative opportunity.
And all these problems from Deadline continue into Blackout with less zombie action - which is not a bad thing - and a really disappointing return of the dead Georgia. As a clone. Cheap sci-fi resurrection device number one. Not just a clone which I could have accepted but a clone which contains all of the original Georgia's memories.
Plot holes abound: the CDC created the clones in order to look like but not act like the original Georgia - who was critical of the CDC and whose brother had broken into the CDC on numerous occasions. So why put 97% of her memories and personality into place at all when they weren't going to use her anyway? The programme was created by one of Georgia's colleagues, Rick, who is now Vice-President because she would be believed when she exposed the conspiracy. Is the US public pre-disposed to believe dead people? Even in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world? Would not any other journalist be believed - such as any member of the entire After The End Times team, trained by Georgia? Resurrecting a dead woman at a cost of billions - not to mention the ethical implications - was easier than speaking to her replacement? Or her brother?
And the final denouement? More clones were exposed; hostages were released off-screen in the space of two pages which really begged the question Why didn't you do that a year ago, you morons?.
Rushed, unsuccessfully plotted; two-dimensional and unconvincing characters; pedestrian prose.
No, this was not a great book. Nor even, really, a good read.
Sorry, Mira, I wanted to like it but I didn't.
2.0
I'm not going to write much about this book: it doesn't really warrant it!
This is the third in Mira Grant's post-zombie-apocalypse political thriller Feed trilogy - so I have that glow of satisfaction of completion having read it - but it is a trilogy that should never have been. The first book, Feed was, I thought, actually pretty good up to and including the death of the main character and narrator. Book two, Deadline lost the plot, both literally and metaphorically: without the direction that Feed had because it was following a presidential campaign, Deadline seemed to lurch from one disaster to another with no real momentum; and the change of narrator from Georgia to Shaun Mason did not work. Primarily the change of narrator did not work because Shaun became unstable, violent and heard the voice of his dead sister. All of that I could have accepted. Except that Grant kept telling me that Shaun was crazy. Over and over. And over. It became dull. Slightly offensive to anyone who has struggled with bereavement. And never really engaged with as a narrative device. There is a wealth of unreliable narrators in fiction - a rich vein of interesting perspectives to delve into - all of which were eschewed just to expound the fact that Shaun was "crazy". A waste of a narrative opportunity.
And all these problems from Deadline continue into Blackout with less zombie action - which is not a bad thing - and a really disappointing return of the dead Georgia. As a clone. Cheap sci-fi resurrection device number one. Not just a clone which I could have accepted but a clone which contains all of the original Georgia's memories.
Plot holes abound: the CDC created the clones in order to look like but not act like the original Georgia - who was critical of the CDC and whose brother had broken into the CDC on numerous occasions. So why put 97% of her memories and personality into place at all when they weren't going to use her anyway? The programme was created by one of Georgia's colleagues, Rick, who is now Vice-President because she would be believed when she exposed the conspiracy. Is the US public pre-disposed to believe dead people? Even in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world? Would not any other journalist be believed - such as any member of the entire After The End Times team, trained by Georgia? Resurrecting a dead woman at a cost of billions - not to mention the ethical implications - was easier than speaking to her replacement? Or her brother?
And the final denouement? More clones were exposed; hostages were released off-screen in the space of two pages which really begged the question Why didn't you do that a year ago, you morons?.
Rushed, unsuccessfully plotted; two-dimensional and unconvincing characters; pedestrian prose.
No, this was not a great book. Nor even, really, a good read.
Sorry, Mira, I wanted to like it but I didn't.
Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell
It's that time of year again: the Carnegie Medal Shortlist is announced! Much joy! Genuine excitement! Much fretting over how to juggle reading the Shortlist with doing work, marking, planning ... and, this year, entertaining the baby!
And Roof Toppers was a lovely way to start the Shortlist ... Which I finished today by reading it out loud to the baby! Who says men can't multitask?!
The story follows Sophie, a year-old baby orphaned in a ship wreck in the English Channel and rescued by an English gentleman and gentle man by the name of Charles Maxim. It is set in an undefined period but with perhaps a nineteenth century feel: the authorities disapprove of a man raising a female child and, as she hits puberty, try to take her into care. To escape, Charles and Sophie flee to France in order to find Sophie's natural mother as - despite all the evidence to the contrary - Sophie is convinced survived the catastrophe.
Rundell has a lovely turn of phrase in the book: the prose has a musicality which is perhaps unsurprising when we realise that Sophie is saved inside a cello case in which is the first clue that sets her en route to Paris. It's the sort of book where I find myself underlining phrases such as
In fact, Charles is a jolly good role model for a parent: unconventional, eccentric, scholarly to the point of archaic, he brought Sophie up on a diet of imagination, Shakespeare and music with large helpings of ice cream!
In fact, there are echoes of Shakespeare through the book. The eponymous roof toppers are a group of youths who inhabit the aerial spaces above Paris: the roof tops of buildings and tree tops of the parks. They are not far removed from the fairies of A Midsummer Nights Dream and Sophie's mother's photograph is discovered from the doomed vessel in which she was disguised as a man. Sophie also makes a copy of Hamlet "slightly damp" whilst using it as a booster seat and
So, overall, and endearing and lovely book which is unlikely to win because it's too sweet
4.0
It's that time of year again: the Carnegie Medal Shortlist is announced! Much joy! Genuine excitement! Much fretting over how to juggle reading the Shortlist with doing work, marking, planning ... and, this year, entertaining the baby!
And Roof Toppers was a lovely way to start the Shortlist ... Which I finished today by reading it out loud to the baby! Who says men can't multitask?!
The story follows Sophie, a year-old baby orphaned in a ship wreck in the English Channel and rescued by an English gentleman and gentle man by the name of Charles Maxim. It is set in an undefined period but with perhaps a nineteenth century feel: the authorities disapprove of a man raising a female child and, as she hits puberty, try to take her into care. To escape, Charles and Sophie flee to France in order to find Sophie's natural mother as - despite all the evidence to the contrary - Sophie is convinced survived the catastrophe.
