Oh, I do enjoy the conceit of the English country novel. It’s second only to the Agatha Christie country house detective. In these stories, it’s not the policework or even the mystery that matters so much as the effect of the crimes on the collective psyche of the town in which they take place. Lafferton, the setting of The Various Haunts of Men is a cathedral town. Simon Serrailler describes it as "a jumped up market town", just big enough that not everyone knows everyone else, but the degrees of separation must be pretty close. It’s the kind of community that would be shocked by a murder. Except a murder isn’t what they get here: instead, three women (and a man, though his disappearance apparently isn’t noticed) go missing over the span of several weeks. The police aren’t even certain foul play is involved until very far into the book—but thanks to our privileged position, we know we’re dealing with a serial killer obsessed with conducting post mortems.

Susan Hill balances the relationships of Lafferton’s inhabitants with monologues and meditations by the serial killer. As a result, we get to know the antagonist well. She exposes the various traumas and events that triggered his latent urges. Gradually, she connects the dots until his identity is obvious. Whether one guesses the killer’s identity before its revelation or not, the actual identity is a betrayal of sorts. But it’s nothing next to the final twist in the plot.

One question I ponder whenever I’m reading a mystery novel is whether a good mystery must leave enough clues for the reader to solve it, if they are able. I would say no; although no longer my favourites, Sherlock Holmes has always held a special place in my heart—and, let’s face it, the stories are still popular and captivating—despite the fact that in almost every story, Holmes’ deductions rely on obscure clues that only he has noticed and connected. Yet I do enjoy books where it is at least theoretically possible for the reader to solve the murder, even if I don’t usually manage to do so. I happened to uncover the killer in this book before Hill revealed it, and I don’t consider that a flaw in the book’s design, though I am rather surprised by myself.

As for the big twist, which involves the protagonist, Freya Graffham, I saw that coming as well (albeit not as early as I saw the killer’s identity). I hoped I was wrong, and briefly following the events, I thought Hill might have faked me out. In the end, though, she indeed carried through. It’s a decision that no doubt alienates just as many readers as it captivates. Good. Don’t do anything by halves.

These are all just party tricks, though. The substance of The Various Haunts of Men is Hill’s rich portrayal of the relationships between the main and minor characters. She builds up a network of friends and acquaintances of each of the victims. Everyone seems to know Cat Deerbon, even if she isn’t their GP, and her budding concern over the rise of unregulated "complementary therapists" proves to be a major plot point. Hence, while someone like Karin McCafferty isn’t directly related to the mystery part of the novel, her involvement is an opportunity for Hill to demonstrate how Cat navigates the difficult waters of doctor-patient counsel. I found this part of the book very interesting, and it’s one of the reasons I got hooked.

Freya’s unrequited love for Simon was less interesting. I felt very sorry for Freya, because she is head-over-heels, and I couldn’t help but think that, inevitably, Simon was going to end up hurting her. However, this aspect of the book is very one-sided. For a novel that is apparently the first in Simon’s series, he is just barely a main character, and the narrator certainly keeps Simon’s cards close to his chest. Most of what we know about Simon comes instead from what others, particularly his sister, divulge about him to Freya.

This penchant for telling rather than showing is perhaps the flaw to The Various Haunts of Men that haunts me. Hill proves herself skilled in crafting intricate webs of characters and circumstance, creating a potent mystery that sticks with the reader. Her descriptions leave something to be desired, sometimes, and she can go overboard with the exposition when her narrator gets on a roll. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to overlook this because of the style of the book, in which such lengthy depictions only contribute further to the unhurried, small town atmosphere that Hill is trying to create.

This is not a thriller, and while it involves murders, it is barely even a murder mystery to the characters within the story. For them it is simply a case of missing persons, with the reality that there is a serial killer among them only revealed very close to the end. From the reader’s better-informed perspective, though, this only heightens the tension. As the investigation becomes more complex, the killer starts to panic, to forget his rules that were supposed to set him apart from killers past. It’s interesting watching the killer unravel. Meanwhile, the other characters show themselves committed to their causes—whether it’s finding the killer or protecting innocents from being exploited by "psychic surgeons" and other quacks.

The Various Haunts of Men is an entertaining and enthralling book. Hill captures the charm of the stereotypical small English town and then plunges it into the dark abyss of the tortured human psyche. It’s reassuring and disturbing at the same time, with warm and sympathetic characters. In short, it’s exactly what I want in a nice and juicy mystery.

The cover of this edition boldly proclaims, “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.” This quotation is from fairly early in Catch-22, yet I understand what it was chosen as representative of the book as a whole. The novel’s title has become synonymous with an absurd, recursive paradox—because that’s exactly what Joseph Heller depicts in this satirical World War II story.

When I was younger, Catch-22 defeated me, in that I had to put it aside. I’m not bothered by this; plenty of books defeat me, usually because they are terrible. I refused to think that Catch-22 was terrible, however, given its iconic status. It was always possible that the book simply wasn’t to my tastes, but I don’t think I gave it a fair hearing the first time. So it has lingered on my list for years now, waiting for a second chance.

Probably the defining feature of Catch-22, and what made it so difficult for young!me to enjoy, is the spiralling style of its narrative. Seldom have I encountered a novel so relentlessly character-driven, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of its chapter titles are character names. Heller prosecutes the action from an oblique angle, jumping back and revisiting events that we have already seen recounted, only to embellish them in further unlikely ways. I can see why some critics call the book repetitive. But this repetition is a deliberate part of the book’s structure. Catch-22 isn’t so much a conventional narrative as it is a winding, looping tour of a squadron camp during the last few months of World War II.

This time the unique structure appealed to me. Though I read it on occasion, war fiction is not my usual cup of tea. So Heller’s unconventional style was refreshing. It allowed me to push away the typical shorthand that seems to settle over most war fiction (especially from World War II) and focus more on the characters and their interaction. Heller helps in this quest by taking the emphasis off the battles and the missions, placing it instead on life back at camp. Yossarian’s shenanigans with Milo, Nately, et al are far more important than the aerial manoeuvres or death-defying stunts that they might pull on their missions; these only intrude when they are relevant to the point Heller is trying to make.

