redshift

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

Girl meets boy by Ali Smith is a retelling/reinterpretation of the Myth of Iphis, from Ovid. It’s a love story, between boys and girls, girls and girls, people and other people. It’s a political story. It’s a story about gender and identity and self. It’s a story with a lot of joy and affection and kindness to it, and it’s a story that sometimes defies categories and definitions. The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me. Which is, really, one of those moments which to me feels precisely right. This book did that to me quite a bit.

True, it would have been nice if it was longer, with more about some of the characters. But if that’s the worst I can find to say then I’m sure someone is doing something very right.

They looked old in the photo, I could see that now. They looked like two old people. Their features were soft. He looked smooth, sweet-faced, almost girlish. She looked strong, clear-boned, like a smiling young man from some Second World War film had climbed inside an older skin. They looked wise. They looked like people who didn’t mind, who were wise to how little time was left.

Miles gestured the injured mercenary captain ahead of him into sickbay with a little jab of his nerve disrupter. The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless–one ought to at least have to grunt for it.

Young Miles by Lois McMaster Bujold is a compilation volume, containing two novels and one novella of the Vorkosigan Saga: The Warrior’s Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning, and The Vor Game. While the actual reading order of the series can be a bit confusing, the first of these was the first published and the others follow from that within the timeline of the series. There are books set previously, which I haven’t yet read, focusing on other characters and events. I started at this point almost by chance, but it seems to have been a good place. The saga is space-opera, full of interplanetary tension and all the rest.

The first and last of the stories in this volume, the full length novels, are full of wild adventure (misadventure?) across space, with the central character, the crippled Miles Vorkosigan, just barely keeping everything running as he invents wildly to try and make situations work, with varying success. The novella, The Mountains of Mourning, is a more subdued and thoughtful piece set on Miles’s home planet, dealing with social prejudices. It’s a short murder mystery, of sorts, focused entirely on the rural society of Barrayar.

There are a lot of things I’m fond of about these books. They balance humour and seriousness wonderfully, and many of the characters are fantastically sharp, well-drawn people who are honestly fascinating to read about. The adventures are really great fun, and the writing drags you along. (I finished reading The Vor Game in the small hours of this morning, due to an inability to put it down and go to sleep.) I think, really, I’m fairly thoroughly hooked; I’ll certainly be hunting down more of this series.

“Simon,” said Count Vorkosigan, “there’s no doubt ImpSec will have to go on watching Miles. For his sake, as well as mine.”

“And the Emperor’s,” put in Illyan dourly. “And Barrayar’s. And the innocent bystanders’.”

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure.

Another of Tove Jansson’s books written for adults, The Summer Book is a gorgeously simple and captivating story about an old woman and her young grandchild spending summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. I find this story captivating, for many of the same reasons I was captivated by A Winter Book.

I’ve mentioned the story’s simplicity, which may need explanation. The language and description is wonderful and precise, with a sense that there are no wasted words, and it reads absolutely beautifully. The story itself is not complex, but it has a lot to say; about people and relationships and life and death and the sea. In relatively few words it paints absolutely vivid pictures of people, places, moments.

A book that I am really going to treasure, this.

Suddenly he burst out, “And now Backmansson is gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He is no longer among us,” Verner explained angrily.

“Oh, you mean he’s dead,” said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.

I write in the year 1901.

My name, my real name, is Alfred Borden. The story of my life is the story of the secrets by which I have lived my life. They are described in this narrative for the first and last time; this is the only copy.

The Prestige deals with the rivalry of two stage magicians/illusionists, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, in the later years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, and the enduring effect of that rivalry on their families through the generations. It was adapted into a film in 2006, which I saw at the time, so I didn’t come to the book entirely fresh. I enjoyed the film greatly, but I very much wonder what I would have made of the book had I read it without foreknowledge of elements of the story. The book, though, is substantially different to the film; even more so than I expected as far as half way through the book. There were a fair few surprises; events that unfolded differently, characters that I perceived in an entirely different light, and so on. I’m unable to avoid writing this partly as a comparison between book and film, rather than just as review of the book on its own merits; I’m sure plenty of more comprehensive reviews of just the book can be found all over the internet. Apologies, anyway.

The book is very strangely told, combining journals of the two main characters with stories and experiences of their great grandchildren. In the earlier parts of the book the important events feel as though they’re being recounted from a great distance, and I found it somewhat disconcerting — I’m still somewhat in two minds as to what I think about some parts of the narrative. On the other hand, once I got really absorbed in the book and realised the central mysteries weren’t actually the most important part of the story (unlike the film, where they are more the emphasis), I began to enjoy it a lot more and with far fewer qualifications. It’s something of a melodrama, but enjoyably so on the whole, and the combination of illusion and genuine weirdness is intriguing.

