michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

"Complexity should be your excuse for inaction."

I was born in 1973 in a village in Kent. So far as I know, only once. I have to say, when I die, if I were to be reborn as myself in the same village in 1973 again, I'd be a tad surprised! I mean 1973. I'd have to live through the '80s again. Did anything good happen in the 80s?

But how would that repetition affect your life? Your relationship with your parents? With the world? With history? Immortal, yet destined to only see the same lifetime. That's the basic premise of The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August. As a premise, it's unusual and yet oddly familiar: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell was very similar save that you were reborn as a new person and the next generation; Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. Even Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Harry is a kalachakra or ouroboran, one of many across the world, looping perpetually through their lives. We are never informed how or why these kalachakra exist and the question "What is the point of you?" echoes within the book.

The cyclical nature of the protagonist's life also affects the narrative structure a little in that occasional snippets and flashbacks occurred but the novel was generally chronological through Harry August's lives. Certainly it lacked the complexity of structure which The Time Traveller's Wife had. Nor does the book dwell on ethical questions, beyond the slightly unclear "Don't bugger about with temporal events". Harry decides to kill someone in almost every one of his lives because he murdered a friend in one. The lives of linears (normal un-re-born people... muggles I suppose) seem to be treated very poorly. As if their lives didn't matter.

Philosophical ideas are thrown out: does each new life create its own alternative universe?

None of it is really dwelt on.

The book which this reminded me of the most, however, was I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. It was, at heart, a thriller. Once you stripped out the reincarnation. Harry becomes part of The Cronus Club, an organisation generally aimed at self-preservation and support for themselves to avoid the ennui of repeated childhoods, as well as maintaining a temporal status quo. A shadowy figure emerges with a complex plan which threatens the world. Atrocities are committed. A confrontation occurs.

It is a cracking thriller with a decent plot (the quantum mirror could be substituted for any weapon of mass destruction) and, despite developing over 400 years of linear time (give or take) a snappy pace.

The relationship between Harry and Vincent, antagonists and comrades, loving and hating each other was played out well. With occasional moments of real tenderness and cruelty. Vincent, like Harry, is a kalachakra but rebels against the indolence and inaction perpetuated by the Cronus Clubs and he seeks to propagate the knowledge and science he discovers at the end of one life at the beginning of his next. In each lifetime, knowledge speeds up, discoveries are made sooner, boundaries are pushed further. The end of the world comes quicker. Harry and Vincent are two sides of the same coin, spinning together through their lives. Which reminds me of another Harry: young Mr Potter who carries around a portion of his nemesis' soul with his own.

The opening lines to the novel are addressed to Victor and encapsulate this:

I am writing this for you.
My enemy.
My friend.
You know, already, you must know.
You have lost.

Time for a brief diversion.

Books and authors and publishers are odd beasts, categorising each other and themselves... and then frequently deriding those categorisations. "What's wrong with genre fiction?" is a frequent lament; "Literary fiction is so pretentious".

What is genre fiction anyway? Isn't all fiction a genre? Isn't fiction a genre? Well yes. My take on it though is this: if the author consciously adheres to the expectations of a genre then it feels like genre fiction; whereas, if the novel coincides with those expectations and conventions, it is not genre fiction just fiction. Within a genre but not for that genre. And then you get some clever buggers who write within a genre, consciously breaking the expectations, conventions and tropes.
Me? I'm as guilty as anyone! I pigeonhole and categorise and shelve certain books together. I know I have a predilection for historical, crime and fantasy (especially with fairytale or Steampunk elements) and I enjoy that labelling process. Quite literally. When I moved house I enjoyed handing over my boxes labelled Gothic, Lesbian, Fantasy, Fairytale and the like! Like many reviewers on Wordpress, my list of categories demonstrates this rationalist love of classification!

