Another one I wrote for coffee. I read all of MacBride's stuff over the summer of '09 because it was entertaining and I needed entertainment.

This is the fifth book to feature Logan McRae, whose thankless job it is to police the mean streets of Aberdeen. Familiarity with McRae’s previous adventures is not essential to your enjoyment of this instalment, a police procedural that leaps straight in with both booted feet first, opening with an armed raid that goes badly wrong, but which leads to the discovery of a horribly mutilated Polish immigrant. An attack by a psychopathic racist is the obvious conclusion, but McRae’s investigation hints at something even darker and more disturbing. Labouring under the verbal lashes of his immediate superiors, the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking DI Steele and the withering sarcasm of DCI Finnie, while attracting the unwelcome attentions of local mob boss Simon McLeod, McRae’s a good policeman plagued by bad luck. Unravelling the plot takes him all the way to Poland and some of the nastiest secrets from the fall of the communist government.
A dark streak of gallows humour raises this offering above the standard grim’n’gruesome serial killer fare, as does a gift for the creation of memorable characters and hilarious dialogue. Explosions of bloodcurdling, hair-raising violence veer across the line into farce as the propensity of local criminals to view police raids as opportunities for a good punch-up lay waste to carefully planned strategies, leading to chaos and confusion which MacBride handles with skilful aplomb.
The policemen and women in Blind Eye are a cheerfully slobby, human lot, who like their drink, kit-kats, bacon butties and endless cups of tea, which keeps the whole book well grounded. Dark, funny, suspenseful and entertaining, if Blind Eye is your first Stuart MacBride novel, it probably won’t be your last.

I tried to read, this, I really did, back when I first finished The Lord Of The Rings and wanted more more MORE. The opening chapters defeated me, however, which really is a pity. I wasn't sure how to deal with a brand new creation myth, for one thing. As a Catholic teen, it seemed to close to blasphemy. As a Catholic teen who wasn't all that enamoured of being a Catholic, it was too much like religion. Then again the archaic language was also off-putting, and though the chapters were short, the reading was long, so it seemed to take forever to get to the point. So I gave up. Still, i must have dipped in and out of it, flicked through, read passages here and there, because this time I did read it, and quite a bit of it was oddly familiar.

I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them.

Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.

Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it.

There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.

Ooh this was a big one. Took me a whole bloody month to read, partly because I had to rearrange the furniture every time I wanted to open it.
The thing about this is that it's all about a world where scientific progress comes about through the efforts of ancient monastic enclaves who devote their lives to the study of scientific theory and philosophy, letting the outside world get on with believing whatever madcap delusions they can draw from passing cloud blocking out the sun or whatever. Oooh, clever inversion.
I knew monks. I grew up near a monastery. They weren't that much like these guys, but I don't think they were much like other monks, either, being a fairly wealthy and extroverted order who sent missionaries to Africa and Asia and came back with groovy beaded rattle things and dried snakeskins. Oh, there were more than a few saintly beatific brothers with benign expressions and faraway eyes who preached sermons about the ineffable thingness of wotsit (seriously, listening to them was like... well, even as a kid I actually kind of liked them, especially compared to the Bush-like eloquence of the parish priests, and anyway they were short.) Mostly, though, they were what college students would be like if they didn't drink or swear or have sex or do drugs, so I apreciate what Stephenson is getting at here. Also, the singing.
I also knew nuns, seeing as Anathem's monastries are coed. I went to a convent school, and there's nothing quite like seeing tiny, hunched, female figures in black putting the fear of almighty God in the hearts of strapping six foot farmer's sons. Sister Agnes, who taught us Irish, would stand beside us (we were sitting, she was standing, and the tallest wisp of grey hair that poked out of the front of her wimple came up to our shoulders despite the massive heels on her shoes) and stick her arm out from her elbow at a ninety degree angle, rotate her hips and repeatedly strike our arms and say 'Nil pheac deanta agat!' What did that mean? No idea. Never learnt a word of Irish. I assume it's Irish. The suurs in Anathem don't do any pheacing, so that aspect didn't ring true for me.
Anathem's a lot like The Baroque Cycle in that science and philsophy and technology are all discoursed on in various ways by the characters while the plot ticks along in the background, except it's all rephrased and reformulated because it's a different world, same physics (or is it?) Our hapless hero is summoned by the saecular power to help out with this problem they're having which may involve the end of the world, and all that. Epic stuff happens with the usual Stephensonian aplomb, some of it funny and witty, some of it not, all of it eminently readable and fun.

