There are times when this book is like a long, endless slog through dense jungle with water and food running low and the natives looking unfriendly and most of the porters giving up and going home; but still the far distant waters of some undiscovered river beckons the fevered brain. It is dense with detail. There are two whole continents involved and this astonishing thirty years changes at least one of them into something unrecognisable, and all for reasons that were, initially at least, perfectly admirable. Stamping out the scourge of slavery was a major aim, and so were commerce and education, so-called civilising influences, if we can refrain from a hollow laugh when using such a phrase. Nothing wrong with trade and nothing wrong with the free flow of information, but that's not really what happened at all, is it?

Despite the influence of Livingstone's Three Cs - commerce, Christianity and the other one - there was no real desire or drive for empire in Africa, at least not by anyone who mattered. Britain had its informal empire, trade networks up and down the coast, and they didn't want the expense of anything else.. But mad-capped hare-brained explorers charged off through the interior and fractious settlers in the south caused trouble and poor old Egypt became a luckless pawn in the maneuverings of the Great Powers and the most evil arsehole of the 19th century, King Leopold of Belgium played his long, cunning game, and suddenly countries who could not afford to go to war with each other were competing furiously for domains and dominions and protectorates and colonies they mostly didn't want or need and for which they paid vast quantities in blood and treasure, and for which the Africans who lived there paid even more.

There are a lot of ugly atrocities in this book. A lot of war and a lot of adventure and a lot of international intrigue. It makes for hair-raising reading, but Pakenham keeps a crisp even tone throughout, writing lucidly and clearly. The reader might buckle under the sheer weight of it all, but the book itself never does. There aren't many likeable figures, European or African, a bare handful of women get mentioned in passing and precious few moments of levity, though the repetition of Gordon's phrase about throwing in the sponge must surely count as a kind of running joke. Less funny is the final chapter which begins with a cautiously hopeful description of the independence ceremony of Zimbabwe in 1980.

This is real favourite of mine, and it's the third time I've read it and I devoured it. It combines a crisp eighteenth century novel with magic in a brilliantly seamless way, as the gentlemen magicians go about trying to impose values of rational thought and practical application to the restoration of British magic, denying or overwriting or suppressing the historical roots of that magic deep in Britain's folkloric past, far too dangerous and difficult to control for their liking - or at least for the liking of Mr Norrell. Mr Strange's sympathies lean elsewhere. Secret histories lurk in casual asides and old legends and tales and footnotes. Female magic is particularly suppressed, and if Mr Norrell has is way, it will remain so. Drawing room dramas, Napoleonic warfare, dreadful enchantments enduring under everyone's noses and the steadily growing influence of the Raven King kept me hooked, but it's the brilliantly drawn characters that compelled me to keep reading long after my poor old eyes had started to boil like eggs in the pot.

Oh, I'm unwell. I could put a stop-gap thing here, but I'd never get back to do it properly. Here: after spectacular flameout involving chasing the wife of the professor she's been sleeping with on a project in Alaska around an airstrip in a small plane, Willy comes home to Templeton, disgraced and pregnant, on the same day a dead monster floats to the surface of nearby Lake Glimmerglass. Her mother informs her that her Dad is not, in fact, some sort of interesting arrangement of up to three hippie men, but an unknowing stalwart of Templteon. Willy sets out to find him by tracing a few family trees for indiscretions, so we have Willy desperately trying to keep it together in the today and a series of historical voices revealing the history of Templeton and the lives of the people who helped create it. It is very, very good.

(Just ressurected this review from the dusty depths of Facebook.)

Perennial philosophical loner Travis McGee is asked to trace a missing yacht, which he does with a delightful bit of lateral investigating. Unfortunately the thieves are still on board, horribly murdered. Despite his best efforts at discretion, word gets back to certain people of his involvement, and he's soon dodging bombs and bad guys. Finding the man responsible becomes a matter of life and death, but it's thoughts of old age and loneliness that are bothering McGee the most, while the mystery of who is leaving pipe cleaner cats on his boat seems like only a trivial annoyance.