Rundell has a lovely turn of phrase in the book: the prose has a musicality which is perhaps unsurprising when we realise that Sophie is saved inside a cello case in which is the first clue that sets her en route to Paris. It's the sort of book where I find myself underlining phrases such as
he had kindness where other people had lungs, and politeness in his fingertips.
In fact, Charles is a jolly good role model for a parent: unconventional, eccentric, scholarly to the point of archaic, he brought Sophie up on a diet of imagination, Shakespeare and music with large helpings of ice cream!
In fact, there are echoes of Shakespeare through the book. The eponymous roof toppers are a group of youths who inhabit the aerial spaces above Paris: the roof tops of buildings and tree tops of the parks. They are not far removed from the fairies of A Midsummer Nights Dream and Sophie's mother's photograph is discovered from the doomed vessel in which she was disguised as a man. Sophie also makes a copy of Hamlet "slightly damp" whilst using it as a booster seat and
had a habit of breaking plates, and so they had been eating their cake off the front cover of A Midsummer Night's Dream....
Sophie ... waited until Charles was looking away, then dropped the book on the floor and did a handstand on it.
Charles laughed. 'Bravo!' He applauded against the table. 'You look the stuff that elves are made of.'
So, overall, and endearing and lovely book which is unlikely to win because it's too sweet
Room by Emma Donoghue
This book had been on my to-read list since it was listed for The Booker Prize. The copy I had was electronic and just stopped about 20 pages in... And I never got round to replacing it.
Until it cropped up whilst I was browsing on Audible.
This was a perfect book for an audio file: not only is it a first person narrative which is always going to work best on audio, the voice of the narrator is the key to this book. Initially, the infantile voice of the five year old narrator was off putting but that was quickly overcome by the purity and innocence of his narrative voice. That voice was created through the hyper extension of grammatical rules and the omission of articles in sentences (which had the effect of personifying almost every element of his environment, presumably filling the social void caused by his isolation). There were one or two moments when I did question the authenticity of the voice: he discusses minus numbers within the opening chapters which jarred a little. Do five year olds have a concept of negative numbers? Really?
For those who've not come across this wonderful novel, the narrator Jack is five years old and it's his birthday which opens the book. Throughout those five years, he believed the world to be comprised of the 11 foot square cell in which he and his mother had been incarcerated by an abductor. In fact, Jack's mother had been abducted seven years previously and Jack was the product of the sexual abuse she suffered through that time. The appalling abuse suffered is mediated for us through Jack's eyes: Donoghue strikes a very sensitive balance between her reader's need to understand and her narrator's innocent lack of understanding. We know what the noises Jack hears mean when Jack has no idea.
In the opening chapters, I was not sure in what direction she was taking us. Was this going to be a bleak tale of the destruction of innocence and hope (not unlike the 2014 Carnegie Medal winning The Bunker Diaries)? When Jack and his mother managed to escape perhaps a third of the way through the book I was genuinely elated at their freedom but continued to dread what might be in store for them in the last five hours of recording. I did genuinely pause my listening for a couple of days!
The story, I suppose, progressed in a fairly predictable manner in that the difficulties faced post-escape were just as traumatic as the horrors of the capture. The media. Lawyers. Police. These institutions all play their role in constructing a narrative around the abduction for their own ends. I loved the moments in the book where Jack was watching snippets of the media coverage of his own escape: stories within stories within stories, none of which were narrated with any degree of reliability.
It really is a remarkable book, purely through the voice of Jack. There's a strength and beauty to the power of humanity to persevere despite the horrors we experience. It is, unlike The Bunker Diaries, a very optimistic and hopeful read.
5.0
This book had been on my to-read list since it was listed for The Booker Prize. The copy I had was electronic and just stopped about 20 pages in... And I never got round to replacing it.
Until it cropped up whilst I was browsing on Audible.
This was a perfect book for an audio file: not only is it a first person narrative which is always going to work best on audio, the voice of the narrator is the key to this book. Initially, the infantile voice of the five year old narrator was off putting but that was quickly overcome by the purity and innocence of his narrative voice. That voice was created through the hyper extension of grammatical rules and the omission of articles in sentences (which had the effect of personifying almost every element of his environment, presumably filling the social void caused by his isolation). There were one or two moments when I did question the authenticity of the voice: he discusses minus numbers within the opening chapters which jarred a little. Do five year olds have a concept of negative numbers? Really?
For those who've not come across this wonderful novel, the narrator Jack is five years old and it's his birthday which opens the book. Throughout those five years, he believed the world to be comprised of the 11 foot square cell in which he and his mother had been incarcerated by an abductor. In fact, Jack's mother had been abducted seven years previously and Jack was the product of the sexual abuse she suffered through that time. The appalling abuse suffered is mediated for us through Jack's eyes: Donoghue strikes a very sensitive balance between her reader's need to understand and her narrator's innocent lack of understanding. We know what the noises Jack hears mean when Jack has no idea.
In the opening chapters, I was not sure in what direction she was taking us. Was this going to be a bleak tale of the destruction of innocence and hope (not unlike the 2014 Carnegie Medal winning The Bunker Diaries)? When Jack and his mother managed to escape perhaps a third of the way through the book I was genuinely elated at their freedom but continued to dread what might be in store for them in the last five hours of recording. I did genuinely pause my listening for a couple of days!
The story, I suppose, progressed in a fairly predictable manner in that the difficulties faced post-escape were just as traumatic as the horrors of the capture. The media. Lawyers. Police. These institutions all play their role in constructing a narrative around the abduction for their own ends. I loved the moments in the book where Jack was watching snippets of the media coverage of his own escape: stories within stories within stories, none of which were narrated with any degree of reliability.
It really is a remarkable book, purely through the voice of Jack. There's a strength and beauty to the power of humanity to persevere despite the horrors we experience. It is, unlike The Bunker Diaries, a very optimistic and hopeful read.
The Long War by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter
I do not like wars.
If you cast your eyes over my posts, I think the only war related entries you'll find are books I've had to teach: Strange Meeting by Susan Hill.
I groan audibly when the kids try to put on war films. Much to their annoyance!