But I also like to think I am using those categories knowingly, with a half turned smirk. Post-modernly. Ironically. Because I also know that what makes a story work is utterly independent from its genre (literary or otherwise): characters, voice, language. Fun. Inventiveness. There is great genre fiction out there with all those features; there is also some very poor literary fiction. I think that the reason genre fiction has come to be seen as a perjorative is that some writers adhere to the conventions as if they were rules.

Now this has been a bit of a lengthy sidetrack. But it is because of a review I read of this book claiming that it was a crossover or breakout piece between science fiction genre fiction and literary fiction. I'm sorry if that was you and I've not credited you (let me know and I will if you want!)

I'm not sure I agree. I'm not even sure I'd agree it was science fiction. Sure, it's sort of time travelling in a way but the science is pretty low impact. As I have said, it is a thriller more than anything else. A pretty damn good and different and unusual thriller but a thriller nonetheless.

This was a pleasant enough way to round of my half term: decently written in the engaging and practical voice of Lady Trent, this book conjures up a Regency style world with echoes of Austen. With dragons.

The opening sections of the novel are the most Austenesque - if that's even a word. Isabella Hendemore, the only daughter in a brood of boys, is indulged by her often absent gentleman father in an interest or passion in dragons who appear to be common enough to encroach into her father's lands occasionally. They are treated by most people as any other predator, albeit a particularly dangerous predator, to be hunted and driven away from farms.

After a few minor dragon-based adventures, Isabella is introduced to Society where she meets Jacob Camherst. Their courtship is sped over - presumably due to an absence of dragons - and I'd have liked to have seen more of it. Brennan's writing was actually quite effective in describing the tension and comedy between genuine affection and the conventions in which Isabella are forced to express it. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not Austen; it's not social satire. But it was sweet and affecting. Especially as the narrative voice of Lady Trent is narrating the tale with the benefit of hindsight, status and a certain reputation for boldness.

Following the wedding, Brennan has Isabella Camherst meet Lord Hilford, a peer of the realm with a naturalist's interest in dragons. An expedition is planned to the village of Drustanev in Vystrana, a thinly veiled Russia. Isabella manoeuvres herself to be included in it. And from there, the heart of the novel begins as Brennan moves the memoir into the territory of a travelogue and then a mystery thriller. With dragons.

The voice of Isabella, Lady Trent, was very well done. Self-deprecating, self-aware and honest. She - and in very real ways we've not seen her as neither Isabella Hendemore nor Isabella Camherst had yet become Isabella, Lady Trent, as she herself pointed out - was irascible and warm and engaging. A bit like an eccentric great-aunt. And the novel did indeed sound like what it claimed to be, a memoir, with occasional asides to the reader, references back to novels, travelogues and reference books within the world of the novel.

The dragons' presence was almost incidental: they were an integral feature of the landscape Brennan created and a key plot device but the story was really about the people. Some suspicious and fearful, some greedy, some venal, most generally decent, none exactly evil. It was quite refreshing for a fantasy novel not to have a dark lord figure brooding over the world pretending to be Sauron - and no doubt one whose name ends in -ex or -ix or some other suitably sinister suffix. Yes, Christopher Paolini, I'm referring to your King Galbatorix here! I'm sorry, but, well, the dragons make it an obvious comparison.

So, all in all, I enjoyed this. It was pleasant and took me to a credible other world with some interesting characters.

And there were dragons.

And, doing the Reading Challenge which requires a trilogy, the remaining two books in the series (see here for covers, which are also very impressive) won't be a bad way to spend the Summer.

Oh dear.

I fear I'm going to be unpopular here because I've heard so much good about this book. People have raved about it. A friend, whose book recommendations I've often been steered well by, re-reads it. Monthly.

So I apologise in advance.

I found it to be... okay.

It was standard zombie post-apocalyptic horror fare with a fairly interesting twist.

Let's look at the world building first ... World building? World destruction? Whatever. It is set in the UK which makes a nice change from the almost ubiquitous American settings. This is, perhaps, not hugely surprising as M. R. Carey hails from Liverpool but the occasional reference (like the one to David Attenborough) gives it, momentarily, a very British feel. The setting, however, quickly became fairly generic: generic Army base; generic devastated countryside; generic infected cities.