Catch-22 has much in common with Slaughterhouse-Five. Both are novels set in World War II, about war, but not aggressively filled with war per se. Both are modest, self-deprecating stories that rely on subtle (or, in Catch-22’s case, not-so-subtle) absurdism to highlight the folly of war. The eponymous regulation that apparently prevents Yossarian and other pilots from being taken off active duty or shipped home is similar to the non-linear existence that curtails Billy Pilgrim’s free will: it’s hard to imagine Yossarian doing anything other than what he does, because what choice does he have?

Yossarian is an interesting protagonist. We first meet him in a hospital, signing fake names to letters he censors for the military. This sets off a chain reaction of investigations culminating, towards the end of the book, in serious consequences for the poor squadron chaplain. Initially, the Washington Irving scandal seems funny in a wry sort of way—oh, those hilarious, incompetent CID men! Yet it’s actually the first in a frequent series of events that demonstrate how Yossarian’s disregard for the consequences of his own actions gets other people in trouble. Throughout, other characters meet unfortunate ends as a result of Yossarian’s decisions. When he steals through camp at night to move the bomb line on the map above Bologna, he inadvertently sends Major —— de Coverley to his death.

Major —— de Coverley, by the way, is my favourite. He’s a badass of the classical camp, so indefatigable that no one knows his first name or even what he’s supposed to be doing, so he just pitches horseshoes and goes around arranging apartments for the soliders’ leave. I loved him from the first time he shows up, and I was overjoyed when I reached the chapter Heller dedicates to him. When Yossarian’s cowardice results in his death, I soured towards Yossarian considerably.

I loved Catch-22 so much that I’m having trouble doing justice to it. All novels, all good stories, are ultimately about people, and Catch-22 is certainly that. It is entirely about the characters—it has a vast cast, but they are fleshed out, their pasts and presents and futures explored in detail. From the sleazy Colonel Cathcart to the amorally capitalist Milo Minderbinder, Heller conjures up more than his fair share of unforgettable people to populate this incredible tale of wanting to go home.

If you approach this novel with anything remotely resembling sincerity, you’ll be disappointed. Catch-22 is absurd, because this allows Heller to show the irrationality of war. Even the best people in this book suffer, because bad things happen indiscriminately. The regulations that prevent Yossarian from going home also certify that Doc Daneeka is dead, when he isn’t, and that Captain Shipman can be accused of stealing Colonel Cathcart’s tomato. So, you need your tongue firmly in cheek for this one.

I’ve never been in war, and hopefully I never will be. So take this with a grain of salt, but even with all the nonsense and absurdity, I’d still take Heller’s depiction over the real thing. And maybe that’s the point.

Spiritwalk bills itself as “the sequel to Moonheart”, and while this is technically true, the events of Moonheart are only barely linked to this book. Reading it will spoil certain outcomes from Moonheart, but you could probably read it without having read the first novel. I wouldn’t recommend this course of action, however, simply because it seems that Charles de Lint doesn’t spend as much time in Spiritwalk developing the atmosphere of the worlds in which this story takes place. Whereas Moonheart was a vast and sprawling tale of faerie, intrigue, and wild magic, Spiritwalk is a narrower but more disjointed story about the tensions between magic and the mundane.

This was not an easy book for me to like. Urban fantasy like this generally takes longer to endear itself to me, but de Lint really hit it out of the park with Moonheart, which had that perfect balance between character and plot. In comparison, Spiritwalk tends to vacillate wildly between the two, usually to the detriment of the former. My case in point would be Esmeralda. She is mentioned early on in the book as an absent friend who once spent time at Tamson House, and eventually she materializes to become a major character. I didn’t like her though—her self-confidence and self-possession came off as annoying and heavy-handed. She always sounded like her explanation of events was always right. And though de Lint hints at a much deeper backstory to Esmeralda, he doesn’t actually share much of it.

In general, it seems like Spiritwalk spends very little time fleshing out its main characters. Poor Jamie, now the guardian spirit of Tamson House, learns the hard way that he can’t leave the House behind and wander the Otherworlds. I enjoyed this story arc, for it is familiar and predictable, but de Lint executes it very well. Jamie naturally misses his interactions with the wider world, so he tries to “get out” more. Yet this leaves the house vulnerable to a bad guy who wants to leech its magical power. For all that this is very interesting, however, de Lint spends very little time focusing on what Jamie has learned—I think we spend about two chapters total seeing things from Jamie’s point of view before returning to less interesting characters.

I should mention that this house-getting-taken-over plot is ostensibly the core plot of the book. In many ways, Spiritwalk feels like a series of connected novellas; the book is split into four major parts, with the final, Ghostwood, containing shorter named chapters as well. Though they are connected through common characters and a clear progression from one to the next, each could also be read standalone. Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking several novellas and publishing them as a single volume—but then, please, advertise them as such. Alternatively, if the goal is to present the works as a single work, then adapt them into a single novel. Spiritwalk takes the middle path, hence my difficulty with it.

There is nothing technically amiss here: de Lint once again shows his skill as a writer and a storyteller. Sometimes I found the way he uses magic somewhat frustrating … growing up on epic fantasy has trained me to expect intricate, systematic magic, and the wilder magic that de Lint portrays here doesn’t sit as well with my orderly soul. (This portrayal of magic, I find, makes it very easy for plots to veer in unexpected directions while the author claims that “the magic did it”—and while I don’t accuse de Lint of that here, I can’t say I enjoyed the opacity of the magic’s presence either.)

So, Spiritwalk is a competent work. But that’s just it … it feels very mediocre. I liked it well enough, but I wasn’t excited by it. It didn’t wow me like Moonheart or bring me closer to the characters who appear in both. It was kind of like, years after a successful movie comes out, the studio releases a cheaper-budget TV movie sequel to capitalize on the anniversary. The same elements are there, but the screen feels smaller, the scope less ambitious, and the actors weary of their roles.