So The Long War... I was actually looking forward to the war here. It's a sequel to The Long Earth which was okay if you like your novels slow and languid with little real action or plot. So I was hoping that the war would at least inject a direction to the rather directionless first book.
The same premise exists: an (apparently) infinite number of alternative Earths exist featuring slight variations in the planet's history and evolution and (most of) mankind has discovered the ability to step from one world to another.
There's a significant gap of time between the two books. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking twelve years... but I could be wrong. Joshua Valienté, our protagonist, is now married with a son... but, apart from that fact, he seems to be exactly the same as he was in the previous book. Sally Linsay, similarly, is exactly the same character as well.
The book is such a rich concept that I feel ... robbed. Cheated. Let down.
The central image in the novel is of the dirigible airships floating in the sky - the cutting edge technology of the first book made universal. These ships are a symbol of the narrative style: adrift, slow, vaguely heading in one direction. But the multiplicity of airships removed and narrative drive: one ship heads one way, another the other way, another follows the first, another comes back again... Many authors would coincide these different characters and journeys into a climax.
This book doesn't have that.
It doesn't have ... anything really.
The novel gently records a variety of worlds like a travelogue but without the depth and colour. There is no war between humanity and the other sentient forms; nor between Datum and Long Earth communities - despite the name of the book. It all sort of... peters out. One of the airships travels millions of worlds ... and just turns around and goes back again.
These books have none of the wit, wordplay, pace, humanity or passion of Pratchett's usual writing. And the quality of the writing is ... not great. I'm fully aware that I'm not one to talk - and a comment like that invites all sorts of criticism of my own prose! - but the repetitious nature of the language as worlds ticked by grated. Grated immensely.
The new species introduced in this book - Kobolds and Beagles and the extinct reptilians - were deeply unimaginative. They seemed almost lifted from computer games. And too familiar: however many times the beagles were described as wolf-like, they just weren't.
Currently, I have the third book in the series - The Long Mars - queued up on my to-be-read list.
I'm not sure whether I'm going to bother...
3.0
I do not like wars.
If you cast your eyes over my posts, I think the only war related entries you'll find are books I've had to teach: Strange Meeting by Susan Hill.
I groan audibly when the kids try to put on war films. Much to their annoyance!
So The Long War... I was actually looking forward to the war here. It's a sequel to The Long Earth which was okay if you like your novels slow and languid with little real action or plot. So I was hoping that the war would at least inject a direction to the rather directionless first book.
The same premise exists: an (apparently) infinite number of alternative Earths exist featuring slight variations in the planet's history and evolution and (most of) mankind has discovered the ability to step from one world to another.
There's a significant gap of time between the two books. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking twelve years... but I could be wrong. Joshua Valienté, our protagonist, is now married with a son... but, apart from that fact, he seems to be exactly the same as he was in the previous book. Sally Linsay, similarly, is exactly the same character as well.
The book is such a rich concept that I feel ... robbed. Cheated. Let down.
The central image in the novel is of the dirigible airships floating in the sky - the cutting edge technology of the first book made universal. These ships are a symbol of the narrative style: adrift, slow, vaguely heading in one direction. But the multiplicity of airships removed and narrative drive: one ship heads one way, another the other way, another follows the first, another comes back again... Many authors would coincide these different characters and journeys into a climax.
This book doesn't have that.
It doesn't have ... anything really.
The novel gently records a variety of worlds like a travelogue but without the depth and colour. There is no war between humanity and the other sentient forms; nor between Datum and Long Earth communities - despite the name of the book. It all sort of... peters out. One of the airships travels millions of worlds ... and just turns around and goes back again.
These books have none of the wit, wordplay, pace, humanity or passion of Pratchett's usual writing. And the quality of the writing is ... not great. I'm fully aware that I'm not one to talk - and a comment like that invites all sorts of criticism of my own prose! - but the repetitious nature of the language as worlds ticked by grated. Grated immensely.
The new species introduced in this book - Kobolds and Beagles and the extinct reptilians - were deeply unimaginative. They seemed almost lifted from computer games. And too familiar: however many times the beagles were described as wolf-like, they just weren't.
Currently, I have the third book in the series - The Long Mars - queued up on my to-be-read list.
I'm not sure whether I'm going to bother...
Half a King by Joe Abercrombie
3.0
I've been meaning to get round to reading Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy for a while but haven't managed to find the time recently. Work. Children. Babies. Goatee growing. You know: the things that take up your time.
But with the summer holidays coinciding with a new book, Half A King, I thought I'd start there.
Half A King is a fantasy novel aimed at the Young Adult audience which is a difficult one to succeed with: the pace required to satisfy a modern teen male audience brought up on video games, instant gratification and the internet can be inimical to the development and depth required to create an authentic High Fantasy world.
Does this one succeed?
Not entirely, in my opinion.
Gettland is one of the kingdoms around The Shattered Sea, the world of the novel. Whilst fictional, The Shattered Sea has echoes of Norse and Viking culture and language which lends the novel both a familiarity and alienness. It's not as ubiquitous in our culture as the Greek or Roman mythologies of the Low Fantasy Percy Jackson series; but stories of burning longboats and raiding parties are still part of most school children's education.
The novel focuses on Yarvi, second son to the King who unexpectedly ascends the throne in the opening chapter, following the deaths of his father and older brother. The novel proceeds to follow his slightly tenuous grip on the throne in a series of adventures and set backs. At its heart, it is a coming of age book as Yarvi is forced to follow a journey into adulthood. As is typical of this genre, our unlikely hero collects unlikely allies and forged unexpected friendships to aid him on his journey.
Abercrombie maintains the pace of the novel well: Yarvi's various exploits are episodic and at times we seemed to lurch from one incident to another. Only once or twice does Abercrombie slow things down enough to try to develop characters and their relationships. For me, it marred the book a little.
Nor was I terribly keen on the main character, Yarvi. He started engagingly enough: the youngest son, rejected because of a malformed hand, reticent and shy, forced into a role he did not desire and for which he was ill-suited. So far, so good. But he becomes an altogether less engaging character as the novel progresses and far more blood thirsty and distinctly lacking in empathy. The attempts to humanise him - through his friendships with Rulf, Jaud and Ankram and the hint of romance with the somewhat exotic navigator Sumael - did not convince me. It's hard to give specifics without giving spoilers away but there is one point in particular when I was quite shocked by his lack of empathy.
