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n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnThis is Lispector’s last book (she died the same year that it was published). In his essay, 'A Passion for the Void', Colm Tóibín describes the novella as the book in which “all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded”, and, although it is not autobiographical, he suggests it is “an exploration of a self that is sometimes glimpsed but never known.”returnreturnI did not immediately love the book—though it was kind of touch and go—stimulating and intriguing though it is. I am more at home with irreal or absurdist writing that in a way riffs on an idea, gives the reader a thread to cling to regardless of how unpredictable the story that follows and stays with the same idea, however absurd or disconcerting it might be, for long enough that the reader can see the landscape. Lispector disconcerts by being suddenly in one place, then in another, like a springtail, without any evidence of motion in between. “If you see what I am saying, fine,” the narrator says at one point, “if you don’t, that’s fine, too. But why am I bothering with this girl when what I want more than anything is purely ripe and golden wheat in summer?” returnreturnThere are two things going on in the novella. One is the story of Macabéa, “ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved,” told by her boyfriend Rodrigo, and the other is the story of writing the story. Both are brilliant in their way, but possibly too strong a meat as a first foray into Lispector’s writing. Toibín’s illuminating essay is the introduction to the book, and if this work is the one in which encapsulates Lispector’s writing style, then perhaps it will be better appreciated—by me, at any rate—when these “talents and eccentricities” have been encountered in a less concentrated form.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnThis was a solid, fun read. A sports celebrity, Nilah Brio is focused on the next big race and on her career, accepting any price that needs to be paid to reach each target; happily for Brio, most prices are out of sight and mostly paid by other people. returnreturnMid-race, Brio has a bewildering encounter with the terrifying ‘Mother’ and is framed for murder, and falls into the rackety company of a bunch of salvagers. It is an environment that, while not personally hostile to Brio, certainly has no damns to give about her special status. It’s a very fast-paced adventure, with a lot of fight scenes which (despite these really not being a big draw for the present reader) are ingenious and engaging. There are a couple of romances (again, not a draw here) that manage not to slow down the pace, and are quite fun, and occasionally funny in their bristly way, as well as earning a LGBTQ+ sticker. returnreturnWhat is not entirely clear is why exactly everyone is so desperate to get their hands on the eponymous big ship. The Harrow was thought to have been destroyed, and can itself wreak terrible devastation, but it all feels a bit vague, as though the fact of the ship’s existing is reason enough; like Edmund Hillary saying ‘it was there’ when asked why he climbed Mount Everest. returnreturnBut the pace of the action and the polished, if not remarkable, writing mean that it is easy enough to suspend the disbelief. The Big Bad—‘Mother’—is properly scary, and the overall world-building, which involves both detailed technology and mind-magic, is very well done, thorough and convincing. The characters are well-drawn, though so instantly recognizable—the egotistic darling of the sporting fraternity, the noir-ishly washed-up and betrayed treasure-hunter dragged into ‘one last job’, the bickering, loyal crew—as to seem not entirely three-dimensional. If not a new favourite, 'Big Ship…' is definitely worth a read.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnOlivia Laing, in her 'Guardian' review in 2020, noted the “precise and estranging fluency” of Harrison’s writing. It is a perfect tool for depicting uncertain negotiation of uncertain worlds. returnreturnShaw, one of the main characters, starts the novel coming to (incomplete) rest after motion: he has had a breakdown, and has just moved house. He meets Victoria in the place where he has come, if not to rest, at least to a stop of sorts, and almost immediately she leaves, moving house in her turn. His mother has dementia, and takes pleasure in tearing up family photographs, destroying memories. Victoria’s mother has died and Victoria is moving north to Shropshire to