We here at Sheelagh na Gig like our thrillers dark and brooding and twisty, full of foreboding, dense with danger,tingling with trepidation, minging with menace, but most of all, we like them well written. That’s why this week’s review commends to your attention Bad Things, by Michael Marshall, which has an opening that will break your heart, a story that will drag you to the edge of your seat, and a terrifyingly suspenseful climax that will dump you on the floor.

Bad Things opens with the sudden, inexplicable death of a young boy on a jetty, devastating the lives of his parents and destroying their marriage. Three years later the father, John Henderson, is working in a pizza joint, reluctantly protecting his boss’ daughter from the dangerous blunderings of her drug dealing boyfriend, until he receives a mysterious e-mail from someone who claims to know how his son died. Henderson is drawn him back to the tangled forests of Washington State where a wealthy family and an entire town conspire to keep some horrible secrets.

Grappling with old memories and fighting old ghosts, haunted by his devastating loss, John becomes entangled in a sinister web of secrets and old power that may well provide answers to the mystery of his son’s death that he might be better off never knowing. The arrival of his boss’ daughter and boyfriend with a pair of hitmen in close pursuit, adds a complication that he could really do without. Death and darkness close about our hero and the people he wants to protect, and the scene is set for a final confrontation on the same jetty where he lost his son

Marshall’s crisp, fluent style conveys setting, character and emotion with precision and clarity while the murky, mysterious plot is slowly, tantalisingly unravelled, building a sense of disquiet and unease into an almost unbearable suspense. Bad Things provides more than a few chills, making it perfect reading for the Summer holidays.

With Spring busily springing and the ice gradually thawing from our hair and the feeling coming back to our fingers and toes, it would, perhaps, behoove us to recommend something of a bright and cheerful nature to our readers, something warm and sparkly and happy and such. Well, maybe next time.

Blood’s A Rover is the third book in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, which has charted the dark and murky underbelly of American history, from JFK to Nixon. The current volume brings us up to the seventies on a wave of drugs, racism, violence and corruption on a massive scale. Ellroy pulls no punches and spares no sacred cows. Everyone’s dirty, everyone’s scamming and nobody’s innocent.

Dwight Holly, Wayne Tedrow Jnr and Don Crutchfield are Ellroy’s damaged, morally compromised antiheroes, charting a course between the depraved paranoia of J Edgar Hoover, the insane profligacy of Howard Hughes and the scheming unctuousness of Richard Nixon. While working to build mob-financed casinos in the Dominican Republic, the must also engage in a clandestine race war, targeting black power organisations in Los Angeles. They find themselves drawn to women on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and these obsessions spell their doom.

Epic in scope, relentlessly paced and written in terse, pared down, hard-boiled staccato sentences, this is a hyped-up, pumped-up journey through a vision of social and personal damnation, which will be immensely satisfying to readers of previous volumes. New readers may want to go back to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, though be aware that the middle volume is also the weakest of the three.

So yes, it’s grim and violent and straddles the line between unflinching realism and outright voyeurism, but

it’s also a hell of a thriller that will glue itself to your eyeballs.

Beautifully written, fiercely intelligent, epic in scope, intimate in range, this is a note-perfect study in character and period, a compelling tale of the son of a brutal blacksmith who rises to the highest office in the land and sets about breaking down the old entrenched power structures and remaking a society in a more egalitarian fashion. That one of Thomas Cromwell's chief adversaries should be Thomas More, author of Utopia, is entirely apposite, and it is not unexpected that more romantic hindsight should cast him as a villain.