Hard to say whether this is the most famous Rushdie, but it’s certainly the one that got him into the most hot water. The Satanic Verses contains, in part, an irreverent telling of the genesis of Islam as revealed by the prophet Mohammed (Mahound) retold through the visions of Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar-turned-archangel. Yet, in that trademark way of his, Salman Rushdie manages to turn such irreverence into a kind of sacred worship all its own. Through plots both parallel and hopelessly entangled, Rushdie chronicles the falls from grace and redemptions of two men: both born in India, both actors, both somehow imbued with powers not of this Earth.

I’m very glad that I come to The Satanic Verses with other Rushdies under my belt. Its narrative is much less straightforward than either The Enchantress of Florence or Midnight’s Children. In this respect, it was more difficult to read and comprehend. Rushdie’s overall style remains the same, though. His characters are broad-strokes creatures viewed against the cardboard backing of a pinhole camera. They are caricatures, fantastical in description and dialogue, as Rushdie recreates the world ever so slightly as it is not. The narrative bifurcates and trifurcates, its branches diverging before looping around and returning to their origins—everything has its purpose, even if the purpose isn’t evident at first.

I’m becoming ambivalent about this whole "magical realism" as a genre thing. It seems like a construct of a Western tradition of literary criticism that is uncomfortable with anything less than stark delineations between realistic and fantastic literature. I don’t have enough experience with Indian literature (or entertainment in general) to say for sure, but the more I experience of it, the more it seems like this dichotomy between real/fantasy is mostly a Western thing. (We like our binaries.) Hence, when Rushdie infuses these unreal elements into a book that is otherwise grounded in modern society and conventions, he’s actually just emulating the great literature of India. This fact flies over the heads of most Western readers, though, and this is a shame. It makes the book seem more inscrutable than it has to be.

I won’t pretend to grok everything about The Satantic Verses from first page to last. This is a story that demands multiple readings of multiple types: long, lingering ones; quick, frantic ones; even, thoughtful ones … the complexity of the plot and nature of the narrative, with its multiple characters and layers of meaning, make this book more challenging than, say, a "beach read". I suspect that when I revisit it, I’ll be able to understand more, and give it a higher rating and sing its praises even more loudly.

As it is, the dualism between Gibreel and Saladin is one of the more obvious and most easily comprehensible of plots here. Gibreel the angel, Saladin the devil … and between them, the mysterious narrator, reluctant to reveal itself as God or Lucifer or Other, happy to remain aloof yet mischievous. Gibreel dreams of revelations to Mahound and the peasant girl Ayesha: for him, the transformation triggered by his fall from the airplane is a chance to realize what he has only portrayed on screen. Similarly, Saladin’s more diabolical countenance is linked to his careful, almost systematic attempts to eliminate any trace of personal character.

Of the two, it’s interesting to note that I found Saladin more fascinating. He turns his back on India and Indian culture, embracing with open arms "Englishness" as he perceives it. The root cause for this might be his relationship with his father. In a broader sense, Saladin’s choices seem to represent one of the many paths India faced in the twentieth century (and still, to some extent, faces today): to embrace an ersatz Englishness as the path to engagement with global (Western) civilization. (Gibreel, therefore, is the antithesis: he achieves success by embracing Indian culture, heritage, and mythology in an attempt to retrieve some of what was diminished by colonization.) As the book begins, Saladin is an established voice actor in England, his experience in removing traces of his native accent having furnished him with the talent to twist his voice into myriad others. He thinks that he has successfully divorced himself from his heritage, but a visit to India casts doubt on this. Thus, as he plummets to his certain doom alongside Gibreel, Saladin is a deflated man, forced to confront the fact that, ultimately, he has yet to find a place.

His transformation into a goat-like, devilish being only emphasizes this fact as Saladin’s friends and family turn from him. He loses his job. He is, technically, dead. And he only regains human form after he harnesses the power to hate: something Rushdie does not because he thinks hatred is good so much as he thinks it is a necessary component of the human condition. Saladin for so long had been repressing his hatred as part of an attempt to become as bland and unremarkable as possible (see also his lack of politics, his inability to have children, etc.) Hate is a strong emotion, and strong emotions are what Saladin needs to begin reconnecting with the world.

This thread of the necessity for connection and community runs throughout The Satanic Verses. What else is the creation of a new religion, a new god before all gods, or the declaration of a pilgrimage, but an acknowledgement of the need for common ties, for something that binds people together and provides identity? Mahound’s struggle for the recognition of Islam mirrors the struggle of the Black and Asian communities in London to find a worldview other than the one of thuggishness being fitted around them by others. Ayesha’s pilgrimage is a classic story of faith versus scepticism.

Layered atop this storytelling is Rushdie’s well-established talent for description and narration. His flair for manipulating the English language like a well-tuned musical instrument makes the book, though not easy to read, enjoyable to read. The Satantic Verses doesn’t quite approach the pinnacle atop which I’ve placed Midnight’s Children—to me, that is Rushdie at his best. However, it is certainly worth reading, as a work of art and a piece of incredibly multi-faceted storytelling.

I enjoyed NBC’s new Dracula series an inordinate amount. It was a fun, thrilling experience of storytelling and characterization. And it got me thinking that, despite happily watching various adaptations over the years, I’ve never actually read the original novel. What with it being public domain and all, I put the Project Gutenberg edition on my tablet and sat back to see how the original stacks up to its adaptations.

(If you haven’t already, you really should donate to support Project Gutenberg. They are doing an amazing job cataloguing and providing free access to public domain works.)

Dracula is essentially a psychological drama in epistolary format. But it’s more than that. It’s a complex tale of courage against an overwhelmingly dangerous force of nature (or, in this case, the supernatural). Bram Stoker harnesses a combination of European folklore, Gothic convention, and the shifting landscape of Victorian attitudes towards sexuality and machismo. For the modern reader, Dracula is an interesting portal into the past. Unfortunately, a number of factors work to undermine these strengths—namely, this book is very long, very sexist, and very poorly characterized.