live in the house her mother left behind. returnreturn'Sunken Land' is a story that has key absences: Shaw’s sense of distance from himself, Victoria’s deceased mother, the repeated failures to communicate. Shaw and Victoria seem barely to have come together before they separate. There are significant gaps in knowledge, too: the true business of the person who gives Shaw a job, the reason that copies of 'The Water Babies' keep turning up, what is the source of the voices Shaw can hear through his wall. returnreturnThis makes it sound as though 'Sunken Land' is about the uncanny, or weird experiences, and that does it the injustice of pinning it down, but weirdness is inherent in the novel like hair on an arm, giving it distinction; the novel would look odd without it, like a face without eyebrows. It is not about them, they are factors in and consequences of life. What is most memorable is not so much the strange occurrences and recurrences, the unsettling glimpses of disturbing things, but the maps of the characters’ diffident interactions with the world, both familiar and defamiliarized, maps that are built up with such subtlety, and with so unique a literary palette, that it is almost startling to stand back and see how immaculate and strong is the resulting fictional reality. returnreturnIn a 2017 interview with Heather Marshall, Harrison said that he looks for the ‘I don’t know why you did that’ moment at the endings of his own short stories, and there are plenty of these in 'Sunken Land' too, keeping the reader on their toes, keeping the prose too dynamic and complex to be burdened down by the shifting, often gloomy, atmosphere; it is a gloomy world, but the weirdness and Harrison’s remarkable prose make it almost rebelliously suffused with resilience.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnThat VanderMeer takes a ‘less is more’ approach is embedded right from the moment the reader discovers that they will not learn the characters’ names. This sets out a ground rule—that you will barely get the amount of information you need, and not a comma more—and it reinforces the strange, strained relationships between the scientists, who will share a transformative experience without knowing anything about each other, and between their expedition and Area X, an intensely, compellingly weird landscape. returnreturnThe story is a first-person narrative, the ‘I’ is a product of an isolated youth, an ‘expert in the uses of solitude’. This makes for an interesting point of view, especially here. The question of the reliability of the narrator naturally enough arises, but is more difficult to answer when events recounted never seem to amount to more than hints as to something else: the past, the future, a different interpretation. returnreturnThe very first feature the four scientists encounter is the foot of a stone stairway that tunnels down into the ground, which the narrator stubbornly persists in calling a tower. The scientists are part of an official investigation into the ‘mysteries’ of Area X, but all they really discover, even those that survive, is that the mysteries are far more evolved than anyone expected. They entered the Area X territory in the hope of finding out about its mysteries, but three out of four do not survive their encounter with its unmediated reality. They arrive under instruction to record information about Area X but Area X seems, in its unexplained way, to be recording itself, keeping the scientists’ records as well as their remains. returnreturnBy the end, the narrator has acknowledged the collapse of her "compulsion" to "know everything"¸and that even if she had clung to it, “our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish." What makes this compelling is that it is an admission not of defeat but of a radically altered perspective of her role in relation to uncanniness, which, under the circumstances, seems the only sane admission to make. returnVanderMeer pulls off the remarkable feat of presenting an immensely rich and immersive story in a narrative style that is elusive and ambiguous and a linguistic style that is reticent yet precise. This is a compelling combination.