Books - December/January/February 2007 - Part 1
The Christmas period meant lots and lots of books.
Spin manages an interesting balancing act. It’s a hard Sci-Fi novel that works in some genuinely interesting - although not always entirely believable - character development, and some musing on human crisis response at family- and global-scales.
The “Spin” in question is a planet-engulfing barrier, erected by unknown agents that effectively blocks Earth off from the rest of the universe, either as a prison or for protection. The human response to this is told through 3 main characters: A pair of twins, one a scientist who dedicates his life to examining and understanding the Spin and one who looks to fringe religions to explain the events, and the narrator - a childhood friend of the twins who has to act as a bridge between them.
This type of “big science” novel tends to demand at least one great big hurdle for your suspension of disbelief to clear. In this case it’s in the form of the boy genius twin, who is almost single-handedly responsible for deciphering the meaning of the Spin. It’s hugely unrealistic, but would be difficult for the author to handle any other way, given the more probable situation of a huge group of scientists, lobbyists and bureaucrats forming around the event, providing no kind of empathetic hook for the reader at all.
If you can forgive the book this, then you’ll have a great time with it, and in a way it’s a shame that its SF-centric marketing and deeply awful cover art will stop it getting the larger audience it probably deserves.
The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde
This is the first of Ffordes’s books since the end of the [Thursday Next] series. I liked those books a lot, but they were slightly light and frothy; a lot of fun to read but often without a lot of substance behind them.
His new series uses the same bizzaro-Reading setting, and this time follows detective inspector Jack Spratt’s investigations into a series of nursery rhyme killings. It’s still got the same barmy sense of invention that his older books had - the detectives having sidekicks whose job is to write up their escapades into Agatha Christie-style serials is a genius touch - but it’s a lot more tightly plotted than the previous books. It actually works as a proper whodunnit, which is a pretty impressive achievement given the crazy set up.
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
I have a weird confession about why I’ve never read any Ray Bradbury stories before. When I was a wee lad, there was an Outer Limits-style episodic TV series that dramatised his short stories. It was done in the worst traditions of cheesy American TV, with hammy acting, lots of overwraught moralising and the painful oversaturated reds of an NTSC signal being displayed on a PAL TV. Worst of all though, were the introductory segments with Dan Ackroyd, where he very intently explained what you were about to watch. So, from that day to this I’ve had a mental image of Bradbury’s stories as very cheap Americana with the face of a soft-focused, plastic-haired, washed-up actor.
Anyway, I finally realised that believing TV in these matters was probably foolish, and I should just read the books. Something Wicked This Way Comes was about as much a break from my expectations as would have been possible; I can’t imagine it being filmed at all (though I know it’s been attempted.) The plot is almost non-existent, so the whole book is carried by the tumbling, lyrical picture of small town America and the dark imagination of childhood. It’s almost a novel-length poem and it’s fantastic and I feel like an idiot for not reading it before now.
The QI Book of General Ignorance
There’s a certain type of book that get released around Christmas time, usually tied into some TV show or campaign, plastered in the windows of every book shop in the country and designed to be given as presents. It’s hard to be cynical about them, because they’re so transparent that there’s no real reason to object to them.
So, I was given this for Christmas, read it while eating too much food, found it Quite Interesting and then moved on. It’s mostly laid out as a series of questions posed on the TV show followed by more long-form answers than TV schedules would allow for, and I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be dipped into rather than read straight from cover to cover, but where’s the fun in that? I do worry that my head was already filled with largely useless information, and that stuffing it with more might not have been the best idea. Either way, as blatant marketing ploys go, it was fairly enjoyable.
Again, I’m writing about a Terry Pratchett book and I don’t know why. You already know whether or not you’re going to read this, and if you are then you probably have already.
Anyway, this one continues the Tiffany Aching series (The Wee Free Men, A Hatful of Sky,) but whereas the last two books were really aimed straight at the Young Adult market, with a different page format and cover style than his normal books, this one is in the format of all of the other Discworld hardbacks. I’m not totally sure what the reason for this change is, as the writing style seems pretty similar to the other TA books to me, and the story doesn’t get moved on in any particularly meaningful way. In fact, the book’s a bit of a disappointment in some respects, since it doesn’t really do anything that wasn’t covered by the previous instalments, and feels a bit like it’s just marking time for his next novel.
It’s still enjoyable though - I finished it in a couple of evenings - and has some pretty funny moments, mostly featuring the Nac Mac Feegle (tiny, drunken, violent, blue-skinned Scottish gnomes) which will greatly increase your everyday use of the word “crivens!”, so it’s probably worth it for that alone.