Worth reading, but I’m not as enamored with it as some, I suspect. I am, however, finding myself very much wanting to read more of Christopher Priest’s books — ones I know less about in advance!

A Small Theory

People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.

The Book Thief is a book about a German girl called Liesel Meminger, set during the second world war, and it is narrated by Death.

This book has been much talked-about amongst my friends, and I’d been led to expect great things of it, but it actually took me two attempts to get through it, and I spent a lot more time over it than I typically do with books. This isn’t entirely the book’s fault, but I think that on first picking it up I did perhaps feel a little disappointed, as though it wasn’t living up to expectations. The use of German phrases in the text disconcerted me (although they are explained and not just sitting there untranslated), and the story didn’t have enough instant draw to pull me in and make me unable to put it down. I planned to finish it eventually because it seemed interesting, but I wasn’t massively enthusiastic.

Allow me to exercise my right to completely change my mind. This book is, once it warms up, actually pretty fantastic, and definitely rewarded the effort I put into getting through the beginning. As you may have surmised from my initial sentence about the subject matter of the book, it’s not a happy story. It’s a long way from being unremittingly depressing, though, and in many ways I found it uplifting. It’s humorous and engaging. It’s (to borrow a word from a friend yet again) unsentimental, too, and deals with terrible things in a very matter-of-fact manner which feels fair and honest, and I respect that a great deal.

It’s also just (just?) a Very Good Story, with some wonderfully human characters.

At some point I believe I may have cried.

They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like a new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder rpeating one thing, incessantly. ‘Get it done, get it done.’ So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.

Any sheets of paper she’d already written on lay hidden against the surface of the table, because if words lie face down there’s a chance they might change during the night; you may suddenly come to see them with a new eye, perhaps with a rapid flash of insight. It is conceivable.

A Winter Book is a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson, divided into three parts — snow, flotsam and jetsam, travelling light. The first part is a childhood in and around an artist’s studio; the second is a childhood on an island; the third is adult, but no less evocative or touching. It’s described as a book of “short stories for adults” — presumably to differentiate it from the Moomin books for which Tove Jansson is far better known — but really, it’s a book of short stories for anyone, I think.

Many of the stories are more than a little autobiographical, and reading the book I got the very strong sense of seeing the world through the author’s eyes, getting to know her a little at a time. These are sketches of life, often very simple but also captivating. There is a lot about island life, about childhood, about growing older and letting things go.

I’m a coastline girl. I lived until I was eighteen within half a mile of the shore, and the significance of the sea in this book really caught me, probably all the more so because of that. I’ll borrow a few of Val’s words on that subject, and I hope she will (yet again) forgive me: She lived much of her life in the archipelago and later on a small island in Finland. It shows. The sea is not only an inspiration. It’s there in almost everything she wrote and it seems almost like a character in its own right.

And a wonderful character too.

This is a beautiful book.

You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.

“I wasn’t prepped at all,” I said. “Two hours of subliminals, real-time, which I was too time-lagged to hear. On the subservient status of women, mostly. And fish forks.”

She looked appalled. “You weren’t prepped? Victorian society’s highly mannered. Breaches of etiquette are taken very seriously.” She looked curiously at me. “How have you managed thus far?”

“For the past two days I’ve been on the river with an Oxford don who quotes Herodotus, a lovesick young man who quotes Tennyson, a bulldog, and a cat,” I said. “I played it by ear.”

This book is one I was set onto by a friend from the US. I’d never actually heard of Connie Willis before which, it turns out, is probably because her books are more or less impossible to find in the average UK bookshop. I think this is a real shame, and I’m ever so glad to have discovered her writing.

To Say Nothing Of The Dog is a story about time travel. Or a Victorian comedy of manners (and errors). Or a detective story. Or a love story. Or all of the above and then some. The narrative (and central character) hops mostly between a future Oxford, 1940s Coventry, and various parts of Victorian England, trying to correct a perceived threat to the course of history and unravel various mysteries along the way. It’s not an overly serious book, and a few of the revelations aren’t precisely shocking — but I didn’t really feel as though they needed to be. The joy is in the process of getting there, and having suspicions confirmed. Or, sometimes, completely undermined. The humour is wonderful, and I found the story thoroughly gripping. The references to the sort of detective fiction I grew up reading insane amounts of really didn’t hurt either.