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnThis is the kind of book that remains in use for reference, even though it bears reading all the way through. As an author, I have found it very valuable for world-building, not just in terms of how to make up likely Hibernia Altera place-names, but in terms of thinking about the different ways the landscape is understood and interpreted by those who live with it. returnreturnIt is intriguing to see the way that language that is in everyday use will focus so finely on different forms of common things; not just the thirty-two words for field, but the range of words for a hole in the ground, depending on whether it was a spawning fish that made it, or it was a shelter for a wild animal. returnreturnAlso intriguing is the reminder that words can have among their multiple meanings those that seem unconnected; a goat muzzle and an invisibility cloak, for example. The words for landscape can reflect a different way of looking at things: there is a measurement of land, ‘copla’, which does not refer to distance or space but to the carrying power, the potential productivity level that a piece of land can sustainably reach. returnreturnThis book is informative, very engaging, and, for a non-speaker of Irish reading a native speaker, very convincing. Some assertions, unrelated to the language itself, could be more useful if they came with footnotes or a reference for further reading. These include assertions about interpretations of myth, the linguistic link between Irish and India, or with Arabic, or about the traceable marks left by spoken words. Less convincing are the occasional sweeping statements about, for example, Irish people having a unique relationship with the land itself, along “we are rooted to the island” lines, or ideas about race memory. returnreturnAnglicised Irish place-names have a weird, nearly quantum, state—entangled with two languages but meaning nothing in either without translation—that Tim Robinson described as being ‘like twigs snapped off the trees’, and 'Thirty-Two Words' goes a long way to assisting the interested non-speaker towards a more informed understanding of the landscape.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnHarrison says he never much liked this book, but that it achieved what he had intended, which was ‘to take the piss out of’ certain tenets of SFF at the time: that the main character drives the action, that the universe is knowable, and the universe is anthropocentric. returnreturn'The Centauri Device' takes the piss and pours it all over the place. John Truck is the main character and never seems to know what is going on. He is dragged into the plot to get the device because he is half-Centauri, and he is manipulated, lied to, threatened, and generally kicked about by all political shades. He is not a hero at all, and he only reluctantly speaks for ‘all who breathe the air of tragedy’ when none on the political spectrum can offer anything else. returnreturnWomen characters are hardly worth the effort, being limited to ‘port ladies’, Truck’s limp wife, and one-eyed Alice Gaw, a sort of pulp-punk Sister George. Everything in the worlds Truck encounters is compromised, vulgar, and demeaned. There is quite a bit of violence, in fact anything that is physical seems to be violent, or to invite violence, but the register in which everything is written is sophisticated and even, very unlike the heightened register (often involving very unlikely similes) of more contemporary works. returnreturnThere is a very noir-ish, Tiger Lillies aesthetic and some great characters, including the full-blooded grotesque Grishkin, Truck’s friends Tiny—the ‘last great musician’, who incurs the wonderful characterisation of having ‘all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery’—and Fix the bo’sun. returnreturnTruck has no authority, no power, and seems to have no real aim in life except not to die. He is the grubbiest, most ramshackle, and most inept of Chosen Ones, but not without depth when pressed. Whatever meaning there might be lies in that response, and the ultimate decision about the deployment of the device is with Truck because of it. Even unreflective Truck, and the wretchedness experienced by those living on the abrasive edges of corrupt worlds, have an occasional desolate richness; not poetry but resonances of poetry in being both brief and illuminating: Truck recognising his fellow hustlers and losers “shivering with cold and fear of the long, incomprehensible future’, and his desolate struggle back to his ship, his encounter with the undramatic but profoundly alien Device. returnreturn'The Centauri Device' is a space opera (at the 'The Stars My Destination' end of the spectrum), but despite the drugs, the legions of dead bodies, and the spaceships, there are unexpected echoes—or, rather, adumbrations—of the alienating elegance of 'The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again'.

