Superb novel, popular entertainment at its finest. A political thriller charting the rise of Cicero through the echelons of Ancient Rome, as told by his faithful slave and scribe, Tiro. Extremely readable, though sometimes he almost succumbs to the temptation to make the contemporary parallels a bit too on the nose

The Quiet War, by Paul J McAuley.
This was the book I read over Christmas, and I like McAuley, so that wan't a problem, but do you know what I prefer? For years I'd save books by a particular author for my Christmas book, the one I actually dipped into on Christmas Day, and lay about in front of the fireplace with on Stephen's Day, and that was Kim Newman. Paul McAuley won't mind, they're good mates. But there hasn't been a Kim Newman novel in years! Where's my new Kim Newman novel? Fair enough, there was The Man From The Diogenes Club and Secret Files Of The Diogenes Club, fix-up novels with more than enough new material to justify their purchase, but, frankly, I devoured them as soon as I got them. No will power, me. But where's the English Ghost Story book or the new Anno Dracula book? I want them! I want them noooooow! So I can put them aside for eleven months until next Christmas.
McAuley, on the other hand, well, his last two books were relatively poor. Cowboy Angels wasn't up to much and Players was downright mediocre. For heaven's sake, Paul! You wrote Fairyland! FAIRYLAND! One of the best science fiction novels of the nineties! Not to mention White Devils, whch was, amongst other things, a Michael Crichton book by someone who isn't scared shitless of science and who didn't structure their entire book around that fear.
The Quiet War is a return to form, a space opera about the growing schism between a conservative, ruthless Earth-based society and the more adventurous, genetically advanced but fatally complacent settlements scattered throughout the solar system. The book charts the slow buildup to war through the eyes of an ambitious geneticist, a hard-nosed bio-engineer, a gung ho fighter pilot, a genetically engineered sleeper agent and a ruthlessly ambitious diplomat.
McAuley's a reliably good writer, and this stuff is potter's clay in his hands. An entertaining mix of hard science fiction, espionage, social upheaval, political intrigue and high tech warfare, it turned out to be a damned fine Christmas Day book.

This is so unlike Chandler and the image of the lonely, haunted PI that I’m still reeling whenever I think of it. Our hero is wealthy, happily married to a woman easily his equal in terms of drinks and wisecracks and lives life in a wild social whirl of parties and lunches, to which the murder mystery is an unwelcome intrusion. But people keep coming up and telling him all about it so he has to solve it between one drink and the next just to make them go away and let him get on with living the high life. I think the Continental Op stories might be of a different tone, but this was fantastic and a bit of a revelation.

Halfway through this book I discovered a receipt which suggested that it had been originally purchased in 1981 at Heathrow Airport for one pound ninety. No real point to make about that, just thought it was interesting.

So much of the English literary fiction I've read lately has featured protagonists who are fairly horrible people, or who come across that way. (Darley from the Alexandria Quartet comes across as massively pretentious and self-involved but turns out to be perfectly nice and personable and self-effacing in person.) Intellectual, superior, condescending, pungently opinionated, self-obsessed but compelling and, naturally, absolutely fantastic writers. Charles Arrowby is a particularly monstrous creation, his ego forged in the fires of the theatrical world where he dominated, god-like, over the productions he directed. Completely and thoroughly up himself in a way that is hard to credit, he takes routine, everyday joy in the failures and set-backs of his friends and contemporaries, and sets himself up as a self-exiled Prospero in his remote cliff-top cottage: statesman, sage and retired wizard, waiting for his spirits, malign and blessed, to come serve and appease him.

The first thing that happens is the vision of a sea-serpent rising from the waves. What this portends is ambiguous. Frankly it could symbolise anything, from a break with everyday reality to the devouring beast of jealousy that is about to consume Charles or the eastern mysticism of his cousin James. Assigning simple one-to-one correspondences seems almost vulgar, but perhaps in keeping with the theatrical backdrop.

The next thing that happens is the sprites duly arrive, separately, a Caliban and an Ariel in the form of two women, one of whom is afflicted with love, the other with hate, both upsetting his equanimity with their demands. Then, like a shipwreck crashing on his rocks, a childhood sweetheart appears, and the serpent of love and jealousy and obsession thrashes onto shore and starts to eat everything in sight.

A campaign of comic terror begins as Charles invades and disrupts his childhood sweetheart's married, though not blissfully, life. Charles is a Shakesperean idiot, plotting and manipulating and lying and interfering and speechifying and generally capering about in a self-deluded frenzy. Hartley and her husband are an Ortonian kitchen-sink drama married couple, locked in a possibly mutually abusive relationship, him with anger and jealousy and her with mental issues and a cringing meekness, both dependent on each other however bad things might seem. A missing adopted son rounds off the classically dysfunctional twentieth century British lower middle class nuclear family. It all culminates in kidnapping and captivity and it's sort of funny and sort of skin-crawling, which I suppose is very much the point.

The whole thing is told by Charles, an unreliable narrator utterly reliable in his self-serving delusions. He constantly uses flipping inverted commas for 'everyday phrases' or 'common cliches' as if to underline his remoteness from everyday reality and honest down-to-earth emotions that cannot compete with the flamboyancy of theatrical life. It drives you crazy, but a distinctive voice emerges and is sustained through to the end when Prospero finally returns, books drowned and staff snapped, to Milan, ego more or less intact and any moral development possibly on a scale too tiny for the human eye to appreciate.

This won the Booker, and it's as daft and peculiar as a brush. I shall look askance at 'literary types' who turn their noses up at 'genre fiction' in the future. No amount of lovely writing can disguise the fundamentally unreal oddness of this book. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just saying, is all.