But one of the pleasures of zombie novels, for me, is the imagined mechanics of it all. Mira Grant's Feed books had a credible virus-origin; World War Z felt credible enough; Justin Cronin's The Passage was a little convenient and vague. The infection here, however, is fungal rather than viral and rooted in real science: the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus apparently does infect and change the behaviours of ants which actually is genuinely amazing! And it must be true: it's on Wikipedia here! It is one of those facts that does shift your perception of the natural world. These are fungi, pretty much the most basic organism in the world. Taking control of an insect. In the world of the novel, a mutated form of this fungus does the same in people, destroying the higher functions of the brain and exaggerating the hunger.

So far, so good: a pretty solid creation. The twist comes in the form of the ten-year old protagonist Melanie: infected but somehow retaining her higher processes: language, memory, intelligence, which we are told repeatedly is at genius-level, emotion and empathy. We first meet her along with nearly two dozen other children, housed in a cell, strapped into a wheelchair and transported back and forth to have classes with a variety of teachers, her favourite being Miss Justineau. Occasionally, children are removed by Doctor Caldwell to be dissected. As a reader, we catch on fairly quickly, and Melanie's partial understanding and her almost wilful refusal to confront it is managed well enough.

Although not first person, the point of view is generally Melanie's and the language seems to match it with a simplicity and clarity and naivety which is pretty effective. But the voice doesn't change when our point of view does which don't seem terribly well managed. Equally clumsily done are the various infodumps about the infection: even Justineau asks Caldwell why she's telling her how the infection began.

In terms of structure and plot, it progresses in the only real way it could: the security of the base is compromised; a small band of survivors flee, heading for Beacon, some safe holdfast south of London. On the way, Carey tries to develop the back stories of his characters before the inevitable occurs.

And that was where the novel faltered, for me. The characters never emerged from two-dimensionality: Parks was always the gruff but well-meaning Sargeant; Gallagher, always the immature innocent soldier caught up in a war he did not understand; Caldwell never became more than a female Dr Mengele; Justineau the compassionate. And they were so incredibly stupid! Heading for cities where the concentration of zombies was at its highest; approaching a zombie in the street. Even Melanie, who was the most intriguing of them all, didn't really engage me. I'd seen it done before in Cronin's The Passage and between Melanie and Amy Harper Bellafonte, there is no contest.

I mean, don't get me wrong... This is not a bad book; it's a decent read and a good example of the genre; it's not lyrical or beautiful in its language but it is well written and well paced. It's a decent book. I just don't get the huge praise I've heard about it.

Maybe it's me.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Related

The Passage, Justin Cronin
World War Z, Max Brooks
Feed, Mira Grant
My Swordhand is Singing, Marcus Sedgwick
The Strain, Guillermo del Toro and Chick Hogan

Why are so few book covers yellow? This looks gorgeous! Like a literary bumblebee. I have to confess, the only reason I picked this up was the cover - despite the advice parents give their children the world over. That and Waterstone's promotions. But I'm really glad I did because it's a powerful, haunting, human and compelling novel.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Peize in 2014, the novel revolves around three children. Two of whom are missing. All of whose share one story.

We enter the story in 1996 when our narrator, Rosemary Cooke, is at college. I was at University and socially awkward between 1992-6, so there were elements of Rosemary's life which struck a chord! Although generally my experience lacked the drugs, arrests and ventriloquists' dummies which Rosemary had to navigate.

We first meet Rosemary witnessing and accidentally becoming embroiled in a scene (as my mother would say) or a fracas (as a police officer might describe it) initiated by another student, Harlow Fielding. As a result, both are arrested. An unlikely friendship between the outwardly reserved Rosemary and overly dramatic Harlow.

This friendship, though, is not the story; nor is this incident the start of the story. Over the course of the novel, we hear the story of Rosemary's childhood focussing on her aged five, dispatched to her grandparents house for a week.

