Book #3 The Twelve by Justin Cronin

The Twelve

I've had The Twelve on my Kindle for about 3 years without reading it. It's the follow up to dystopia The Passage, a trilogy which is due to conclude this year with City Of Mirrors. I've had several abortive attempts at reading The Twelve, in part because I wasn't grabbed by the opening, and because I was struggling to remember where The Passage left off.

I don't quite know how I missed the section at the start of the book, written in biblical style, summarising events up to this point, but I did. Finding it this time made the book easier to get going with, using Wikipedia really helped too. I guess that's what happens when you leave a three year gap between installments.  

Following the end of The Passage our main group of heroes have gone their separate ways, some are missing presumed dead, some are actually dead, and Alicia, for one, has become a creature unto herself neither human nor viral.

After what they learned pursuing Babcock in The Passage, Amy, Peter and co now know that to solve the viral crisis, they must kill The Twelve originators of the plague thereby killing all the virals they individually sired.

Whilst The Passage was an unnerving and bleak novel with a lot of prologue involved, The Twelve is more dramatic set piece after dramatic set piece, action sequences with a clear view to the film adaptation which has been optioned by Ridley Scott.  The cage fighting sequence, the convoy ambush, the stadium, the school bus etc. As such it loses much of its reflection upon the changes in the world.

The flashback to just after the virus broke as we meet Bernard Kittridge 'The Last Stand In Denver' is all really great stuff which ends somewhat prematurely. Other things entirely miss the mark. Lila is a terrible character and the hunt for the Twelve becomes ridiculously over simplified were previously it had much potential for a variety of target take down scenarios.

Given that the entire nation has become literally overrun with these things, at one point they are said to number in their millions; it seems odd then, both that human colonies seem to survive in such large numbers or indeed that 100 years later any are left at all.

There were two things I really actually detested about The Twelve. A lengthy segment ensues in which one of the main characters is trapped in The Homeland - an established colony run by a panto villain named Guilder. Instead of inventing conditions in this oppressive colony Cronin merely borrows from the Holocaust. Inmates have barracks and are starving, they have numbers burned into their arms, they have their heads shaved. Instead of feeling like a subtle allegory, the comparison is like a sledgehammer. To do this felt grotesque to the point of offensive to me.

It also has multiple allusions to rape and rape sequences, which I think many readers would find disturbing.

However, I did manage to read this book, in the end, in two large gulps, it does sort of gallop along with haste in a way that makes it occupy your attention, and ultimately these books are quite long over 500 pages each, so having devoted over 1,000 pages of my attention to this saga, it just wouldn't make sense not to read its conclusion.

I have recently said though, that I wish the publishing world would take note of the fact that pandemic dystopias have somewhat reached saturation point now, and act accordingly. I have certainly reached a 'not another one' malais when seeking out new reading materials, and finishing this trilogy will certainly mark my taking a well earned break from them.

7/10

2015 Challenge : A book with a number in the title.

Book #45 Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Bring Up The Bodies

Bring Up The Bodies is of course the sequel to Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall, charting the career and life of senior Tudor court advisor Thomas Cromwell.

We return to his story exactly where we left off at the titular Wolf Hall where Henry VIII is first introduced to future third wife Jane Seymour. One of the many great things about Wolf Hall was that they arrived there in the last sentence, and you finally know why it is called Wolf Hall in the first place.

I adored Wolf Hall and thought it was one of the most well written and enjoyable Booker Prize winners in years. Therefore it gives me tremendous pleasure to say that Bring Up The Bodies is equally good. The exquisite prose and turn of phrase follow on seamlessly from the first book and it wasn't hard at all for me to totally re-enter that universe despite not having brushed up on a re-read of Wolf Hall beforehand.

I enjoy stories of the Tudor court and have read all of Philippa Gregory's Tudor novels, and watched the laughably bad Showtime series on BBC2. Mantel's novels are a much classier affair however, and by taking the character of Thomas Cromwell, a lesser explored and perhaps enigmatic figure gives a fresh eye on a well told tale. Where Wolf Hall chartered the downfalls of Cardinal Wolsey and Katherine of Aragon respectively, Bring Up The Bodies brings us the downfall of Anne Boleyn, a well documented fall from grace. Anne Boleyn herself remains enigmatic - were the stories about her true or was she much more sinned against than sinning?