I'm beginning to get an idea of why MacDonald's McGee series is so popular. I enjoyed The Deep Blue Goodbye, but it was a bit of a drag compared to this fast, slick read with a well crafted plot and well-drawn characters.

A coffee review for the shop I work for. I've been a fan of Simmons since I read Hyperion way back when. This isn't quite as good as last years' The Terror, but it's terrifically ambitious and clever.

This blockbuster historical novel, set over the final years in the life of Charles Dickens, is an intricate, psychological thriller, a puzzling examination of madness and literary rivalry, sometimes comic, sometimes horrific. Narrated by Wilkie Collins, remembered today as the author of The Moonstone and The Woman In White, generally regarded as the precursors of the modern mystery novel, who is Dickens’ friend and, in his own mind, equal, Drood opens with an account of a terrifying rail crash in which Dickens was a passenger and survivor. Moving amongst the dead and dying, Dickens encounters a terrible, spectral figure in black who introduces himself as ‘Drood.’ Dickens proceeds to search for this disfigured creature through the slums and sewers of London, dragging a reluctant Collins along in his wake.

This is merely the opening of a long and strange odyssey. As Dickens appears to lose interest in Drood, Collins finds himself ensnared in a strange underworld, addicted to opium, labouring under the shadow of one of the greatest of literary geniuses, he becomes obsessive, paranoid and possibly delusional.

Dan Simmons is best known for his science fiction, but he has also been known to dip into crime and horror. Drood bears more of a resemblance to his previous book, The Terror, an extraordinary fictionalised account of a doomed Arctic expedition stalked by a supernatural monster. Drood has a pair of doomed authors stalked by a gothic villain.
Collins’ pungent narration lays bare Dickens, warts and all, a selfish egoist with a mean, angry streak, yet also kind and generous to a fault, and capable of the most amazing acts of courage and sacrifice. Despite acute mental and physical suffering, Dickens embarks on a gruelling series of reading tours that exact an appalling toll, yet Dickens displays a superhuman strength of will throughout.

At 800 pages, Drood is a long read, but one that engages on several levels and keeps the reader guessing until the final pages. Terrific, intelligent entertainment.

Extremely enjoyable romp through an alternative universe governed by the laws of alchemy.

Absolutely superb. May be Lansdale's best: has real heart and warmth, which shine through the much-reduced trademark violence, profanity, zany plotting and darker-than-a-black-cat-in-a-coalmine-at-midnight-humour. According to his blog, he has just finished a YA novel, and I very much look forward to it.

Investigating a strange, quarantined area of apparently unspoiled wilderness might seem like a walk in the verdant park, but one doesn't exactly have to be clued in to genre tropes to know that this is the sort of thing that usually goes horribly wrong, with death and bloodshed to follow at the hands of aliens, genetic monstrosities or even the simple fallback of man's inhumanity to man as the whole thing goes Lord Of The Flies. Annihilation's doomed expedition du jour, however, has some notable peculiarities. The four female members do not have names; they have titles, denoted by speciality. Their entry into Area X is achieved under hypnosis, so they have no idea of what their point of entry was. Indeed the borders of Area X seem unclear, as is what exactly is going on in Area X, but eleven previous expeditions have foundered in various downright uncanny ways, including all the members of the previous expedition turning up in their homes with no idea of how they got there. If the lighthouse is so important, as stressed in their training, why is the base camp so far from it? Why is said base camp positioned so as to apparently ensure the discovery of an unmentioned, uncharted, unmapped structure that the narrator insists on calling 'the tower' even though it goes down into the ground?

So things rapidly go south for the employees of the Southern Reach. madness and secrets and strange transformations become a part of the landscape. The whole thing is like Lovecraft by way of House Of Leaves, all told in a terse, lucid narrative voice of scientific detachment that isn't as reliable as the tone would like you to think, just as the narrator's own detachment isn't as pure and objective as she'd like to think.

The nightmare comes into focus gradually, the hints and hauntings and mysteries and horrors taking gradual, but not complete shape. At the end of the book, we've been shown something that might be an outline of the problem. I expect the other volumes in the trilogy to plunge deeper into it leaving nothing unchanged.