Or rather the stories. We receive the consciously modified and edited version given to Harlow as a safe and practiced narration, crafted for effect. But the same story is retold with the edited sections removed and we learn that her sister, Fern, disappeared whilst Rosemary was away. We hear memories, possibly reliable and possibly not; recovered memories. In 1996, having done his own disappearing act, Lowell visits Rosemary and we hear new accounts of the same event from his point of view.

The structure of the story, starting in college but circling the events of fifteen years previously could have become tedious and dull, or confusing, with a lesser author or a less engaging narrator. Rosemary was delightful! Smart, damaged, insecure, funny, self-aware. A remarkable guide on the journey that the novel represents. The novel does explore these layers of memory, consciously or subconsciously shaped into different stories. And it does chime with my own experience and understanding of memory. Do I feel like I know the truth about Fern's disappearance? No. Did I feel that the novel was strikingly experimental in style? Not really (compare Eleanor Catton's novel The Rehearsal). Did I feel her use of language was lyrical and poetic? Again no (compare The History Of The Rain by Niall Williams).

Do I feel as if I've met a real person in Rosemary? Yes. What more could I ask for in a novel?

For me, at times, the novel did veer a little towards the didactic, the moral lesson of non-human animal rights. There were occasions when we were, effectively receiving science or philosophy lectures. Theories of Mind. Mirror Tests. The experiments of Winthrop Kellogg and Gua. The Animal Liberation Front.

I didn't mind those moments for two reasons: they were delivered unerringly in Rosemary's voice and entirely suited her character and history; and they were genuinely quite interesting studies of animal behaviours. And these scientific expositions were balanced with frequent literary allusion and references too including A Tale Of Two Cities (Ahhh! Madame Defarge!) and Thomas More's Utopia. It really was a very literary novel.

And at no point did these expositions detract from the central grief at the heart of the novel and of Rosemary. Her grief at the double loss of her sister and brother.

I did want more Harlow, though. She exploded into the book. Several times. She broke boundaries. Seduced men carelessly. Stole. But she was engaging as hell! Oh well. Maybe any more time spent in her company would have made her tiresome.

I now have a choice. There is a huge 'reveal' perhaps 75 pages into the book. You may already be aware of it from other reviews. I think I'll choose not to say what it is. But it may fundamentally change your response to the Cooke family. It may not. Enjoy reaching it!

Again, a gorgeous cover here and a decent read.
This is the second in Marie Brennan's Lady Trent trilogy and it continues the adventures of Mrs Isabella Camherst - still to meet Lord Trent or to be named a lady - from the first book, A Natural History Of Dragons. Much of what I praised in the first book re-appears here, but not all.

I have more hesitation this time round - although I'll admit that that may be caused by how quickly I read this after A Natural History, or perhaps pressing distractions of a personal nature. But mainly, I felt a lack of dragons!

Allow me to summarise what we do get in the novel before lamenting what we lack.

We pick up Isabella Camherst three years or so after the first book, in which her husband Jacob died and, at the end of which, we learn she is pregnant. Her son is named Jacob after his father and promptly taken on by nannies whilst Isabella distances herself from him. Even more so than might be expected in this Regency-esque world. To the extent, in fact, that she flees to the continent of Eriga - a thinly disguised Africa just as Vystrana was a thinly veiled Russia.

The expedition arrives and potters about a bit somewhat aimlessly. It seemed poorly conceived. Maybe Lord Hilford, who funded but did not join it, is getting a little vague in his senescence. Eventually, however, the group are given a task by the oba in whose palace they've been whiling away their hours: descend to the rain jungle / swampland of the neighbouring Mouleen area and bring back dragon eggs. More time was whiled away. Only a couple of dragons were seen.

What this was really was a study of the society of the Moulish (with whom we spent most time) and of tensions and conflict between the somewhat mercenary Scirlanders and various other tribes using the Mouleen swamps to further their own ambitions. At least once, Lady Trent informed me that she should not be distracted by her natural history of dragons and meditations on their life cycle when her reader was more interested in the army she'd encountered.