This book doesn't offer those answers only Thomas Cromwell's motives: political alliances, satisfying the King's capricious nature by any means necessary, and more interestingly, payback for his personal vendettas. He makes for an intriguing, clever, and foreboding individual which is just what one wants from a protagonist.

It is again, beautifully written and beautifully researched, and I was delighted to hear that there will be a third novel, which history buffs will know will cover the disaster that befalls Thomas Cromwell as Henry's favoured man when Henry finds that he mislikes fourth bride Anne Of Cleeves. I for one can't wait! 10/10           

Book #88 The Hunger Games : Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games : Mockingjay

WARNING : This review may contain spoilers of the previous two Hunger Games novels

Following her unexpected exit from the Allstars Hunger Games arena, Katniss Everdeen finds herself a resident of District 13, a district widely believed to have been destroyed many years before. She comes under intense pressure to become "the Mockingjay" the public face of the rapidly gathering rebellion, but after agreeing, discovers deceptions, ulterior motives and dangers from unexpected sources.

Mockingjay is very different from the previous novels and was less compelling for me in it's opening third. District 13 has to be established as a new society in addition to the continuing rebellion, its a bit slow, and then later, a lot of warfare segments which I'm not a great fan of anyway. What is clever about the depiction of the District 13 rebellion is its emphasis on propaganda, war is less about action and more about persuasion, hearts and minds. I thought this was a really interesting and important message to give young readers to think about. When watching media coverage think about agenda, think about manipulation, think that those purporting to be "right" may not always be what they seem. I liked it.

Where I am more critical however is with some slightly dodgy plotting on a number of occasions in order to get Katniss into the necessary position for the next event. Its weak, its like some of the highly unconvincing plotting that occurs in those awful Disney TV series, Katniss wants something, it looks impossible, she's told its impossible, but somehow it all turns out exactly as she wanted. Sigh.

The Gale/Peeta dilemma interests me as a writer because I actually think that Collins herself couldn't decide what to do with this decision, she doesn't choose the easy way of eliminating the choice, but it is done in a quite lame, anti-climax way. I decided that she really regretted the strength of the origins of one of them and didn't know what to do with him, and even the end resolution for the couple who do become the item, though the right choice, feels unromantic and halfhearted.  

Although, the "fault on both sides" take on war was well done. President Snow still fails to be at all threatening or scary. The pinnacle of Katniss's  desires is to be the one to assassinate Snow and yet, he's only really in two scenes. He just doesn't cut as a bad guy, even with Finnick's testimony to add weight to his crimes.

Still.....very readable, if rather flawed and the trilogy as a whole is massively enjoyable 7/10 

Book #87 The Hunger Games : Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games : Catching Fire

This review contains spoilers of The Hunger Games :

This sequel to The Hunger Games picks up more or less exactly where it left off. Following the choices she made at the end of the last novel Katniss Everdeen has unwittingly become a symbol, not of loves young dream, but of rebellion. Even though it wasn't so much a deliberate rebellion as an awareness she could outsmart the system, she has inspired an uprising and led her family and friends into danger.

Attempting to punish Katniss, the President makes the uprising worse when he forces her to compete in a second Hunger Games tournament, a battle pitting previous victors against one another in a series which reminded me of an "All Star" Amazing Race or Survivor.

Like its predecessor Catching Fire is compulsive and I read it over a matter of hours, it reads like adrenalin feels and you really do want to turn the page. Though it is called The Hunger Games it is less about the new tournament and more about the consequences of the previous one, and that was difficult for two reasons. 1) The Hunger Games game show is the best bit but 2) There is/would have been a danger of simply recycling the same story elements over again like a bad Hollywood sequel. Catching Fire doesn't do this, which is to its credit, but, personally I enjoy The Hunger Games scenario and found the competition angle a bit truncated, though I liked the creativity of the setting of the new arena. It's a tough balance to get right, on the one hand creative credit to Collins for not repeating herself on the other I wanted more....

In this novel, President Snow is presented as the antagonist both for this novel and the final novel Mockingjay, but, he himself, isn't really asserted as a proper villain, an evil man to be feared like for example, Mayor Prentiss from the Chaos Walking Trilogy. He's comparatively weak despite his threats and his intimations that he knows things and is watching. I didn't feel scared by him and didn't feel Katniss was either. He doesn't make a convincing 'big bad'. Even the Peacekeepers don't feel all that threatening. Though the Capitol has been playing The Hunger Games for decades it is hard to believe in it as a genuine sinister enemy when its citizens are so frivolous and weak and hard to see how it has maintained its hitherto lengthy hold on these Districts. I feel like this could have done with further exposition in the previous book as well as this one.