Solarpunk’ is the term used to categorize fiction that speculates on post-radical-change life, and does so on the assumption that there will be survival, however radically changed. It is fundamentally optimistic about the continuation of human life, and life with a ‘civilized’ aspect; that is, concerned with more than brute survival. In Another Life, Ulibarri presents a very convincing vision of how the post-climate-collapse society organizes itself materially. The circumstance presented is of a community established after the planned flooding of Death Valley.returnreturnThe need for an alternative way to live became pressing after Thomas Ramsey’s Planet B project failed spectacularly. His plan, and its collapse, is indicative of the sort of grand scale, grand theft, great lie consumer capitalism that preceded the social as well as climate collapse from which the Otra Vida community arose. There is no real presentation of the kinds of structures that make people like Ramsey possible, so he comes across as a ‘Big Bad’, a sui generis villain rather than the logical extreme of a particular, and profoundly complex, set of priorities, assumptions, and indulgences.returnreturnThere are two storylines in Another Life, one personal and one political. The former concerns the implications of a scientific discovery, and the second arises from ideological conflicts.returnThe discovery itself is a clever one, based on theorizing a holographic universe, and on reincarnated material having unique markers that can be genetically tracked under certain circumstances. The storyline arises from implications of reincarnation—what your previous life implies about your current self—which feel naïve, rather than profound. A significantly more interesting possibility—a human reincarnated from animal, a human with past experience but no experience of being a human—is raised, but resolved only in terms of human emotion. returnreturnThe Otra Vida community experiences some conflict with police, and with opposing ideologies from those outside, but there is no sense of actual threat. We see plenty of evidence of fair-mindedness in the community, of capacity for reflection and an impulse to honesty. But there is none of the sort of dogged, tough-minded persistence that, being necessary to push through any kind of unpopular change even at domestic rather than global scales, must surely be a characteristic required to sustain radical change within a radically destabilized society. returnreturnIt is this that gives Another World a specifically utopian, rather than purely speculative, feel: it isn’t that the possibility of such a community under significantly altered circumstances feels unconvincing, it is that everyone is so nice about it. In twenty years, there has been only one ‘rival’ for Galacia’s role of Mediator. The worst anyone inside Otra Vita does is kill a hornet, and even they are just ‘crass’. All the real threats are outside. A utopian slant is not a criticism, but it does not come across as well-secured.returnreturnOne thing that is oddly lacking is any depiction of the landscape after the Oil to Water Project flooded Death Valley. There is a reference, during the backstory of the community, to the positive environmental impact, the possibility of increasing biodiversity, and of ameliorating the decline of desert wetlands. These are never mentioned again. The focus is very much on human survival. This is not to suggest that a work of fiction is responsible for addressing the implication of every circumstance it describes. At the same time, there is here arguably a perpetuation of the sort of anthropocentrism that is at the heart of our current crisis (or crises).returnreturnWhat works very well is the development of the Otra Vida community and its practices, which are closely bound to structures familiar from contemporary society. The ways of surviving massive temperature increases seem reassuringly likely: reading as practical implementations, or logical extensions of, alternatives already at least theoretically possible. The community is very thoroughly planned and clearly presented, the characters are both human and humane; as a whole, the Otra Vida reads like a very realistic manifestation of Galacia’s motto “Their way of life wasn’t built for us, so we built another life.”

It has been some months since I read Piranesi and I have hesitated to review it. To do so feels like coming in at a stride from a bracing country walk, entering a beautiful room, and trampling mud, tufts of dead grass, and clumps of peat all over their fabulous Tabriz carpet.

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Piranesi is a remarkable book. It tells the deeply weird story of a man, the narrator, who spends his days in close examination of the statues that populate the halls of the House he lives in. ‘House’ does the place an injustice; it is a world in itself, with an ocean in the lower floors and birds circling the upper. The original Piranesi, the eighteenth-century engraving artist, produced a series of ‘invented prisons’, but they could hardly be more involved or complex than the House.

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Piranesi has, he believes, always lived in the House, and is entirely accepting of his existence, and the reality of the House. His unruffled serenity, his unshockable narrative of life, are themselves elements of the world’s atmosphere. Everything is uncanny, and uneasy, and weird, but not in a threatening or mysterious way. Rather, what Piranesi recounts is so very other, it is hard to know how to respond, or how to try to apprehend the world. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the narrator is disbelieving when Henry Winter tells him that he and his four friends decided to hold a bacchanal. Henry, piqued by the disbelief, asks, “What if you’d never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture … Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it?” This is the weirdness of Piranesi – looking at a real, convincing world without any understanding of it, looking but experiencing not comprehension, but severe cognitive dissonance.