As someone who dislikes violence, I was also mildly concerned that violence - or more precisely "steel" -was often viewed as the "answer" to almost every problem. In fact, on several occasions, we were told exactly that. I'd have liked Yarvi, having been trained for the Ministry, a scholarly and advisory role, to have been more reliant on his wits and tongue and less reliant on befriending people to fight for him.
One character I did like a lot, though, despite his fairly minor role, was Grom-gil-Gorm, a neighbouring King. His presence was quite magnetic, especially as we generally viewed him from the point-of-view of Yarvi kneeling at his feet.
There is something very much of the Game Of Thrones atmosphere in this novel: Laithlin, Yarvi's mother, is reminiscent of Cersei Lannister; the historical-fantasy world; the inter-familial violence; the competing religions; the ambiguous characters trying to balance honour and ambition. Personally, I found Phillip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur more effective on many levels and navigating the same ocean with far more satisfying results.
Another blog review on this book is here.
But with the summer holidays coinciding with a new book, Half A King, I thought I'd start there.
Half A King is a fantasy novel aimed at the Young Adult audience which is a difficult one to succeed with: the pace required to satisfy a modern teen male audience brought up on video games, instant gratification and the internet can be inimical to the development and depth required to create an authentic High Fantasy world.
Does this one succeed?
Not entirely, in my opinion.
Gettland is one of the kingdoms around The Shattered Sea, the world of the novel. Whilst fictional, The Shattered Sea has echoes of Norse and Viking culture and language which lends the novel both a familiarity and alienness. It's not as ubiquitous in our culture as the Greek or Roman mythologies of the Low Fantasy Percy Jackson series; but stories of burning longboats and raiding parties are still part of most school children's education.
The novel focuses on Yarvi, second son to the King who unexpectedly ascends the throne in the opening chapter, following the deaths of his father and older brother. The novel proceeds to follow his slightly tenuous grip on the throne in a series of adventures and set backs. At its heart, it is a coming of age book as Yarvi is forced to follow a journey into adulthood. As is typical of this genre, our unlikely hero collects unlikely allies and forged unexpected friendships to aid him on his journey.
Abercrombie maintains the pace of the novel well: Yarvi's various exploits are episodic and at times we seemed to lurch from one incident to another. Only once or twice does Abercrombie slow things down enough to try to develop characters and their relationships. For me, it marred the book a little.
Nor was I terribly keen on the main character, Yarvi. He started engagingly enough: the youngest son, rejected because of a malformed hand, reticent and shy, forced into a role he did not desire and for which he was ill-suited. So far, so good. But he becomes an altogether less engaging character as the novel progresses and far more blood thirsty and distinctly lacking in empathy. The attempts to humanise him - through his friendships with Rulf, Jaud and Ankram and the hint of romance with the somewhat exotic navigator Sumael - did not convince me. It's hard to give specifics without giving spoilers away but there is one point in particular when I was quite shocked by his lack of empathy.
As someone who dislikes violence, I was also mildly concerned that violence - or more precisely "steel" -was often viewed as the "answer" to almost every problem. In fact, on several occasions, we were told exactly that. I'd have liked Yarvi, having been trained for the Ministry, a scholarly and advisory role, to have been more reliant on his wits and tongue and less reliant on befriending people to fight for him.
One character I did like a lot, though, despite his fairly minor role, was Grom-gil-Gorm, a neighbouring King. His presence was quite magnetic, especially as we generally viewed him from the point-of-view of Yarvi kneeling at his feet.
There is something very much of the Game Of Thrones atmosphere in this novel: Laithlin, Yarvi's mother, is reminiscent of Cersei Lannister; the historical-fantasy world; the inter-familial violence; the competing religions; the ambiguous characters trying to balance honour and ambition. Personally, I found Phillip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur more effective on many levels and navigating the same ocean with far more satisfying results.
Another blog review on this book is here.
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan
2.0
Oh dear.
What a let down.
I was really looking forward to this one. And now I feel just... let down.
I've read some great books recently: emotional, lyrical, beautiful. I wasn't expecting any of that from The Strain. I was looking forward to an enjoyable, rollicking horror vampire fantasy in the style of del Toro's Mimic, Hellboy or Splice. If I was lucky, it could have been as powerful as the wonderful Pan's Labyrinth.
It wasn't either.
It was... lazy. Somehow.
Pedestrian.
The basic plot revolves around the arrival of a mysteriously darkened plane into New York JFK Airport. Once opened, the plane is found to be full of dead passengers and crew. Not a bad premise and I imagine deliberately reminiscent of Bram Stoker's Dracula's arrival into Whitby on the crewless Demeter.
We are led through the investigations into this dead plane by Ephraim Goodweather, a CDC epidemiologist. He is our main protagonist and del Toro and Hogan succeed in investing him with almost no personality. There's a somewhat limp attempt to create a personal back story: he is separated from his wife and fighting to retain partial custody of his son. The writing here was almost embarrassingly pedestrian:
Poor Nora. She was sidelined so far she was barely on the same page.
She was even made to stay home to babysit Zack whilst the men went out to hunt the vampires. She was no Mina Harker!
Just flicking back through the book, nearly every page has ridiculous language. It's not even tongue in cheek, so-bad-it's-good... It's just badly written. I mean, take this as an example:
Oh. Oh dear.
Now, let's turn instead to the vampires. I suppose they didn't sparkle in the sunlight. They had a retractable proboscis-like stinger which darted from the mouth instead of fangs. Why? I imagine the intention was to ramp-up the visceral icky-factor. But, again, the ready appellation of stinger was applied and all the descriptive power dissipated. It could have - should have - been a depiction from a nightmare, dripping, oozing, moist and phallic... But it became just a stinger.
The physiology of the vampire was explained in tedious detail: blood worms transmitted the virus which converted the human physiology into a vampiric one. Cancerous growths on the organs take over and subvert them. After a day and a night, those bitten become stumbling new-born vampires. They have more in common with zombies than vampires: uncoordinated, shuffling and rather easy to kill.