The tawdry soap opera of Henry VIII's second marriage becomes a painful, sometimes blackly comic, sometimes wrenching, always divisive political drama where lives are ruined and power shifts dramatically. But it is Cromwell's lively extended family and his affection for his boisterous household that keeps the story, and the character, grounded.

This won the Booker, and I'm slightly relieved after my previous Booker winner this year, The Sea The Sea, which certainly had its charms, but whose qualities as a year's best literary work escaped me, unless it was a particularly off year. Wolf Hall is superlative, a supreme achievement and a worthy winner.

The first few chapters of this novel triggered an astonishing cascade of thoughts, memories and sensations. Growing up in the seventies/eighties, reading Tolkien, Lewis, Garner, and any and all science fiction and fantasy I could get my hands on, the chord struck was, presumably, the intended one. My reading would not have been anywhere near the breadth or vigour of Mori's, nor would my responses have been as astute or thoughtful, but the effect on my imagination of reading The Lord Of The Rings was like hooking up a Christmas tree to a nuclear power plant. And a few years ago that might have been enough to make me fall in love with this book, just to see it being recreated, reimagined like this. I cherish my memories of being a bookish boy who half preferred to live in fantasy or way out in the galaxy somewhere than the real world, but I'm also perfectly aware of the drawbacks to such a life, the seclusion, the ant-social avoidance of other people and the tendency towards solipsism. There was also the seductive lure of language and wish-fulfillment, as it seemed possible to achieve things just by describing them in a few pages or chapter. Learn magic or warrior skills in as long as it takes to describe it! Much easier than actually doing the hard physical graft.

So it's worth remembering that I didn't just live my life through books. I was extremely fond of climbing mountains, for one thing, and I climbed most of the mountains in Ireland at one time or another, which meant that I climbed them in the worst weather imaginable and had the skills, experience and strength to love every minute. I also hiked through Wales, twice, which is relevant.

What I mean to say is that I had the suspicion that I was being pandered to, being told that I was special and misunderstood, but that I wasn't alone. Well I wasn't really, they don't let you climb mountains alone at that age. Fortunately, Jo Walton seems to get this, too, but that initial rush was the most vivid response to a book I've had in a long time. Which is fine, but is it any good?

It really is better than it has a right to be. A confection of whimsical fantasy, realism and nostalgia, the three worlds co-exist separately, much as the fairies do, so it's like an odd triangle balancing on one point at any given time.

Mori Markova has saved the world from her insane mother's magic, resulting in a dreadful sacrifice, and this is what happens in the aftermath. Sent away from her childhood home and extended family in the valleys and mountains of Wales to a boarding school in England, bringing with her a voracious appetite for reading. Lonely and isolated, she tries to find her way back to a life, but can't quite escape her mother's dark influence and her own propensity for magic.

Thus the three sides of her life: her books - a barrage of names and titles most of which I'm not too proud to say I am familiar with (but if you're not, there's a particularly lovely section where Mori describes her family and its history, another barrage of names and details, and like the books you really don't need to keep close track of everyone and everything to follow along); her new life and all its complexities and difficulties; and the fairies - which she sees everywhere - and the magic, and somehow it all works. Beautifully written, perceptive, quirky and evocative, Walton keeps them all balanced and poised with perfection.

This has won the Nebula and the Hugo, and it's easy to see why this has won the hearts of pros and fans alike, but it does more than just pander, which is not to say that it isn't a kind of wish fulfillment. The life, the books, the magic. Mori gets to have all three. But she earns it and she deserves it, and it's not a happy ending, but a happy beginning. After that, anything could happen. It's called growing up.

Just to note the coincidence: the last book I read and reviewed here was The Magus, which is one of the books Mori reads and talks about, which brought me up short a bit. I mean, you can read hundreds and hundreds of books, and none of them mention The Magus, but then you go and read The Magus, and in the very next book you read, the protagonist reads and talks about The Magus. Is that not peculiar? I found it peculiar. VERY peculiar.