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Clarke invokes Narnia in one of her two epigraphs, and the impact of the House’s statues recalls the Charn waxworks in The Magician’s Nephew and the scattered statues in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Even before the true nature of those figures is revealed, they are inherently eerie and wrong. It is not just the Gothic effect of doubles or mirror-images, it is because they are records of, not memorials to, some terrible event. The statues in the House are disconcerting, being recognisable as statues but giving nothing away about their meaning or their references.

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Piranesi has travelled widely through the rooms of the House, discovering its statues, which he interrogates for meaning but treats kindly, giving them gifts. This kindness, he believes, is in keeping with the generosity of the House towards him. He finds what he thinks of as gifts from the House – when he needs something, the house provides – and the nature of the gifts is probably the first hint of the world outside the House. The gifts are very practical, and sit oddly in the echo-chamber of Piranesi’s life in the House, which seems to be more a condensed, intense aesthetic experience, than corporeal movement through a material place.

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That the House is not all that exists is hinted at by Piranesi’s belief that there is someone else in the House, whom he calls ‘the Other’. A tentative dance begins, as Piranesi tries to find, or at least to communicate, with this ‘Other’. Eventually he does, and the reality is a great deal more mean-spirited than the generous-hearted Piranesi expected. For all that, though, Piranesi rises to the truth, and seems rather to bring with him remnants, not of what the House was, but what he believed it to be, a belief that seems ultimately more real than the feet of clay of its inventors.

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnAn unnamed detective is hired to find his client’s husband. The husband is a salesman who disappeared at the corner of a street near their home, and the client's brother has tried without success to find him. returnreturnThe detective never seems to be quite certain what he is looking for, and the story reads often as though he has two and two in his two hands, but he cannot make them make four. He seems to be in between very distinct places for much of the book: the couple's apartment and his own office, the office and the dry channel where the prostitutes work, the office and the noodle-shop, and so on. Neither the places nor his journeys between them lead to any advancement in his case, as though the eponymous ruined map he has been given keeps him in the wrong place, rather than guiding him to where he might find answers. returnreturnIn the same way, the detective seems to be in-between the pages of the book, but never quite in, let alone driving, the story. He expects to find ways of resolving the mystery through his obsessive attention to irrelevant details, like traffic patterns or matchbooks. He never seems to get any closer to the object of his search, except insofar as he begins to identify strongly with the husband, thereby failing to find either of them. returnreturn'The Ruined Map' is written in a naturalistic way, and is bleakly funny in places, but both characteristics serve to underline isolation as a fundamental human experience, as the detailed description of particular places throws into relief the universality of absurdity as characteristic of life.

There is a line of argument that institutional archives are ‘structurally spectral’, to use Verne Harris’ phrase, that their function is deconstructive and hauntological. That 'Lucia' is not a biography of Lucia Joyce is stated at the start. It’s all fiction, deduction, adduction, supposition—with no access to evidence, what else could it be? Arguably, Lucia is a manuscript within ‘Lucia’s’ archives. The uncovering of ‘Lucia’s’ sarcophagus—and the writing of the book—is presented in a series of excavation passages, and in one, the narrator performs ‘what I could of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth’. This is an encapsulation of an aim of the book, a search for the voice of a dead person. Herein, though, lies a complication. Every archive contains the absences of the disenfranchised. Even if Lucia seeks to symbolically ‘open the mouth’ of the dead ‘Lucia’, there are no words of hers there, only what has been said of her. Had she been able to haunt, to disrupt, would she have presented herself in the same light? returnreturnLucia has unrelenting grimness. ‘Lucia’ as the passive subject of ritual is a keynote—we start with her funeral, where she is almost invisible. There is close, even mesmerizing, focus on rituals to which she is subject, and in this there can be seen an abstract of the sort of brutal and dehumanising world where such rituals could have a religion or doubtful science as a patina: slapping at the menarche, near-fatal water treatments for mental health, a number of options for