While there’s nothing wrong with epistolary novels as a rule, in this case I found the writing could approach tedium at times. This is a relatively long book in which very little happens; its length is mostly a consequence of the extended descriptions Stoker uses to pad out his letters and diary entries. But my main objection to this format is simply that it constrains the way in which Stoker can reveal certain information, and so he occasionally has to find very contrived ways to shoehorn it into a telegram or letter.

The next thing that jumped out at me while reading was the crushing, latent sexism within the writing. Even by Victorian standards it’s somewhat laughable. There are some fairly tame phrases, such as Mina’s wish that “when we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan” through her mastery of shorthand and typewriting. But then there are gems such as Lucy’s lamentation: “My dear Mina, why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?” (This is upon receiving not one but three proposals in the same day.)

Later on at the start of Chapter 8, Mina and Lucy consume a hearty meal, and Mina reflects that “I believe we should have shocked the ‘New Woman’ with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them!” In the very same paragraph:

Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! Tehre’s some consolation in that.

There’s always some danger in conflating an author’s personal opinions with the opinions expressed by characters. But Mina and Lucy are not the only characters to express these opinions; the men in the novel think much the same, and if Stoker disagreed with any of them, one would have hoped to see at least one character with more progressive politics. The very fact that Mina herself expresses these opinions belies any attempt to establish her as an independent and “strong” character.

So really, Dracula consists of two women becoming damsels in distress and a quintet of adventurous men working to save their souls, with one of the two women being allowed to help in a very reduced capacity.

To make matters worse, no one ever argues. Everyone goes on for pages and pages about how great, smart, thoughtful, and brave everyone else in the group is. Mina is so grateful to Jonathan and Van Helsing for being considerate of her womanly nature when making their plans. Arthur is so grateful that Dr Seward summons Van Helsing, whose diagnosis of vampirism requires them to decapitate and mutilate the corpse of Arthur’s fiancée. Jonathan is so grateful that Mina shares his secret journal full of mad tales with Van Helsing (whom she had just met, mind you).

When I started writing this review, I wanted to explain how Dracula is interesting in a psychological sense … the more I think on it, however, the less this seems to be true. Stoker doesn’t seem to care about creating realistic people in his characters, for they act instead like automatons, executing his plot with military precision. Everyone is melodramatic, enthusiastic. There is never any conflict in the group. Van Helsing consistently comes out with crazier and crazier theories and “facts”, and aside from Seward and Arthur’s initial bout of scepticism, no one ever stands up to him. (I love how Stoker blithely has him transfuse blood from himself and Seward in complete ignorance of blood types. It’s the kind of thing that could only ever be hilarious in an anachronistic sense.)

This lack of character conflict is very disappointing in a book that otherwise attempts to probe some of the darkest impulses of the human heart. Stoker’s decision to appropriate the vampire as his monster of choice was an inspired one. The vampire, after all, is sex, and Stoker was writing at a time when discussions of human sexuality and libido were still very much frowned upon. Dracula, though he is a monster to be vanquished through external force, represents the latent desires and appetites of the everyday person. He preys upon the feminine yet decidedly non-sexualized Lucy and Mina, and his defeat at the hands of Jonathan and company signifies the triumph of the traditional attitudes towards this subject over the more liberal ones. In this respect, Dracula has the potential both to scandalize and to reassure its contemporary reader.

Perhaps its single best contribution to literature, however, is as an example of how it is possible for material to inspire adaptations far superior to their source. These days, fans tend to be rather protective of source material—and I suspect this is largely a result of an abusive relationship with Hollywood. We tingle with excitement whenever an adaptation of a favourite novel or series is announced while simultaneously cringing at the thought of how Hollywood has “updated”, “tweaked”, or otherwise altered the material for consumption by the masses. And even in situations when the finished product receives acclaim, such as Game of Thrones, there are those who sniff at any significant departures from the source material, forgetting that translation can never be just transliteration.

Such is definitely the case with Dracula. This book has not aged well. It is a classic for its influence on the media that has come afterwards, but the novel itself is underwhelming. I enjoyed NBC’s new series substantially more—orders of magnitude more—even though it distorts Stoker’s narrative. Dracula is an example of how once something transcends its original form to become a cultural mainstay, it is no longer just about the original form: the modern conception of the vampire is a compelling idea we owe to Stoker, but it has grown up. You’re missing that much by missing out on this book. For the hardcore fans, it’s only a download away. For the rest of us, there are innumerable retellings and reimaginings, with more undoubtedly on the way.

So, back when The Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake’s contemporaneous sequel, came out, the great Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Guardian that she must honour Margaret Atwood’s wish not to have her novels labelled science fiction. She claims this restricts her ability to praise the book in the way she wants:

I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.

Le Guin is an amazing writer, one of my favourite of all time. But I disagree. Atwood can draw lines in the sand all she likes to make distinctions between science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy. Her opinions of these things are definitely relevant as we analyze and critique her work … but they are not, perhaps, the last word.

I don’t want to get into a long, complicated dissertation on my personal stance about speculative versus science. Suffice it to say, Oryx and Crake is set in a near-future, one in which corporations dominate even more than they do now. Science, education, and secrecy have all converged in the name of the ever-relentless march of profits and progress, prompting a final, apocalyptic disaster as a result of humanity’s hubris and folly to think it can remake the world. Atwood calls upon technologies that are plausible but not yet entirely possible. For me, this combination of setting and futuristic technology makes the book science fiction. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Half of Oryx and Crake is post-apocalyptic. Snowman is, as far as he knows, the last human alive. He survives—barely—in an environment now much more dangerous for humans, one populated by deadly hybrid species—pigoons and wolvogs—manufactured in corporate labs. Co-existing with him are the Children of Crake, genetically-engineered humanoids designed to be humanity’s superior successors. The other half of the novel tells the story of the end of humanity from the point of view of a younger Snowman, then Jimmy, protégé of the one-and-only Crake.

As a narrative device this set-up is tried-and-true and works well. Darting constantly between these two stories, Atwood creates tension in each. What new danger will Snowman face in the present? How did he personally contribute to the apocalypse he has managed to survive? More importantly, the two stories complement one another. Snowman is dealing with a world’s worth of survivor’s guilt for his role in the apocalypse, his unwitting complicity, and of course, for Crake’s death. In part, he deals with this through his strange relationship with the Children of Crake.