And, seriously, worms?
It felt almost as if del Toro and Hogan didn't agree on how to portray the vampires. Are they supernatural deriving from the blood of an Archangel? Are they infected with parasitic worms? Are they infected with a virus? It just feels messy. There is patently a larger story than is contained in this novel and it may be that these confusions are resolved later. But I'm not sure that I'm prepared to give my time to those books to find out.
A number of reviews on Goodreads compare this favourably with The Passage by Justin Cronin. That, I don't see. The Passage was a wonderful, vivid and mythic reinvention of the vampire. The Strain Is everything I worried The Passage might be: dull, tedious in its violence, superficial in its characterisation and pedestrian in its language.
There is a TV show of the book.
I'm not inclined to watch.
What a let down.
I was really looking forward to this one. And now I feel just... let down.
I've read some great books recently: emotional, lyrical, beautiful. I wasn't expecting any of that from The Strain. I was looking forward to an enjoyable, rollicking horror vampire fantasy in the style of del Toro's Mimic, Hellboy or Splice. If I was lucky, it could have been as powerful as the wonderful Pan's Labyrinth.
It wasn't either.
It was... lazy. Somehow.
Pedestrian.
The basic plot revolves around the arrival of a mysteriously darkened plane into New York JFK Airport. Once opened, the plane is found to be full of dead passengers and crew. Not a bad premise and I imagine deliberately reminiscent of Bram Stoker's Dracula's arrival into Whitby on the crewless Demeter.
We are led through the investigations into this dead plane by Ephraim Goodweather, a CDC epidemiologist. He is our main protagonist and del Toro and Hogan succeed in investing him with almost no personality. There's a somewhat limp attempt to create a personal back story: he is separated from his wife and fighting to retain partial custody of his son. The writing here was almost embarrassingly pedestrian:
"For a lot of other guys Eph knew, men in a situation similar to his own, their divorce seemed to have been as much from their children as from their wives. Sure, they would talk the talk, how they missed their kids, and how their ex-wives kept subverting their relationship, blah, blah, but the effort never seemed to be there. A weekend with their kids became a weekend out of their new life of freedom. For Eph, these weekends with Zack were his life."It seems bizarre that a filmmaker with such a vivid visual imagination felt the need to tell rather than show. The same awkward gauche approach is applied to Eph's relationship with his almost silent colleague, lover and fellow vampire-hunter, Nora Martinez.
Poor Nora. She was sidelined so far she was barely on the same page.
She was even made to stay home to babysit Zack whilst the men went out to hunt the vampires. She was no Mina Harker!
Just flicking back through the book, nearly every page has ridiculous language. It's not even tongue in cheek, so-bad-it's-good... It's just badly written. I mean, take this as an example:
"Eph too had been turned. Not from human to vampire, but from healer to slayer."
Oh. Oh dear.
Now, let's turn instead to the vampires. I suppose they didn't sparkle in the sunlight. They had a retractable proboscis-like stinger which darted from the mouth instead of fangs. Why? I imagine the intention was to ramp-up the visceral icky-factor. But, again, the ready appellation of stinger was applied and all the descriptive power dissipated. It could have - should have - been a depiction from a nightmare, dripping, oozing, moist and phallic... But it became just a stinger.
The physiology of the vampire was explained in tedious detail: blood worms transmitted the virus which converted the human physiology into a vampiric one. Cancerous growths on the organs take over and subvert them. After a day and a night, those bitten become stumbling new-born vampires. They have more in common with zombies than vampires: uncoordinated, shuffling and rather easy to kill.
And, seriously, worms?
It felt almost as if del Toro and Hogan didn't agree on how to portray the vampires. Are they supernatural deriving from the blood of an Archangel? Are they infected with parasitic worms? Are they infected with a virus? It just feels messy. There is patently a larger story than is contained in this novel and it may be that these confusions are resolved later. But I'm not sure that I'm prepared to give my time to those books to find out.
A number of reviews on Goodreads compare this favourably with The Passage by Justin Cronin. That, I don't see. The Passage was a wonderful, vivid and mythic reinvention of the vampire. The Strain Is everything I worried The Passage might be: dull, tedious in its violence, superficial in its characterisation and pedestrian in its language.
There is a TV show of the book.
I'm not inclined to watch.
Embassytown by China Miéville
Hmmm... where to start with this one?
It's a book on which I am still ruminating and which is still rattling away inside my brain after a couple of days. Nagging at me. Gnawing at my consciousness. And Miéville's writing does that: it dwells and lingers and questions and challenges you. That is why Miéville is one of my favourite authors.
Embassytown is a novel about language - with or without a capital L - and imagination, identity, and thought. And, as always with Miéville, a city. A divided city.
This novel is Miéville's entry into science fiction so the city is located in a far distant planet. The planet is home to the Ariekei, a particularly alien and enigmatic race known as Hosts to the colonists in the human town embedded in the Ariekene City. The divide here - unlike the sublime The City And The City - is very physical: the Ariekene atmosphere is unbreathable to humans and they are limited to artificially produced atmosphere called Aeoli. Our first introduction to the city follows the attempts of our protagonist, Avice Benner Cho, to penetrate
The Hosts aren't described in detail but remain enigmatic and hard to picture: their motion is crablike, and sometimes insectile; they walk precisely but on hooves; they have both fanwings and giftwings; they see through multiple eye-corals. And, critically, two mouths which speak simultaneously. There is something H. R. Giger about the organic insectile Hosts and their organic "biorigged" City.
The dual mouths creates obvious problems for communication which is exacerbated because their Language
The words are the thoughts which they refer to. The signifier is the signified, in Saussarean terminology. As a result, computer generated voices could replicate the words but not the thought and therefore could not be understood as words. The solution? To use twins and, eventually create clones embedded with augmentations to create the impression of a single mind speaking through two mouths who act as Ambassadors between the humans and the Ariekei. Their names with their artificially capitalised second syllable reflect the strange artificial construct that the two people are a single mind: CalVin, MagDa, EzRa, YlSib, BrenDan.