abortifacients. Some episodes are hinted at but not described, like encounters with various men with their scratchy stubble and their hurried response to a step on the stairs. Some, like the terrible episode with the rabbit, are compellingly detailed. returnreturnIt is a matter of record that Lucia was placed in an institution when her mental health had collapsed. It is a matter of rumour that she was sexually abused. Had she not been ground to dust before and after death, would Lucia, a creative person, a talented dancer, have chosen these graveclothes? Would she have elected to present herself so exclusively in the shattered and shattering prism of abuse? In fact, there is a recurring sense that, in fact, it is the men of the Joycean milieu that are the focus of this uncomfortable, twisted, and inspired paean to brutality discreetly indulged. returnreturnAt the same time, Lucia is a work of great assurance and brio. If silencing a voice with much to say creates a vacuum, chimeras are born. Pheby presents these impressively well, often as existentialist riffs, using fairytales, or questions framed (a la Cruiskeen Lawn) as catechisms. One or two might not quite swing, but most are excellent, some inspired. In one excavation passage, the narrator states that ‘Lucia’ ‘has gone to the next life friendless and I will be her friend.’ This brings to the foreground a tone that dominates the novel: indignation that Lucia endured such things. This echoes the scene of the opening of the mouth ceremony which includes the blessing ‘may you emerge vindicated’. returnreturnTo create a monument of words, however nuanced, to relentless dehumanisation places its victim in explicit postures. It degrades the perpetrators by criticism, but without restoring dignity to their victim. But the contribution of dignity, and fulfillment of the statement of intent—‘I will be her friend’—is arguably achieved by ‘Lucia’ being the inspiration for and focus of a work of such exceptional and striking creativity.

Nostalgia comprises three short(ish) stories, and two novellas, each told by a different first-person narrator. A censored version (entitled Visul, ‘The Dream’) appeared in 1989 and the full work as Nostalgia in 1993. An English version was not available until Julian Semilian’s 2005 translation. A shallow internet search brought up two reviews, both of which seemed to miss essential points of the work. Kirkus compared Cărtărescu’s “phantasmagorical world” to Dalí’s images, but this loses the deep-seated uncanniness of Cărtărescu’s writing, its existential uneasiness within the familiar; de Chirico would be a better choice, or Carrington. A Spectator review bizarrely compared Cărtărescu to C.S. Lewis, saying Nostalgia summoned “the wonder and terror of a Danubian Narnia”. Tell me you never read fantasy without telling me you never read fantasy.returnreturnThe stories are impressive, even dazzling, but marred by pervasive essentialist sexism. The female characters are thinly sketched in flat, minor roles, and even in 'The Twins', where one of the main characters is (mainly) a woman, her whole life is dominated by her romantic relationships. The male narrator of 'The Twins' doesn’t flinch from open misogyny when he recalls the childhood experience of being naked with his friend Marcela: “the incipience of contempt insinuated itself in me, while in her, it was the beginning of humility and veneration”. There is also a tendency to use animals as sacrificial victims—itself not an unusual ‘feminine’ role—whose trauma or death either reveals something about the hero, or teaches him An Important Lesson. Such reliance on convenient stereotypes of any ‘other’ acting as a foil to or a mirror of the main character makes for tedious reading. returnreturnThis problematic aspect is outweighed by the quality of what remains. Cărtărescu is an outstanding writer, and his imagination, both wild and elegant, is at its most confident and impressive in the second half of 'The Twins' and especially in 'The Architect', in which the effect of that most banal of sounds, the car-horn, on the central character has, ultimately, cosmic repercussions. The first and least inter-connected story, 'The Roulette Player', has a very distinct charm, gritty, violent, and fantastical, like a Dostoyevskian Bulgakov. returnreturnNostalgia is described by its author as a novel, because the stories are connected ‘subterraneously’. It is not a novel in the sense of a continuous narrative, but the locations feel sustained, like the relationship between the characters and their material environment. All the stories take place in Bucharest, but in its unorthodox, unofficial places – alleys between home and school, the secret locations of an illicit sport, the backrooms of a museum. The environment is uncanny; there is a sense that the demi-monde locations are sorcerous in their effects on the characters. Although recollections of youth form much of the narrative, the original Romanian title is more apt, resonating as it does with intensity of experience, suspension of logic, and dismissal of explanation, rather than with a desire to return to a fondly-remembered past.