No.

I was not more interested!

The book meandered a little in the first half and rushed towards the end but it was a perfectly decent read.

We retained Lady Trent's narration and her voice remained convincing, entertaining and engaging throughout. As a character, as Isabella Camherst, I felt she benefitted from the extra years and was more credible than the girl in the first book who kept on coming up with the answer. We added Nathalie, Lord Hilford's wayward engineering granddaughter who, to be honest, didn't really add much to the mix.

What I missed with this entrance to the series - in addition to the direction of the first - was the tenderness of the marriage between Jacob and Isabella. They were lovely together in A Natural History. And the relationship or friendship with Tom Wilker wasn't enough to replace it.

I don't want to sound too down on this book: it's a decent and well-written thing. It is good. It does perhaps suffer from the typical (stereotypical?) middle-book syndrome so I'm hoping that the third book lifts the trilogy. What am I hoping for from Voyage Of The Basilisk? I hope Jacob (junior) will be brought into the book properly - if the chronology holds he's probably about four or five at the end of Tropic of Serpents and there may be a delay of years before Basilisk so he could go on the expedition. It seems mean to sideline him utterly! I hope we meet Lord Trent - assuming that Isabella becomes Lady Trent through marriage which is, I suppose, not guaranteed - and I hope that their relationship is given time to develop ... Actually no, ignore that. I hope we meet him and some form of relationship develops, but that the romantic relationship doesn't even begin.

It is Sunday night.

Today was warm, sunny, a little humid on the south western coast of England. And yet, standing in that sun, warmed by it, with this book open I am transported to a frozen canal sides of Amsterdam over the winter of 1686.

And, as I write this, I'd love an olie-koecken. Or gingerbread, even in the forbidden shape of a person.

Such is the evocative power of Burton's prose in this highly-praised debut novel.


There is something extraordinary about the way Burton creates the world of Amsterdam: its wealth, its precarious geography, its pettiness, its hypocrisy. The tyranny of the church in an almost pagan desire to appease the sea. The suspiciousness and envy of neighbours. The innate xenophobia against the black servant Otto.

There is also a sensuality in the prose in the sights, sounds and tastes of the city - particularly taste as it revolves in large part around a shipment of sugar and fears that excessive sweetness may endanger the soul. And herrings which, assuredly, are good for the soul.

The story itself centres around eighteen-year-old Petronella (Nella) Brandt, arriving unaccompanied at the home of her new husband, Johannes. She is testily received by two other women: Marin, Brandt's spinster (for wont if another word) sister; and Cornelia, a servant. The rivalries and tensions and secrets and shared confidences and growing respect between these three women within the nine rooms of their home are the heart of the novel.

Or one of its hearts.

There's also the matter of the eponymous miniaturist whose presence hovers over the novel enigmatically. Despite her almost complete absence from the novel and absolute silence within it.

She is introduced firstly when Johannes buys an extravagant albeit idiosyncratic gift for his young wife: a miniature of their own house. Angered by the perceived childishness of the gift, believing it a mockery of her lack of power in the house dominated by her sister-in-law, Nella engages the miniaturist to create items which she had been forbidden by Marin. Further unasked for items arrive with them - and continue to arrive - bearing an uncanny likeness and hinting towards something prophetic and lyrical. Or something underhand and prosaic: spies and bribes and listening at doorways. Letters go missing but somehow find their recipients. The miniatures change in unusual ways foreshadowing events. Things that shouldn't have fallen from pockets somehow do. But then, we've all had that happen to us, haven't we?

It was such a delicately drawn line between realism and a hint of more.

And of course, we discover that the miniaturist is a woman: free and (shockingly) living independently of father, husband or guild; whereas Nella, Marin and Cornelia are trapped in their home and with each other and dependent on Johannes. She is blonde in the dark-haired streets of Amsterdam. Her sign is the symbol of the sun. An elegant counterpoint to Nella.