The Crakers were raised in isolation. Until Jimmy releases them from their habitat into the real world following the apocalypse, the only other human they had met was Oryx, their patient teacher. Crake was obsessed with correcting the “flaws” of humanity: our hierarchical structure, our need to compete for prestige and honour and sex, our pride and jealousy and shortsighted ill-treatment of the environment. The Children of Crake are an odd, sometimes creepy mixture between children and highly-developed primates.

Having never met Crake himself, the Children only have Snowman’s words to go by. So Snowman inadvertently transforms himself into a kind of “Prophet of Crake”, and it’s very interesting to see how he uses this position to influence and manipulate the Crakers. There’s nothing malicious about this influence—indeed, at times he seems positively weary of it. Snowman feels responsible for the Crakers—and despite his weariness, it’s perhaps this responsibility that has kept him grounded and sane all this time.

Snowman must live with the fact that, in the end, he knew the reason humanity was dying. Only Crake had the full picture; Jimmy, like so many others, was merely a pawn. Yet this galls him the most, for it is a final affirmation of what his entire life seemed to be telling him: he is a minor character in his own story. He is angry more at himself than at Crake—at one point, he wonders if he should have killed Crake sooner, implying that, at least in hindsight, he should have anticipated Crake’s unintended genocide. In other words, Snowman is seriously fucked up by his role in the apocalypse. Wouldn’t you be?

I’m teaching Player One to my sixth form literature class. Like Oryx and Crake, it is a story of apocalypse set on the edge of tomorrow. Coupland and Atwood share, aside from being Canadian, a particularly keen sense of postmodern fatigue when it comes to the end of the world. Coupland’s characters become introspective, reflecting on the accelerating pace of life in a digital society. For them, the apocalypse is an interruption that prompts them to acknowledge the ways in which they have been living on autopilot. Living through the end of the world is transformative. Similarly, Snowman is highly critical of his society. He is openly disdainful of the CorpSeCorps, the security goons who enforce the strict corporate policies with which all employees must comply. He despairs that there doesn’t seem to be much for him beyond an empty life of composing meaningless ads and watching government-funded snuff films and child porn. (Oryx and Crake is deliciously bleak in Atwood’s own, wry way.)

Moreover, both Coupland and Atwood examine the apocalypse through the eyes of ordinary, everyday people. Jimmy is just some guy, you know? This is the punchline of the story: he exists forever in Crake’s shadow, first as Crake’s high school buddy, then as his employee, and finally as his prophet. Jimmy is not incompetent, but he seems doomed to being a middleman, an implementer of other people’s grand designs. Hell, he doesn’t even figure in the title of the book: this isn’t his story; he just plays a part in it!

And so Atwood brings to Oryx and Crake an unmistakable sense of humanity even as she lays waste to our species, our civilization. Though the story is pessimistic when it comes to the direction of our society, Snowman’s personal story of survival is a potent reminder that there is always hope. Set against a speculative setting, the story contains a healthy dose of realism: there are no easy solutions to Snowman’s problems, no Postman-like post-apocalyptic society just around the corner (well, not quite). With the Crakers, he is not necessarily alone, but he is definitely an outsider. As the years have toiled on, he feels distinct layers of humanity sloughing off: he discards clothing, resigns himself to wearing a scraggly beard and subsisting mostly on vegetation with the occasional tithe of a fish. Snowman is very much cast in the mould of castaway—but in his case, there is no hope of rescue or reprieve.

Longtime fans of Atwood should be used to her forays into the speculative side, and so find Oryx and Crake interesting, if not comfortable. I hope it even convinces some holdouts of the illusion of literary fiction that science fiction is not purely a pulp matter. Likewise, this is a fine entry point to Atwood’s works, showcasing her careful characterization and deep perception of all our flaws and foibles. Though perhaps less moving than The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic tale for the twenty-first century, in the tradition of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick.

Part of my disillusionment with Green isn’t Jay Lake’s fault so much as the cover copy. The dustjacket claims this is a novel about a girl raised to be consort to an immortal Duke—which it is. But that’s only about the first third of the novel. If the dustjacket is to be believed, the entire book is about this plot to overthrow the Duke. Actually, Green accomplishes that with ridiculous ease. From there, the story has two more acts: Green’s journey to discover a place she can call home, and Green’s return to Copper Downs at the behest of her old conspirators and mentors, who have another problem they think she can help with.

On their own, each of these three acts is a relatively interesting and successful story (though I have my reservations about the third act). Their marriage into a single, unified arc for Green is not as neat, but it works (just). The first act is by far the best: Lake takes a very interesting premise and explores it to good effect. Green hails from Selistan, a country with a very different culture from that of Copper Downs and the Stone Coast. Her father is a poor, widower father who sells her because it’s the pragmatic thing to do. At four years old, she finds herself ripped away from everything she knows, transported across an ocean, and forced to learn skills she won’t actually use so much as be expected to judge.

It’s this last part that’s so fascinating. Lake hits on a good point, which is that ladies of high birth and standing might not be expected to bake, cook, fence like a man, etc., but they may well need to judge all of these activities. They need to understand differences in cuisine in order to set a menu, or to tell if someone is aiming to poison them or their guests. I found this explanation for why Green (who, at this point, has forgotten her own name and is just “Girl” to everyone) is learning all of these trades a very believable one.

Moreover, Lake does an excellent job depicting the colonial side of this human trafficking. Green reflects on how learning, speaking, and thinking in Petraean changes her. There are certain concepts she can think about only in Petraean because she doesn’t have the words in her own language (she was only four, remember—think about the vocabulary and concept complexity four-year-olds have, then pare it back because she’s a poor farmer’s daughter). This issue recurs throughout the book: her accent in her mother tongue and her reliance on Petraean marks her as different. Similarly, though Green constantly rails against her kidnappers for preventing her from knowing her father and growing up with him, they retort by accurately saying that if they hadn’t kidnapped her, she would have grown up to a very limited life as a farmer’s wife, a young mother, a peasant. Green acknowledges that, as unfortunate and twisted as it might be, her kidnappers have ironically improved her life in the sense that they exposed her to worlds of knowledge and being that she never would have dreamed existed, let alone been able to access. So, Lake manages to portray Green’s kidnapping and youth in all the problematic and complicated ways such subject matter deserves.