Every year, there is a festival in Knockmealdown. Every year, it is rubbish. This year, it might not be just rubbish, it might be lethal.returnreturnBrian Nolan is a recent resident in Knockmealdown, ‘a thick, lumpy soup of legends’, where the annual festival features inedible, peaty, bread, and events so bad that the Tourist Board has warnings against attending. It is also a place that is peculiarly adjacent to the Otherworld – it is said that the Gentry Below were so angry about a pig factory being built there that a boar, Mulkytine, crossed the border and led the freed pigs on a riot. returnreturnAt the same time, Knockmealdown has a sort of Brigadoon element – despite its polluted lake, derelict houses and invasive Helweed, there are still fleeting glimpses of the beautiful place Brian’s father recalled from his youth, where getting a lift on the back of a swan-graceful cow was just the sort of thing that might happen.returnreturnBrian is coerced into helping with the annual festival, along with Derek and Helen (a ‘thick-headed hooligan’ and ‘a horsey princess’ respectively), and this festival is due to be literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. The Gentry Below attend the festival once a century, and this year is the year. The Gentry Below arrive in style, and Brian, momentarily forgetting how they hate being referred to directly, calls them fai…er…uses the f word. returnreturnAs if that isn’t bad enough, he gets bowled into the King and Queen by Fester, a sooty tangle of something with a beak. The monarchs, already furious at the miserable state of Knockmealdown and devastated at the disappearance of their daughter, are in no mood to be forgiving. For the humans to have a chance of surviving the rage of the King and Queen of the Otherworld, Brian (on the advice of Fester) issues the Challenge of the Four Feats to the devious Cluaracan.returnreturnWhat follows is a magnificently bizarre series of adventures. Naturally, everything is stacked against Brian and naturally, the Cluaracan seems to hold all the cards. Every word is devious and twistable, and the action progresses at a hurtling pace as success seems to breed the threat of a following failure. As in the best fai…folktales, it is not cunning but clear-sightedness that wins and in the course of events, the real reasons behind the curse on Knockmealdown are revealed.returnreturnIf there is any unevenness in the tale, it is that the start of the story has a slightly rushed feel, before the narrative gets the bit properly between its teeth. This haste means some of the backstory and location take a second reading, and there is only partial exploration of some really good concepts, especially the ‘wild form’ of the Gentry Below, or banshees on bicycles. At the same time, the story is told at a cracking pace, so there is no time to linger on absences. returnreturnBrian, who narrates, is determined, indefatigable, and quick-witted enough to cope with what is thrown at him, whether it is enchanted dancing or a hurling match resembling something from the Boyhood Tales of Cúchullain. There is also a strong sense of the importance of the location of events, that it is the place, even more than the people, who were cursed, and that maltreatment of the place that both the humans and the Good Folk call home is an action that demands consequence. returnreturnIt is a very satisfying read, not only because of the ingeniousness of the challenges, but the humour and inventiveness with which they are answered, and the latter gives the tale a distinctly joyous feel.