Another complication of the Ariekeis' Language is their inability to lie: because the thought is the word, the word can only be true. Metaphors are - literally - unthinkable. Even similes can only exist if the actual comparison has occurred and, to that effect, people are co-opted into acting out similes to become enLanguaged. And one such enLanguaged is our heroine Avice Benner Cho. I'm sure that such a language-steeped book has not chosen the ABC of our protagonist's name coincidentally!
So, does the book work? Yes. Oh gosh yes. In the main.
The City and Embassytown are wonderfully evoked albeit perhaps less rendered than New Crobuzon, Armada or Kraken's London. There are fewer textures to the city and fewer dimensions, perhaps simply because Embassytown is a smaller and less diverse culture as a colonial outpost than these other older cities.
Miéville also delights in the opportunity Science Fiction gives to explore his own language with reasonable and credible etymologies and he often throws the reader in without glossing. His characters speak Anglo-Ubiq, a ubiquitous English; humans are described as Terre, derived from our Terran origin; non-human species are known as exots or exoterres from outside the Terran system; computers are Turingware; holographic three-dimensional messages are known as trid, the etymology of which may be clearer if a dash is added tri-d; and miabs deliver post and goods like messages in a bottle. I loved the way these neologisms jarred momentarily before becoming accepted just as part of the architecture of the world.
You do run into the occasional exposition in the novel: Avice's husband, Scile, is a linguist and her friend Bren is a (part of an) Ambassador and both of them offer explanations of the Hosts' Language. I had no problem with these occasional expositions: they were done well, timed effectively and weren't hugely obtrusive.
I was far less convinced by the (fortunately brief) space travel section. The Immer - a strange alternate subspace in which distances were altered - was intriguing but very much in the background. It was little more than an excuse to take Avice off-world in order to have her return and occupy that liminal space of the outsider-native. There is potential within the concept of the Immer - warped dimensionality, fluid distances, strange pseudo-animalistic creatures - the possibility of it being sentient itself...
Did I love this book? Yes. Yes I did. I'm still baffled by it. But that bafflement feels good. I don't know whether the book's ending is triumphal or defeatist or, like the Ariekene Language, both simultaneously. At an intellectual level I love that the novel explores language and linguistics so explicitly and dwells on the power of language to enable thinking. Can we imagine that which we cannot articulate? Can thought be circumscribed by words? The book also works as a cracking science fiction adventure: the new Ambassador heralds in a catastrophe, war rages, our lone hero uncovers conspiracies, secret societies and embarks on a dangerous quest.
The narrative drive is suborned to the intellectual and linguistic explorations more than occurs in the Bas-Lag trilogy and the characters are less colourful but it does still work at that level.
Perhaps not my favourite Miéville novel but a great stand-alone challenging read.
Before you finish reading just cast an eye over the following image, the gorgeous cover art for Miéville's works. See how that duality underplays each image: divided, distinct, disparate and yet conjoined, cohesive and collective. I was struggling a little to maintain the somewhat arbitrary alliteration there! Just gorgeous sensual covers.
4.0
Hmmm... where to start with this one?
It's a book on which I am still ruminating and which is still rattling away inside my brain after a couple of days. Nagging at me. Gnawing at my consciousness. And Miéville's writing does that: it dwells and lingers and questions and challenges you. That is why Miéville is one of my favourite authors.
Embassytown is a novel about language - with or without a capital L - and imagination, identity, and thought. And, as always with Miéville, a city. A divided city.
This novel is Miéville's entry into science fiction so the city is located in a far distant planet. The planet is home to the Ariekei, a particularly alien and enigmatic race known as Hosts to the colonists in the human town embedded in the Ariekene City. The divide here - unlike the sublime The City And The City - is very physical: the Ariekene atmosphere is unbreathable to humans and they are limited to artificially produced atmosphere called Aeoli. Our first introduction to the city follows the attempts of our protagonist, Avice Benner Cho, to penetrate
what was not quite a hard border but was still remarkably abrupt, a gaseous transition, breezes sculpted with nanotechnology particle-machines and consummate atmosphere artistry - to write Avice on the white wood. Once on a whim of bravado I patted the nest's flesh anchor where it interwove with the slats. It felt as tight as a gourd.
The Hosts aren't described in detail but remain enigmatic and hard to picture: their motion is crablike, and sometimes insectile; they walk precisely but on hooves; they have both fanwings and giftwings; they see through multiple eye-corals. And, critically, two mouths which speak simultaneously. There is something H. R. Giger about the organic insectile Hosts and their organic "biorigged" City.
The dual mouths creates obvious problems for communication which is exacerbated because their Language
is organised noise, like all of our are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.... Hosts' minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue.
The words are the thoughts which they refer to. The signifier is the signified, in Saussarean terminology. As a result, computer generated voices could replicate the words but not the thought and therefore could not be understood as words. The solution? To use twins and, eventually create clones embedded with augmentations to create the impression of a single mind speaking through two mouths who act as Ambassadors between the humans and the Ariekei. Their names with their artificially capitalised second syllable reflect the strange artificial construct that the two people are a single mind: CalVin, MagDa, EzRa, YlSib, BrenDan.
Another complication of the Ariekeis' Language is their inability to lie: because the thought is the word, the word can only be true. Metaphors are - literally - unthinkable. Even similes can only exist if the actual comparison has occurred and, to that effect, people are co-opted into acting out similes to become enLanguaged. And one such enLanguaged is our heroine Avice Benner Cho. I'm sure that such a language-steeped book has not chosen the ABC of our protagonist's name coincidentally!
So, does the book work? Yes. Oh gosh yes. In the main.
The City and Embassytown are wonderfully evoked albeit perhaps less rendered than New Crobuzon, Armada or Kraken's London. There are fewer textures to the city and fewer dimensions, perhaps simply because Embassytown is a smaller and less diverse culture as a colonial outpost than these other older cities.
Miéville also delights in the opportunity Science Fiction gives to explore his own language with reasonable and credible etymologies and he often throws the reader in without glossing. His characters speak Anglo-Ubiq, a ubiquitous English; humans are described as Terre, derived from our Terran origin; non-human species are known as exots or exoterres from outside the Terran system; computers are Turingware; holographic three-dimensional messages are known as trid, the etymology of which may be clearer if a dash is added tri-d; and miabs deliver post and goods like messages in a bottle. I loved the way these neologisms jarred momentarily before becoming accepted just as part of the architecture of the world.
