Sometimes, when you read a lot of fiction, it all begins to feel much the same. A monotony sets in: sentence follows sentence, chapter follows chapter, book follows book, all trudging past like prisoners on a death march across a blasted winter landscape. The prose does what it must in order to survive, plodding ever forwards, and once in a while a book misses its step, falls, and receives a shot to the back of the head. (I mean that it gets put down unfinished. Bear with me.)

Then a book comes along that’s filled with such vital, remarkable prose, that it reminds you what fiction is capable of. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is such a book, an explosion of language that leaves the reader wondering, as the publisher might say, How did he do that? This is the kind of prose that makes you want to get up and run around the room, and it’s another feather in the cap of CB Editions, who’ve finally given it a UK publication. (more…)

I have a theory that I revisit once in a while, but don’t often share with others because I suspect it’s largely nonsense. It goes something like this: Each of the main types of genre fiction, e.g. crime, romance, science fiction, etc. in some ways represent a distillation of one element of the writer’s art. So, for example, romance concentrates on character motivation, the drives of the separate characters and how they might conflict or be aligned. Fantasy—when it’s done well—might be said to look at the description of society and social setting. Crime fiction, following this theory, is all about the mechanics of story and plot exposition. After all, crime stories are often (although certainly not always) quite literally about the process of exposing the plot.

So whatever genre a writer might be working—or wanting to work—in, it’s worth taking a little time to explore some of the others and see what might be learned from them. For a lot of writers, the chances are that they’ll start such an exploration with crime fiction. Crime, after all, is often seen as “The genre it’s okay to like”, lacking the stigma of fantasy, sci-fi or romance. So, having decided to explore crime fiction, a writer would want to read some modern authors and the classics. The question of where to begin with an exploration of classic crime fiction has been neatly answered by a new series of Crime Classics from Atlantic Books. (more…) Publishers John Murray have a penchant for thrillers and adventures set around the world, often written by expatriates. One example from last year was The Creator’s Map—Emilio Calderón’s tale of espionage in wartime Rome—and more recently they’ve published The Maze of Cadiz, the debut novel from Aly Monroe.

The Maze of Cadiz introduces British “economic warfare” agent Peter Cotton, who’s set to appear in a series of novels from the author. This first story sees Cotton sent to Cadiz in the closing days of the Second World War. His mission is initially to locate and relieve R A May, a British agent assigned to watch imports and exports in the port, and who seems to have gone rogue, withdrawing large sums of money and not replying to communications. Before Cotton can reach him and discover the reasons for his strange behaviour, May turns up dead. Cotton’s left to tidy up the mess, his only official contact in the region an obstructive vice-consul. (more…)

Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, the debut collection of stories by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, uses compact, unsettling prose to follow the strains of madness and obsession across a dozen generations of a family of doctors.

The early stories in the collection are short and focussed almost entirely on their characters, with just enough period detail to fix them in place and time. This sparseness of setting makes some of the stories seem strangely intangible, like dreams related by somebody who’s just woken up, and adds to the curious atmosphere of the book. Those descriptive details that do exist have an unsettling quality of their own, such as this early description of Dr Olaf van Schuler’s relationship with his mentally ill mother:

When he was home, he sometimes released her so she could pace the thirty-foot length of their single-room dwelling, or kick the straw pallet he slept on. He let her shuck the corn that grew wild in the small lot behind their back door, and stir empty pots, which he set up on the dining table. She liked tangled yarn. He left bundles—in every color—on the floor amidst the clutter. He recited scriptures to her, knelt with her in prayer, and said nothing when she woke late at night to call upon God and plead for forgiveness.

(more…)

I’m doing something a little different for the end-of-year round-up this year. Instead of the best books of 2008, here are some of the titles that I’m sure would have been good… if only I’d got around to reading them. (more…)

Salon.com and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction. Mr. Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Both novels had a lot to recommend them; in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006’s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel).

In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq. (more…)

The Minutes of the Lazarus Club is a story of murder and espionage in industrial nineteenth-century London, the kind of thing that some people call a “gaslight romance”. The central character, George Phillips, is a doctor at St Thomas’s hospital, but the novel’s being sold on a supporting cast that includes Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and even Charles Darwin. Tony Pollard is a well-regarded historian and archaeologist, but how well does he fare when he brings the historical elements into a work of fiction?

A real danger for historians and other academics when they try writing fiction is the tendency to overload the narrative with facts and trivia. The story forgotten, they launch into a technical description of an object or a brief treatise on some aspect of the period, making the reader feel as though they’ve fallen through a hole in the story and landed on somebody’s lecture notes. This is a pitfall that Pollard largely avoids, though: after some early wobbles (the early chapters set in the hospital have some very informative dialogue in them), he does a good job of keeping things relevant to the story, and the historical information serves to colour the goings-on, rather than distract from them. (more…)

Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project opens in Chicago in 1908, with Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Bessarabia, attempting to deliver a letter to George Shippy, the local Chief of Police. However, Shippy takes one look at the dishevelled foreigner on his doorstep, assumes he’s an anarchist, panics, and shoots him dead. (more…) It’s the early nineties, and the city of Sarajevo is under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces. Three characters make their way through the chaos and destruction of the city streets: Kenan, on a journey across town to collect drinkable water for his family; Dragan, held up on his way to work, afraid to cross an intersection covered by a Serb sniper; and Arrow, a Sarajevan sniper struggling to maintain her independence. In the background to all of their lives is the music of the unnamed cellist of the title, who goes out into the street each day for twenty-two days, to play one adagio for each of the victims of a recent shelling. (more…) Lawrence Durrell, best known as the author of the Alexandria Quartet, wrote a total of sixteen novels. Most are still in print, but until this year, his first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have been impossible to get hold of. (more…)

< view newer posts or view older posts >