8 Ballo is somewhere between Philip Marlowe and Lieutenant Columbo, with a trace of Nero Wolfe, and is on the dangerous trail of a shimmy-shaking Sheba, a smoky-eyed femme fatale with whom he becomes infatuated. He is a private investigator working out of 1920s Brooklyn, hired by the tough, bigoted 'businessman', Hartmann whose daughter – the eponymous Velma – has gone missing. She may be on a bender in a juice joint, but she may have been abducted. Hartmann has ‘stepped on many toes’ in the course of his career, and a number of the toes belonged to two ruthless mobsters, Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel and his associated Meyer Lanksy.returnreturnThis sets the tone for the book; at every turn, Ballo finds his investigation scoops up another famous name. Dorothy Parker helps out Ballo and his friend-cum-wingman, Pearle. Zelda Fitzgerald’s kitchen is the location for a regrouping. Babe Ruth sits in a corner somewhere being a boor. Ballo impresses the company at the Algonquin Hotel. It sounds heavy-handed, but it isn’t – once the reader accepts the slightly unlikely premise that Ballo’s investigation will bump up against so many aspects of his city, the effect is a good one. It is helped that there is an informed depth to everyone, or to Ballo’s opinion of them.returnreturnBallo is an engaging character; he has a humantities degree and experience of the trenches of World War I, and these seem to be the explanation for his reflective and tolerant nature, meaning it does not seem too ‘modern’ when he brushes against (or gets in a fight with) the racists, the homophobes, and the misogynists. The historical detail is very convincing, and without any sense that opportunities are being manufactured to show it off, and there is a light but firm touch with the secondary characters, too, who are deftly drawn, recognisable but unfussy.returnreturnThe trigger warnings include profanity, violence, death, and sex, but should include abuse, too. The temperament of the book is more 'The Thin Man' or 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' than 'Farewell, My Lovely'. Ballo functions within, but at a remove from, the grimmer aspects of life, so readers might prefer to be alerted to a smack of 'Chinatown'.returnreturnThis is a good, enjoyable read, well-written, observant, and engaging. It balances its resonance with the atmosphere of compromise, violence, and grubbiness that is characteristic of noir, with being solid detective entertainment

Time-slip stories are a familiar trope in all sorts of literature: in books for younger readers, the slippage is usually into the past rather than (as in Wells’ The Time Machine) into the future. In this, The Wild Way Home slips further than usual, landing Charlie Merriam back into the Stone Age. Charlie’s playground is Mandel Forest, with landmarks not just of place but of imagination – Deadman’s Cave, the Spirit Stone – and a river. When Charlie’s brother is born with a ‘tiny, not-right heart’, Charlie runs away to the sanctuary of Mendel Forest, and there encounters an injured ‘wild boy’, Hartboy (both children mishear the other’s name, and are called Cholliemurrum and Harby for most of the story). Hartboy, in circumstances that are not explained, can find neither of his parents, and is desperate to find and protect his baby sister.returnreturnHartboy introduces the recurring theme of ‘make safe’, and the two children essentially take care of each other, Charlie helping Hartboy until he recovers from his concussion, Hartboy helping Charlie escape from wolves. The adventures that surround their attempts to find what is left of Hartboy’s family, and to get Charlie home, are straightforward and engaging, and both are negotiating a level of guilt: Hartboy because he ‘failed’ to take care of his baby sister, Charlie for running away from the shock of a shattered imaginary ideal, and thereby abandoning the much-anticipated sibling.returnreturnA recurring sensibility, if not theme, is the way that the time-slip is represented by different experiences of nature, rather than purely differences between the humans. Charlie’s previous encounters with the natural world have all been positive, and reassuring, where thunderstorms are exciting, animals are pets, hunting is a game. Overwhelmed by the shattering of a confident expectation of life with a new sibling, Charlie tried to reject circumstances by running away. But in the Stone Age, the forest is a wild place, neither playground nor refuge, and the only thing that counts is being able to survive, and help your own to survive. No plan or idea or person, however important or cherished, is immune to the random and impersonal chances of nature.returnreturnFor what is primarily a well-paced adventure story, The Wild Way Home is reflective, and this, along with the presentation of the natural world as a place with its own rich meaning, makes for a very rewarding read. The balancing influence of a wild place is reminiscent of David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness and Skellig, and the connection with the Stone Age will recall also Stig of the Dump.