There’s also much to be said for Green’s time spent in Kalimpura as an aspirant of the Lily Blades. Having taken her freedom and turned her back on the culture that raised her, Green attempts to find a place where she belongs in the country of her birth, only to find that she is an outsider there as well. The Blades are the closest to a home she can manage: like them, she is a woman capable of fighting and killing, though at times it seems like she surprises even them by her tenacity and past. When Green’s old and new worlds collide with the return of her Dancing Mistress, I knew her time in Kalimpura was concluding, and I was a little sad for what could only be a betrayal ahead.

So, for the first two-thirds of the book, I have to say that I was enjoying Green and eager to devour it as fast as possible. I was even willing to overlook the awkward parts—i.e., the preteen lesbian sex scenes and not-so-subtle hints at BDSM. I think Lake is just trying to show a society with different sexual mores, but the use of “sweetpocket” as an egregious euphemism doesn’t help. More importantly, these scenes are included in such a casual and offhanded way that they don’t seem to have much meaning for Green. The whipping and subsequent creepy conversation with the Mothers just happens and then never gets mentioned again. When Green is exiled, she doesn’t bring up Samma or any of the others, doesn’t reflect on the complex feelings she must have about their relationship. Consequently, regardless of what Lake wants to accomplish here, that dimension of the book understandbly feels rather token and therefore uncomfortable.

The third act is where Green let me down. It feels like an appendage to the rest of the story. Its pacing is off, to the point where I was almost certain that the book would have to end before Green found Choybalsan and confronted him. Then there’s a reveal, a twist that I actually liked, but one that I wish had been foreshadowed in more interesting ways. As it is, I can understand how Lake wanted to manipulate the reader’s feelings through Green’s involuntary, reflexive sense of betrayal … but it didn’t quite work for me.

So far my best experience with Lake has been an anthology of his short fiction. The Clockwork Earth series did not go over nearly so well. I remember being so intrigued by Green when I first read about it at the time of its publication; I added it to my to-read list with a certain joy and anticipation. (In fact, it was the book that introduced me to Lake’s existence, even though I ended up reading Clockwork Earth first.) I’ve waited four years for a book that, alas, isn’t worth it. But sometimes that happens.

The Pirate’s Wish picks up literally where The Assassin’s Curse leaves off: Naji and Ananna are stranded on the Isles of Sky with a wizard who doesn’t seem all that interested in helping them. That changes when a manticore the wizard has been keeping prisoner escapes, kills him, and makes a deal with Ananna to help her in return for passage to the manticore’s home, the Island of the Sun.

The manticore is an early and exciting change in The Pirate’s Wish. I can’t recall the last time I saw a manticore in a fantasy novel; certainly I’ve never encountered them in the way Clare uses them here. The manticores of this world are sentient and, in their own minds, civilized beings with ranks, royalty, and even human servants. They snack on men but not women, and Ja’dorra like Naji are delicacies—but his curse taints his taste. They are hung up on making deals and keeping track of an elaborate system of boons, favours, and debts—all of which Ananna leverages. Oh, and they shoot poison spines from their tails.

Returning the manticore to the Island of the Sun is but a subplot, of course. The Pirate’s Wish is really about curing Naji of his curse through his three impossible tasks … which turn out not to be that impossible. Obviously. To fulfil the task of experiencing true love’s kiss, Ananna kisses Naji. Huh. Well, OK, I guess having the first of the three be so simple and straightforward is fine. But the next two will be really challenging and difficult, right?

Well, turns out that the starstones they need are in the possession of a friend of a friend, who would happily loan them … had they not been stolen by pirates! That’s an excellent complication that could have sent Ananna and crew off on a quest for the stones. Instead, it turns out the pirates are in fact Ananna’s own parents, who naturally give over the starstones without so much as scolding Ananna for her actions. Naji’s experience with the starstones is not as straightforward as his kiss with Ananna, but it still doesn’t seem that threatening.

The kicker comes with the third task, though: creating life out of a violent act. Turns out that Naji already completed it, but the curse didn’t dispel itself until he realizes this. Back when the Hariris (who are disposed of rather neatly as well, I might add) attack Ananna at sea, Naji uses heavy-duty magic to take them out. The magic’s spillover is like radioactive fallout, mutating the ocean life into a fun, under-the-sea monarchy. Good times. It’s not until Naji answers a summons from the new sea king that he understands his role in their genesis and that, therefore, he has passed all three trials and gets to be free of his curse.

So, look, I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, like the first book, The Pirate’s Wish is a fun and somewhat light-hearted romp around an archipelagean pirate world. There’s romance and fighting and manticore shenanigans. I enjoyed it. On the other hand, every time I look back on it, the story shrinks away, as if it knows that it doesn’t bear up under scrutiny.

The completion of the three impossible tasks is just too easy. The fight against the Hariris is not easy—Ananna technically dies, after all, except for Naji’s magic bringing her back by binding them together—but it happens very quickly. Likewise, the entire overarching problem with Naji and the beings from the Mists gets resolved very abruptly, and almost as an afterthought. The story just keeps bouncing from event to event like it’s on some kind of poorly-maintained amusement ride track, with each subsequent problem popping up not necessarily because it’s the opportune moment but because it’s running on a schedule.

This sense of coincidence-rather-than-cause-and-effect-driven plotting pervades the book, from Ananna and Naji’s very flat romantic subplot to the appearance of Jeric, who is apparently obsessed with starstones. As a result, Clare largely undermines her own attempts to build tension by creating a series of anticlimaxes. It’s forgivable in the first half of the book, but by the back half I found myself reading just for the sake of being done.