You do run into the occasional exposition in the novel: Avice's husband, Scile, is a linguist and her friend Bren is a (part of an) Ambassador and both of them offer explanations of the Hosts' Language. I had no problem with these occasional expositions: they were done well, timed effectively and weren't hugely obtrusive.
I was far less convinced by the (fortunately brief) space travel section. The Immer - a strange alternate subspace in which distances were altered - was intriguing but very much in the background. It was little more than an excuse to take Avice off-world in order to have her return and occupy that liminal space of the outsider-native. There is potential within the concept of the Immer - warped dimensionality, fluid distances, strange pseudo-animalistic creatures - the possibility of it being sentient itself...
Did I love this book? Yes. Yes I did. I'm still baffled by it. But that bafflement feels good. I don't know whether the book's ending is triumphal or defeatist or, like the Ariekene Language, both simultaneously. At an intellectual level I love that the novel explores language and linguistics so explicitly and dwells on the power of language to enable thinking. Can we imagine that which we cannot articulate? Can thought be circumscribed by words? The book also works as a cracking science fiction adventure: the new Ambassador heralds in a catastrophe, war rages, our lone hero uncovers conspiracies, secret societies and embarks on a dangerous quest.
The narrative drive is suborned to the intellectual and linguistic explorations more than occurs in the Bas-Lag trilogy and the characters are less colourful but it does still work at that level.
Perhaps not my favourite Miéville novel but a great stand-alone challenging read.
Before you finish reading just cast an eye over the following image, the gorgeous cover art for Miéville's works. See how that duality underplays each image: divided, distinct, disparate and yet conjoined, cohesive and collective. I was struggling a little to maintain the somewhat arbitrary alliteration there! Just gorgeous sensual covers.
Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch
4.0
I've been reading some weighty books recently. Miéville. Ali Smith. Haruki Murakami. All brilliant.
But sometimes, just sometimes, a slightly lighter read is called for: fun, engaging, escapist. And Aaronovitch delivers exactly that in his Peter Grant novels. An authentic police procedural with an engaging first person narrator whose wit is warm and genuine. With added magic.
Following Broken Homes which concluded with a face off between Grant and The Faceless Man and an unexpected and painful betrayal, Aaronovitch has given his embattled PC Grant a countryside break: the sinister Faceless Man arc is set aside almost entirely (save for a few hints setting up book six!) and we swap London for Herefordshire.
Peter Grant meets Midsomer Murders.
I was a little concerned by that. You know what it's like when you take a set of characters that are closely related to a particular setting and give them a trip away. Only Fools And Horses in Spain. It usually doesn't work.
This did though.
Grant was as engaging as ever with witty one-liners such Nightingale's refusal to memorise any police acronym which has not survived ten years. Beverly Brook joined Peter on Herefordshire which gave him the chance to develop their relationship, especially their physical relationship in the rustic setting. The new characters introduced for this stand-alone novel were pleasant enough although just a little two-dimensional.
The plot was, primarily, a straight forward police procedural: two girls had gone missing from a Herefordshire village and Peter Grant lends a hand, just in case the perpetrator is a fae creature or hedge wizard. We also get the chance chance to meet the retired wizard Hugh Oswald - from whom we hear a little more of Nightingale's war record and from whom Nightingale acquire a definite article and becomes The Nightingale - and his grand-daughter Mellissa the etymology of whose name is significant and emphasises by the unnecessary double l. I wonder whether we'll see them again.
And the magic in this one? It seemed a little downplayed and almost incidental until the final few chapters. Unicorns, changelings, faeryland and the Faery Queen all appear, albeit briefly but done well.
Overall, a really enjoyable read and a pleasant warm escapist holiday from December chill.
But sometimes, just sometimes, a slightly lighter read is called for: fun, engaging, escapist. And Aaronovitch delivers exactly that in his Peter Grant novels. An authentic police procedural with an engaging first person narrator whose wit is warm and genuine. With added magic.
Following Broken Homes which concluded with a face off between Grant and The Faceless Man and an unexpected and painful betrayal, Aaronovitch has given his embattled PC Grant a countryside break: the sinister Faceless Man arc is set aside almost entirely (save for a few hints setting up book six!) and we swap London for Herefordshire.
Peter Grant meets Midsomer Murders.
I was a little concerned by that. You know what it's like when you take a set of characters that are closely related to a particular setting and give them a trip away. Only Fools And Horses in Spain. It usually doesn't work.
This did though.
Grant was as engaging as ever with witty one-liners such Nightingale's refusal to memorise any police acronym which has not survived ten years. Beverly Brook joined Peter on Herefordshire which gave him the chance to develop their relationship, especially their physical relationship in the rustic setting. The new characters introduced for this stand-alone novel were pleasant enough although just a little two-dimensional.
The plot was, primarily, a straight forward police procedural: two girls had gone missing from a Herefordshire village and Peter Grant lends a hand, just in case the perpetrator is a fae creature or hedge wizard. We also get the chance chance to meet the retired wizard Hugh Oswald - from whom we hear a little more of Nightingale's war record and from whom Nightingale acquire a definite article and becomes The Nightingale - and his grand-daughter Mellissa the etymology of whose name is significant and emphasises by the unnecessary double l. I wonder whether we'll see them again.
And the magic in this one? It seemed a little downplayed and almost incidental until the final few chapters. Unicorns, changelings, faeryland and the Faery Queen all appear, albeit briefly but done well.
Overall, a really enjoyable read and a pleasant warm escapist holiday from December chill.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
5.0
Ahhhhhh.....
Some books are like taking a duvet day in December with a warm fire burning in the corner. And hot chocolate. Even though I don't like hot chocolate, the idea of hot chocolate. And in the arms of someone who loves you.
These books are comforting. Warming. Safe.