I feel as though this is one I’ll enjoy revisiting from time to time, just to check in on the characters and smile at their quirks and give myself that comfortable feeling of curling up with a good, familiar book. (Which is pretty much what I do with my collection of Dorothy L Sayers books, too. Take that as you will.)

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

By special request from Crystal, who takes the blame for this blog existing in the first place, I’m going to talk a little about the Hong Kong film In The Mood For Love, directed by Wong Kar-Wai and starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. I saw it a couple of nights ago, courtesy of my housemate, and though I didn’t think I was going to be awake enough to take in much of anything it’s actually quite a captivating film, in a quiet sort of way.

The film is about a man and a woman who move into neighbouring flats in a crowded block. Both are married, but their partners are often away, and they eventually realise that both their partners are being unfaithful to them. It’s a tangled sort of love story. It’s not particularly happy, but the drama here is mostly played in a low-key sort of way, and where I think I was expecting something overtly depressing what I actually got was more of a thoughtful, gently sad sort of piece. I think that ‘melancholy’ might be a good word. There’s a great deal of emotion, but the tone overall felt very reflective to me. At times it’s also very funny, and though I’m tempted to talk about specific scenes that I really enjoyed on that level I think it’s probably better just to see for yourself. It’s also visually very beautiful, atmospheric… you may be gathering that it’s not really one for those of you who’d prefer an action-packed film, but if you’re willing to take the time to let the story unfold at its own pace then it’s very worthwhile. And the ending is just right, I think.

(I should also note that Wong Kar-Wai’s films tend to be somewhat interlinked, and that this one is apparently sort-of followed by 2046, which I saw some years ago and didn’t understand in the slightest. I’m going to have to give it another try now that I’ve seen In The Mood For Love, as I’ve been told it’ll make rather more sense with that film in mind.)

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run, and the world would wake into itself again.

Not that year.

Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard, the world remained unfriendly and cold.

Odd and the Frost Giants was a World Book Day release in the UK in 2008, so I’m rather behind time on this one, but for unknown reasons a few copies of it resurfaced in my local bookshop today and I’m very fond of Neil Gaiman so I picked it up.

As a World Book Day release it’s very short, of course — 97 pages long with some illustrations — but it tells a beautifully imaginative story of a crippled boy and a few Norse gods and at least some Frost Giants, although how many may depend on who you ask. It’s a bit of a coming-of-age story and it’s certainly an adventure and it’s another one of those books that makes you (well, me, anyway) smile a lot. Sweet and funny and all Loki’s fault. Read it, and then read it to any children you can capture too. (Err, I suppose it would help if you actually knew the children concerned. That sort of thing can probably be taken the wrong way otherwise.)

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price?

Broken Angels is the second book in a trilogy, so reviewing it first might seem a bit incongruous. It probably is. But it’s the one I’ve just finished reading, so I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with that. I read the first book in the sequence (Altered Carbon) last year and, with a few reservations, enjoyed it massively. I enjoyed Broken Angels almost as much, but the same reservations I had previously bothered me somewhat more. Details on that later.

These books have a distinctly cyberpunk sort of feel — dealing with themes of human consciousness, the blurring of the line between human and machine, corporate power and criminality, all in a distinctly noir tone — but are perhaps a bit wider in scope than that implies. Humanity has reached the stars, albeit with a good deal of help from rediscovered Martian technology, but it’s the same old problems wherever you go.

It’s the Martian technology that Broken Angels is mostly concerned with, building up a sense of humans playing in a universe they can’t even begin to understand, well before they’re ready to be out there, as it were, unsupervised. Overall the message is pretty grim, and the violence fits that description too. The actual story dragged me in very well too; I think I told a friend I was going to stop reading and go to bed sometime last night, and then read for the next three hours anyway because I had to get to the end… and the end was satisfying, if not mind-blowing.

None of this is the bit I have a problem with. The bit I have a problem with is the sex. It only happens a couple of times, but it’s generally enough to disconcert me and break me out of the flow of the story. I find myself wondering what this is actually meant to add and when we can get back to finding stuff out about the main plot. Possibly this is boring of me. Possibly the sex actually doesn’t add anything. Possibly I’m just annoyed that every time a female character is introduced I find myself wondering how long it’s going to take the protagonist to have sex with her. I suppose you’ll have to judge for yourselves, if you feel like reading the books.

A good book, but not incredible, and if I’m honest, as a story in its own right, Altered Carbon was more generally satisfying for me. I’m still happy to own this one, though. It’s just not my very favourite. I’ll still be checking out the third and final book (Woken Furies).