So what started as a promising two-part adventure doesn’t quite deliver. By all means, readers of The Assassin’s Curse should satisfy their curiosity: The Pirate’s Wish isn’t bad and isn’t even—as I so often charge books I give two stars—bland. Rather, this book is definitely entertaining, but it’s not going to stay with you. Ananna and Naji are not a memorable couple; theirs is not a romance that will live through the centuries, and their story is wholly unremarkable except as an hour or two’s diversion.

N.B.: When it comes to spoilers, I'm going to be talking rather liberally about the events of A Game of Thrones, so if you have not read the first book and want to remain spoiler free, stop reading now. I have avoided major spoilers for this book.

Suddenly everyone and his butler wants to be king!

In A Game of Thrones, we had the distinct pleasure of watching a kingdom fall apart as various individuals and their families jockeyed for positions of power. With A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin moves beyond the ambitions of individuals to show how FUBAR the situation in Westeros has become. In the first book, there was a sense of impending doom, but there was also the hope that it could be averted if certain people only worked together. Perhaps the death of King Robert could have been prevented, perhaps Ned Stark's life could have been saved, or perhaps Renly and Stannis would not have faced off against each other, both surviving Baratheon brothers claiming the throne for themselves. As A Clash of Kings opens, it's clear we are beyond the point where peace is an option. The scales have tipped firmly in favour of war, war, war, and it just gets messier.

Tyrion is, hands down (no pun intended), the best part of this book. He arrives in King's Landing to assume the post of Hand at his father's behest. He professes love for Cersei and Joffrey and loyalty to the Lannisters, but he has his own unique way of showing it, and Tyrion often works at cross-purposes to Cersei. He does terrible things, arranges for people to die or be sent to prison, and of course he's fighting for the Lannisters, so it's not like we want him to succeed—but there are times when I just couldn't help myself. Tyrion is just such a delicious, devious character that I can't help liking him even though he does terrible things for the Lannister cause.

Furthermore, Tyrion's machinations as the Hand are the most coherent of the political intrigue running throughout A Clash of Kings. He knows what the endgame has to be: either Stannis or Renly or both are going to attack King's Landing, which is woefully under-defended. All of his efforts go toward securing the city. Yet he has more to worry about than the external threats. King's Landing is suffering through a famine that he has no way of relieving, and it doesn't help that Joffrey is a tyrannical brat who prefers to watch people fight to the death and beat back rioters with a crossbow to, you know, actually helping the people he nominally rules. Tyrion also has qualms about the extent to which he relies upon Varys, the realm's eunuch spymaster with creepy-good intelligence-gathering skills. Finally, Cersei has her own schemes afoot, and Tyrion finds himself constantly countering or co-opting them for his own purposes.

Cersei comes across as much more emotional than she did in A Game of Thrones. Now she's an overprotective mother, and she is desperate to free her brother/lover from the clutches of the Starks. This, in my opinion, makes her a much less formidable enemy and therefore a much less interesting character. Nevertheless, her attempts to protect Joffrey are an important influence on his stunted emotional maturity: he can never hope to become a man, much less a real king, if his mother is always trying to keep him safe.

There's plenty of parallelism here if you want to look for it, because there is another king who has a somewhat protective mother as well. Robb Stark's retainers proclaimed him "King in the North," and now he is doing his best to live up to that title. Catelyn finds herself disquieted by the changes in her son. She wants to give him counsel, but unlike Cersei, she is aware of how that would undermine Robb. Even though she was one of the more bloodthirsty characters in the first book, wanting to hold Tyrion responsible for the attack on Bran and bring all the Lannisters to justice, Catelyn is the voice of reason throughout A Clash of Kings. She pushes Robb to send terms for peace back to King's Landing, and she serves as Robb's envoy to Renly.

So thanks to Catelyn and Ned, Robb grew up to be a mature, responsible, upstanding young man who is well on his way to becoming a great leader. Thanks to Cersei and Robert, Joffrey is a snivelling, immature, misogynistic brat. There is a lesson here about parenting, and about the values we pass on to our children. Because for all its vast and epic drama, A Song of Ice and Fire is also a story about family: family loyalty and family rivalry. It's the cohesion of all these elements, and Martin's wonderful job of balancing them, that makes this series so successful; A Clash of Kings is no exception in that regard.

In comparison to its predecessor, however, there are faults that make this book the less impressive of the two. Mainly, I didn't like any of Daenerys' story in A Clash of Kings. She spends the entire book leading her Dothraki diaspora east, eventually arriving in prosperous Qarth, where she has some dealings with a merchant and a warlock. Whereas we saw Daenerys grow from a young girl serving as her brother's pawn into a powerful, confident queen and leader in A Game of Thrones, this book has no corresponding developments. Her dragons grow larger, and we hear all about how she has no ships and no army. Frankly, it's a little depressing. Although I don't relish the consequences if Daenerys' achieves her dreams of invading Westeros, I still, as I do with Tyrion, want her to succeed; she's just such a compelling character. It's a shame she is wasted here.

Similarly, Bran Stark and his younger brother Rickon have a difficult time. Bran is slowly waking to the idea that magic is real and he is psychically connected to his direwolf, Summer. Of course, Maester Luwin is sceptical about magic and attempts to dissuade Bran from putting stock in any such nonsense. We can't discuss Bran without talking about Theon Greyjoy, and this is something I think worked well. Theon's story feels almost like a separate novella woven into the rest of the book, and it's a very tragic story. In his expanded role, Theon is a foolish and ambitious young man who would be king. He returns to his father only to find himself softened by his adolescence among the Starks; he is no longer an Ironman, and everyone can tell (except maybe Theon). Also, he sucks as a strategist, and almost every decision he makes later contributes to his ruination. Theon is a character with doom hanging over him for the entire book, and it's a little bit terrible that I get so much satisfaction from seeing him laid low. Nevertheless, the consequences of his bid for power are far-reaching, especially for Winterfell and the Starks.