And so it is with Good Omens, the 1990 collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
This is a re-read for me, which is really unusual, but I had fond memories of it, albeit with only a patchy recollection, and Radio 4 are broadcasting an adaptation over the Christmas period starting on 22nd December. I felt that with the end of a long and difficult term at work, I was in need of the duvet day that this book offered. It is perhaps the literary equivalent of a Christmas Mince Pie: warming, spicy and familiar.
Which is an odd way to describe a book which essentially is about the Apocalypse. The biblical, end-of-days, Book-Of-Revelations Apocalypse.
Gaiman and Pratchett do bounce around numerous points of view but essentially each and every character is hugely likeable, even and perhaps particularly the Anti Christ Himself, Spawn of Satan, Adam Young. We are introduced to the novel's world by Aziraphile and Crowley, an Angel and Demon respectively, who have spent so much time on Earth and around humanity that they have grown to like the place. And each other. And are therefore rather aggrieved to find that the Apocalypse is imminent. Their attempts to thwart that Apocalypse are wonderfully inept.
Also working to thwart the End Of The World is the intriguingly pragmatic - and deliciously named - Anathema Device: witch, Practical Occultist and aura reader. She is armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the eponymous Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter from whom she is descended, which comes in handy when she loses the actual book.
Ironies abound in the novel - most notably the fact that the most appalling acts committed by humanity are born from human rather than demonic imagination - and the Witch Finder Army, which consists of a mere two members, Sergeant Shadwell and Private Newt Pulsifer, are in the employ of both Aziraphale and Crowley. And the With Finder Army teams up with Anathema Device, witch, as well as Madame Tracy, medium and painted Jezebel.
Amongst various cameos we also meet the Gardener's World team, the Satanic Nuns of the Chattering Order of St Beryl, the Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse - War, Death, Famine and Pollution (who took over from Pestilence once penicillin was discovered).
It is a rollercoaster of a novel, written with massive flair and fun by two fantastic writers who seem to have just had a whale of a time writing it. Some reviewers have grumbled that they only liked the Pratchett bits or the Gaiman sections - often claiming the same episodes for their championed author. I couldn't unpick them and didn't really see the need to try. It was all just a riot!
Oddly, the section that I found I had remembered most clearly was the arrival of Adam's Hellhound, Satanic Hellhound and Devourer of Souls - complete with glowing red eyes - who is reduced by the will, desire and sheer humanity of His Master to a small and scruffy cat-chasing mongrel. And is named Dog.
Roll on Monday!
With regard to the adaptation, the BBC have announced that the cast includes
Some books are like taking a duvet day in December with a warm fire burning in the corner. And hot chocolate. Even though I don't like hot chocolate, the idea of hot chocolate. And in the arms of someone who loves you.
These books are comforting. Warming. Safe.
And so it is with Good Omens, the 1990 collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
This is a re-read for me, which is really unusual, but I had fond memories of it, albeit with only a patchy recollection, and Radio 4 are broadcasting an adaptation over the Christmas period starting on 22nd December. I felt that with the end of a long and difficult term at work, I was in need of the duvet day that this book offered. It is perhaps the literary equivalent of a Christmas Mince Pie: warming, spicy and familiar.
Which is an odd way to describe a book which essentially is about the Apocalypse. The biblical, end-of-days, Book-Of-Revelations Apocalypse.
Gaiman and Pratchett do bounce around numerous points of view but essentially each and every character is hugely likeable, even and perhaps particularly the Anti Christ Himself, Spawn of Satan, Adam Young. We are introduced to the novel's world by Aziraphile and Crowley, an Angel and Demon respectively, who have spent so much time on Earth and around humanity that they have grown to like the place. And each other. And are therefore rather aggrieved to find that the Apocalypse is imminent. Their attempts to thwart that Apocalypse are wonderfully inept.
Also working to thwart the End Of The World is the intriguingly pragmatic - and deliciously named - Anathema Device: witch, Practical Occultist and aura reader. She is armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the eponymous Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter from whom she is descended, which comes in handy when she loses the actual book.
Ironies abound in the novel - most notably the fact that the most appalling acts committed by humanity are born from human rather than demonic imagination - and the Witch Finder Army, which consists of a mere two members, Sergeant Shadwell and Private Newt Pulsifer, are in the employ of both Aziraphale and Crowley. And the With Finder Army teams up with Anathema Device, witch, as well as Madame Tracy, medium and painted Jezebel.
Amongst various cameos we also meet the Gardener's World team, the Satanic Nuns of the Chattering Order of St Beryl, the Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse - War, Death, Famine and Pollution (who took over from Pestilence once penicillin was discovered).
It is a rollercoaster of a novel, written with massive flair and fun by two fantastic writers who seem to have just had a whale of a time writing it. Some reviewers have grumbled that they only liked the Pratchett bits or the Gaiman sections - often claiming the same episodes for their championed author. I couldn't unpick them and didn't really see the need to try. It was all just a riot!
Oddly, the section that I found I had remembered most clearly was the arrival of Adam's Hellhound, Satanic Hellhound and Devourer of Souls - complete with glowing red eyes - who is reduced by the will, desire and sheer humanity of His Master to a small and scruffy cat-chasing mongrel. And is named Dog.
Roll on Monday!
With regard to the adaptation, the BBC have announced that the cast includes
Colin Morgan (Merlin, The Fall) as Newton Pulsifer, Josie Lawrence (Skins, EastEnders) as Agnes Nutter and Paterson Joseph (Peep Show, Green Wing) as Famine, as well as a host of delightful cameos, from the Gardeners' Question Time team to Neil and Terry themselves....
Mark Heap (Spaced, Green Wing, Stardust) and Peter Serafinowicz (Guardians Of The Galaxy, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Shaun Of The Dead) will be taking the central roles as angel and demon, Aziraphale and Crowley, respectively. The star-studded cast will also include Clive Russell (Game Of Thrones, Ripper Street), Julia Deakin (Spaced, Hot Fuzz), Louise Brealey (Sherlock), Simon Jones (Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy), Arsher Ali (Four Lions, Complicit, Beaver Falls), Phil Davis (Silk, Whitechapel, Being Human) and Mark Benton (Waterloo Road, Land Girls) to name but a few.