And finally, there's Johannes: handsome, endearing, distant. There's an element of the thriller in his parts of the book - and a really very effective trial scene. For a book which was very female centric, Johannes never became either a tyrant or a figure of ridicule and all the women, I think, loved him.

Possibly not the best husband in the world but a good man. In a world which was less tolerant than ours.

If I have a concern about the book, that is perhaps it: the Brandts seemed just a little bit more tolerant and modern than quite fitted with the era.

In case you were wondering olie-koecken were a form of doughnut, a yeast batter, fried and covered in that sinfully dangerous sugar.

Full review here.

https://bookloverssanctuary.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/three-moments-of-an-explosion-china-mieville/




Okay, so short stories.

Part of me loves short stories. The precision, the concision, the economy of language within them - read The Dead by james Joyce. Part of me, however, longs for the lengthy, relaxed familiarity you get with the characters in a novel, even in the best of the genre.

In the worst collections of short stories, you get the impression that the author has swept up the offcuts and cast-off fragments from his editing desk and served them up.

So reading any short story collection is a double-edged sword for me.

But Miéville has such a range to his writings and such a wealth of imagination and control over his voices and depth to his settings that I was looking at this with a lot of excitement. And in main part, this collection was wonderful and rich. Not every story in the collection chimed with me - but then you'd expect that from a short story collection. We also have more than just short stories here: the collection includes monologues, meditations and screenplays for film trailers as well as short stories. And within the collection, Miéville takes us into his familiar weird fiction milieus: familiar and recognisable locations confronted by the bizarre and inexplicable such as walking oil rigs, floating icebergs and a sickness which surrounds the infected with a moat. In addition to this, we encounter magic realism, horror, zombie apocalypses and science fiction.

Let's have a quick canter of some of the most successful stories (at least for me).

Sӓcken was Miéville's foray into horror and begins in familiar enough territory: a pair of innocent girls stay in an isolated lakeside cottage in the forests of Germany. Something horrific drags itself from the lake and into the girls' lives. In itself, the scenario is traditional enough but Miéville's control over the horror and his navigation of the territories of scepticism, doubt, nightmare and horror was wonderful. As were his descriptions of the
"nightmare calf born without limbs or head or eyes but full of tumors".

After The Festival was wonderfully viscerally creepy. Imagining a world in which revellers attend celebrations of slaughter and cooking, and afterwards decked themselves with the severed heads of the slaughtered animals was wonderful. Imagine now the worms burrowing from those heads into the flesh of the people beneath, revealing the animal within the human condition, and the craving those people have for those heads.
The 9th Technique was, perhaps, the most truly Miévillian in the collection. The description of the diner in which clandestine magical black market transactions was brilliantly evoked and made the purchase of the potent puissance-laden cocoon credible. I wonder how many Miéville-readers wondered whether the cocoon contained a slake moth! Again, the beauty is in Miéville's descriptions as much as anything: the glass jar in which his protagonist, Koning, placed the cocoon
"did not break and it did not bow or bend or inflate grotesquely as if heated and made soft, but it was harder and harder to lift, denser and denser with shadow."

The Dowager of Bees, in my mind, was the most evocative story and showed the greatest control to maintain its conciseness. A gambler discovers that there are impossible and unknown hidden suits of cards capable of manifesting inside any pack of cards in any game, warping reality around them, inserting additional chapters of rules into rule books whenever they appear. The imagery of the cards themselves - with echoes of tarot cards and magic in themselves - and the idea that these cards were somehow conscious or sentient.
I did miss with these stories what has, for me, been the cornerstone of Miéville's writings: the urban, thriving, decaying, living cities, whether they be London from The Kraken, New Crobuzon from Perdido Street Station or Armada from The Scar. Obviously, that is inherent within the brevity of the genre and at times there are suggestions of it. Dan's flight in Estate in which he "fingered walls and bollards. He passed a knocked-over bin and knelt to examine it", where he seemed to be reading the cityscape the way a tracker might read a forest, came close. And then the London of Polynia seemed curiously blank in contrast.