A tale of scheming and manners and swordplay set in an unnamed city that features a society that encompasses a sort of Elizabethan underworld and a Regency upper class, where the aristocracy answer insults, offences and challenges by hiring swordsman to do their fighting for them. The best swordsman is Richard de Vier, who hangs around an insalubrious part of the town where the City Watch fear to tread with his lover, an ex-scholar with an aristocratic accent, a caustic tongue and an apparent death-wish. After an unusually bloody fight at a winter party, events and plots are set in motion that will make life very uncomfortable for de Vier indeed.

This is a fundamentally romantic tale of manners and conspiracies, a drama of social and political maneuvering. Despite being central to the plot and part of the core concept, the sword fights themselves are not treated as thrilling climactic conflicts. The focus is very much on the personal and the political. If CJ Cherryh wrote a Regency novel, it might be a bit like this.

Interestingly, the homosexuality and bisexuality of the main characters came as a shock to me. Not because of the sexuality itself, but because it was presented without fanfare or elaboration, as if completely normal, and I can't remember when or whether I've read a genre novel that did that, and I wonder if that speaks to my conservatism in reading choices or the genre's conservatism in general. Anyway, it's all quite matter-of-fact, as is much of the worldbuilding, which is a masterclass in telling you as little as the narrative can get away with and still evoke a fantasy setting, eschewing infodumps and lessons in history and geography and whatever to avoid bogging the story down.

It took a while for the story to really grab me, but in the end it did, and the three stories at the end were pretty good, too.

We pause in our heedless wanderings to think and ponder and wrestle with relationships. Well not a pause in the journeying, but during the journeyings, between actually getting anywhere and anything else happening, we get our interlude of romantic complications. Or anti-romantic complications. Poor Tasmin, falling out of love with her fierce, taciturn, wandering husband, and into love with a gentle, passive, guide without a lustful bone in his body. It's a typicially McMurtrian triangle, where desire and personality and timing and opportunity and geography all fail spectacularly to harmonise, leaving everyone confused, miserable and tortured. And then Indians come along and torture them. Well, no. Maybe. Not for lack of trying.

With more babies on the way and balloons in the air and smallpox on the river and a long dry walk, we must brace ourselves for the death to come, and come it does, and if we've had horror and brutality and senseless violence, McMurtry, like a literary conductor who has expertly woven individual themes out of familiar motifs, builds to a new and novel crescendo of actual heartbreak that leaves the reader sitting, fuming, knowing that you shoulda seen that coming, or something like it. God dammit. Now I've got to read the last book and I know he's got to top the ending of this one and I'M VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE BABIES.

A man in a coma after crashing on the Forth Bridge dreams his way back towards waking. Or does he? It's not a question of a twist: we know going in this is a coma dream. We also know that there is nothing as dull as listening to other people's dreams (our own are so much more interesting.) But Iain Banks is the dream-master, and this, in essence, is a fictional world within a fictional world, an idea made explicit from the start as dream-man invents dreams to recount to his dream therapist who is treating his amnesia because he doesn't dream. Dream man was fished from the waters below an apparently endless bridge with no memories of who he is or where he came from. In treatment, he lives a more or less blissful life under the benevolent rule of the bridge, enjoying a mildly hedonistic lifestyle punctuated with generally unsatisfactory visits to his dream therapist. He has begun a desultory investigation into the bridge itself, with the only result a better understanding of how little he understands.

So is he finding his way back to wakefulness? Or is he finally living the life he always wanted?

At the heart of the book is a love story, or an attempt to write a mature, modern (for the late 80s early 90s modern) love story devoid of the usual conventions but with the same universal emotional core. Our couple are modern, well-educated, liberal. He's climbing out of the working and into the middle class, an rationalist, materialist engineer, she comes from moderate wealth, an intellectual, a linguist and if not a believer then less committed to rationalism then he is. All these things subtly and indirectly provide the raw materials that go into constructing the Bridge, and it is through all this the man must find his way and decide if that's a life he wants back.

Brilliantly written, this still dazzles, even as it prefigures the dazzling baroque world-building of the Culture and the tales of Scottish adults and how their lives were shaped by their experiences as youths. It also firmly sets out the notion that though Banks, and most of his protagonists, firmly and categorically do not believe in God, the human imagination that produced Him is a mighty one indeed.

Oh wow, what a book. I was reaching for a way to describe the feel of it, and I suppose the best one was 'Diana Wynne Jones meets Umberto Eco,' and yet not. There is the sense of a thoroughly sensible fantasy setting, not flashy but deep. Erudite things happen, there is learning and science (mindfulness!) and wisdom, and then, later, oh, yes, the wars and the intrigue and the occasional hint of the supernatural. Often dark, never grim, sometimes horrible, always told with a light touch that emphasises the narrators interests and perceptions, revealing character and world by omission or brusque understatement.

Nazhuret is raised in a military academy with no knowledge of his origins, as much a servant as a student, putting off the inevitable day when he must take service with a Duke or hit the road. On the eve of his final day, he comes oddly under the tutelage of the mysterious Powl, and an apprenticeship begins. Powl makes Nazhuret ready for the world, but is the world ready for Nazhuret? Sent out to find his own way, Nazhuret wanders and has =adventures and learns unpleasant lessons and has ambiguous and confusing encounters that culminate in an attempt to thwart an attack on the king.

It's a terrific tale, a bildungsroman and a fantasy classic that shows what you can do with a short tight tale and a little thought and learning about the world and about people. A new favourite.