A Clash of Kings lacks the novelty that is part of the appeal of A Game of Thrones, and Martin attempts to compensate by increasing the depth of the intrigue and the gruesomeness of the tragedy that befalls the characters. Arya, in particular, has a very interesting time posing first as a boy on the way to the Wall and then later as a serving girl for a lord allied with the Starks. I loved her tenuous alliance with Jaqen H'ghar; she saves his life and those of two other criminals bound for the Night's Watch when she could have let them perish in a fire. So he grants her three "deaths" (kind of like wishes). Remember that Arya is only nine, maybe ten, and here she is with the power of life or death over three people. This is a surreal and serious situation, and it was one of my favourite subplots in the book. (I also like the revelation of Jaqen's "real" identity, which is subtly done but obvious enough if you read closely.)

Arya's sister, Sansa, doesn't have an easy time being a hostage and betrothed to King Joffrey. She experiences Joffrey's fits of pique firsthand, and it reinforces the disillusionment that begun to seize her at the end of A Game of Thrones. Sansa, who until now has inhabited a semi-fantasy world where knights are chivalrous heroes, gets a very rude awakening. And she fast starts maturing into a much more self-aware character. She doesn't have the same skill for dissembling and deception that seems to come so naturally to other characters, but she is definitely far from the innocent, starstruck young girl we met in the first book.

With the HBO series based on the first book now being broadcast, I couldn't help but read A Clash of Kings with an eye for how it will appear on television. If anything, this just made me more excited about the book, because there are some really great scenes I can't wait to see. Still, if my review seems scattered, I hope it's not too presumptuous to suggest that's due, in part, to the scattered nature of this book. A Clash of Kings is a little messy—to good effect—and it carries the burden of the story begun in A Game of Thrones as well as can be expected. There's plenty I didn't discuss here because I just want this to be a casual review, not a in-depth analysis, and even that hope seems rather vain at this point! I guess if I'm supposed to be addressing the question of whether you would care to read this book, the easy answer is: yes, if you liked A Game of Thrones. If you didn't, then A Clash of Kings is not suddenly going to endear you to A Song of Ice and Fire. If you did, then I won't guarantee you are going to fall in love with this book, but I found it a solid successor.

My Reviews of A Song of Ice and Fire:
← A Game of Thrones | A Storm of Swords →

For most of the past week, I ploughed through a W. Somerset Maugham collection with that signature pleasure one has in reading one short story after another. Maugham’s stories can wear thin after a while, however, owing to their formulaic structure. So I took a break for something completely different: The Ice House is a crime novel, but Minette Walters plays with a lot of crime conventions. It’s not entirely clear if a crime has been committed or who the victim is, let alone who the murderer might be.

I only had a vague conception of what an “ice house” actually is. Being Canadian, the first thing that comes to mind are those hut-like structures one erects atop a frozen lake when ice-fishing. That’s not what this is. It’s actually this, which makes much more sense. Not only are such buildings good for keeping ice cold, but they are also nice places to store bodies. The only thing that surprises me is that this doesn’t happen more often!

Walters creates and sustains interest beyond the initial, intriguing selection of the setting. Firstly, there is the question of whether Phoebe actually killed her husband, David, all those years ago. Secondly, there is the related question about the identity of the discovered body and whether its death was accidental or intentional. Finally, the relationships between Phoebe and her friends and the village around Streech Grange result in a tense atmosphere not at all aided by the dynamic among the women of Streech Grange and the police officers assigned to the case.

For most of the novel, Walters very carefully avoids providing any hard evidence either way regarding whether Phoebe killed David. She dances deftly around the issue, dangling tantalizing scenes before the reader that seem to imply Phoebe’s guilt, then in the next chapter revealing evidence that seems to preclude her involvement at all. As the situation surrounding David’s disappearance becomes clearer, so too does our understanding of Phoebe’s character and whether she had the motive, opportunity, and willingness to kill her husband. Watching this develop proves a very interesting experience.

Similarly, Walters keeps the identity of the body a mystery for as long as possible. It is too recent to be David—unless he disappeared, only to resurface and die in the ice house for some reason. Indeed, I wasn’t that impressed by the resolution to this mystery. It makes a neat sort of sense—the kind of neatness that only really shows up in the twee world of the crime novel, where coincidence is the only thing more common than murder. Regardless, this mystery is even more important because of what it means for the police who are involved. DCI Walsh is in charge of the case, as he was in charge of the first investigation at Streech Grange. His experience ten years ago now colours his expectations of these events, and it soon becomes clear that he is emotionally invested in showing that the body is David’s.

The other half of the “dynamic duo” is Sergeant Andy McLoughlin. At the beginning of the book, Walsh is the reasonable, understanding “good cop” and McLoughlin is the rough, straight-to-the-point “bad cop”. Walsh displays a tolerant attitude towards the apparent lesbian relationship among Phoebe, Diana, and Anne; McLoughlin wastes no opportunity to single it out as strange. Gradually, the roles of these two policemen in the eyes of the reader reverse. McLoughlin seems to mellow (though there remains a staunch misogynistic streak in keeping with his overall character) as his attraction to Anne grows and he becomes more committed to finding the truth. Meanwhile, Walsh seems to become more and more obsessed with proving Phoebe guilty of murder, to the point where he almost crosses the line of tampering with the investigation. These two men start as colleagues but soon stop seeing eye-to-eye as each one’s biases take their focuses on the investigation in different directions.

For such a slim volume, then, The Ice House has a lot going on. There is far more beneath the surface here than might seem at first glance, and that is the true talent that Walters displays. I don’t often read straight-up crime novels (if they have a supernatural or science-fiction element, then I’m there). That’s just a matter of preference on my part, rather than an issue with the genre as a whole. So as a relative outsider to the genre, take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt—but also take it as a recommendation that this is a story even a dilettante can enjoy.

The Ice House was published in 1992. It’s practically pre-Web, pre–mobile phone. We’ve moved on from then; missing persons cases (and murder investigations) have changed. So in this way, the book is a relic of a now-lost time, just like all contemporary crime thrillers through the ages. If it were published today, it would be in a different climate, one influenced by the nascent surveillance society wracked with scandals and the discontent of a generation that cannot go quietly into the good night. For all its differences from the present atmosphere, though, it holds up remarkably well. With tragedy and romance as well as crime, its strength of characters and simple set of interconnected mysteries make The Ice House an enduring novel with more complexity than meets the eye.