All in all, this collection offers a number of rich and lush gems, all the more evocative for being so concise, and a myriad of interesting ideas and conceits.

Oh I'm in two minds about this book.

I so wanted to like it. A alternate history world in which the borders between reality and books is flexible and malleable. Who would love to pop to Wuthering Heights for a cup of tea with Nelly Dean? Or stroll through the 100 Acre Wood? Or play hide-and-seek in the Garden of Eden (who's going to find you behind that apple tree?) for an afternoon?

You could pop into Fifty Shades and inform Ms. Steele what consent actually means.

And you have to dodge Baconians on the street seeking to convert your views on Shakespeare's authorship. A world where entertainment includes coin-fed Shakespearean soliloquy dispensers and wholly audience-participation Shakespeare plays with the atmosphere of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And you can own dodos in Fforde's world. I mean, dodos! Because genetic splicing is a thing.

And time travel.

And vampires and werewolves.

I'm sure many people would find the range of alternative structures thrown into this mix quirky or witty - which each one is individually - I mean, book worms which crawl around and eat prepositions and excrete apostrophes or, if they're stressed, capitalisation - the range of ideas, concepts and conceits thrown in, to me, felt confused. Almost as if Fforde wrote himself into plot holes and had to go back to insert a random new feature in order to provide him with a way out. Or woke up with an idea and the words "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if..." on his lips.

What we're presented with is essentially a crime caper: the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit is stolen and Thursday Next is called in to investigate. We discover increasingly shady departments of the Special Ops forces of which Next is a member; the sinister Goliath corporation manipulating the investigation, a subplot involving Next's love life and her time in the Crimean War.

In addition to the confused gamut of tropes, there were more issues which irked me, as a writer myself.

[It is a new thing to self-identify as a writer for me... but it felt lovely saying it!]

The other issues. Oh yes. For a book so aware of the limitations of the first person narrative (it actual is a significant plot device towards the end, the fact that Jane Eyre is itself first person), the novel failed to either give Thursday a convincing narrative voice or to remain in its own first person narrative. We see numerous scenes from outside Thursday's point of view: whole chapters took place miles away from Thursday; some chapters alternated from Thursday's and an omniscient narrative point of view within the chapter.

And to have your first-person narrator randomly look at herself in a mirror just to describe her for the reader? Really?! I'd expect that from kids at school. What was even the point to tell me that she was

somewhat ordinary features.... Her hair was a plain mousey colour and of medium length ...

What do I learn of her from that? Really? Were her looks a plot point? No.

And sometimes Fforde did try. After a botched arrest attempt, we learn what happened from Thursday's interview with internal affairs. That's okay. That's a good idea: you can create the emotion of the protagonist directly; you can deliver half-truths and dramatic irony and unreliable narrators. Or, you can do what Fforde does, and simply retell the story in the same bland voice that Thursday's narrative voice has.

And our antagonist, Acheron Hades. With a name like that, how could Fforde have expected him to be anything other than a cardboard cutout villain. Imbued with a range of unexplained powers. Powers which are not shared by anyone else.

Let's have a look at Fforde's naming system. Thursday Next is odd; Acheron Hades is too obvious and blunt; Jack Schitt is childishly scatological; but minor characters like Millon de Floss or Felix Tabularasa have sparks of fun and wit.

Maybe I'm being too harsh on Fforde - or his editor, in all likelihood. A stronger editorial control could have made this a much better book. Maybe, though, just maybe, there's a really clever developed story arc which will tie everything together over the rest of the series. Maybe I'm too foolish to recognise meta-literary post-modern irony and see them as a lack of control over the narrative.

Maybe.

I will probably give one more in the series a go. Just in case.

If you liked this, try:

Mark Hodder, The Curious Case of Spring-Heeled Jack

Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

Cornelia Funke, Inkheart