In addition the difficulty Collins has given herself with her Bella/Jacob/Edward esque love triangle (Twilight) with Katniss/Peeta/Gale is that Gale is given less time than even before to develop into a more rounded 3D character. It is Peeta who the reader has come to know and love despite the angle that Gale is meant to be Katniss's true love and best friend. Like the way in which Bella/Jacob doesn't quite work after establishing a romance with Edward, Katniss's love for Gale though he came first, has been outshone by Peeta's devotion in the original novel and continued self sacrifice in Catching Fire.

All in all an enjoyable 8/10 despite its inability to truly establish the feeling of "an enemy".

 

Book #48 The Portable Door by Tom Holt

The Portable Door

The Portable Door by Tom Holt was recommended to me by several followers on my Twitter account as a good fun fantasy novel, and a good introduction to Holt himself a writer these followers liked.

In The Portable Door, following what appears to be the world's oddest and most disastrous job interviews Paul and Sophie are appointed as junior clerks to J.W Wells & Co. From the start, their office is odd, and they can't really quite make out what it is that the company does....

I think I need to say again, that fantasy isn't really my thing, I've never been into Pratchett or his peers, and the closest I've come to really loving a fantasy novel is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which, in theory, I loved more for its interesting philosophical questions than any fantasy element. Anyone I've ever recommended that book to has likewise been very impressed with it.

However, Jen recently recommended me the 'A Song Of Ice And Fire' Series which I read in April and are reviewed in this blog. I now consider myself a massive fan of the series. So, when the TV series began in the States, and a review in the New York Times by Ginia Bellafante said :

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

 I was INCENSED by what I saw as horrifying sexism, and also by its implication that the incest subplot was particularly attractive to women, whereas I have known women to cease reading the novel because of the storyline. I hated the implication that women, or rather normal women, could not or should not enjoy A Song Of Ice And Fire or fantasy novels in general.

Therefore it pains me to say that to a certain degree I felt that The Portable Door was a decidedly male novel. In my head, its average reader, is a man, possibly spotty, who does a mundane day job, probably in computing, has difficulties socially, and potentially lives with his parents and/or has a large collection of comics. I've been involved with a man not unlike that, and it's him I see as the target audience for this novel. On the other hand, I am a woman who owns a Spiderman hoodie, loves superhero movies and knows far more about computers than I do about either make up or shoes. So, this leaves me a bit torn, I am possibly guilty of as big a sin as Miss Bellafante by considering this book "male". In the end I have to say that there's something in the narrative voice that makes me feel that way, something that isn't present in A Song Of Ice And Fire, like Holt, in his mind, has a solely male audience too.

I didn't particularly like either awkward, slightly neurotic Paul, or rude, abrasive Sophie and that's a problem, considering they are the 'leads' in the novel. I think it also suffers from my having read it in too close a proximity to Rivers Of London and Moon Over Soho. Those books deal with a magic department within the Metropolitan Police and The Portable Door is about a company dealing in magic, so there is some similarity, but the former are just better books.

Where I DID like it though, was really, when it got going, and Paul and Sophie discover more and more about the organisation in which they work. There's magic, and goblins and a pretty decent mystery going on. Paul gets sexually harrassed by his boss's Mum, and that's quite a fun subplot.

Another criticism is that I wondered why it always seems necessary in some novels to have a romance between the protagonists, a man and a woman never seem able to be just mates with a really great friendship or working partnership. It sort of leaves you thinking : "You're going to get together anyway, so just get together now and let's have done and get on with the rest of the story".

When reviewing Moon Over Soho, I mentioned that its "current" vibe may inevitably date it. In this novel Holt references Esther Rantzen's chat show and "Cilla's Blind Date" neither of which have been broadcast in about ten years, the references aren't strictly necessary either and I think its something writers need to consider. Although, there is nothing worse than what Sebastian Faulks did in 'A Week In December' where he invents new names for things you recognise from popular culture such as calling the Costa Award by some other name or calling MySpace "YourPlace", so you know what he's actually referring to but the name is all wrong, terribly annoying and pointless. That's a terrible book anyway avoid it like the plague.

In the end, I warmed to The Portable Door, after say the first third, once the action got underway. At the end of the day, I'm a sucker for magic, and that's what saved it, but I am incredibly torn in my overall opinion. Ultimately, there are two further books in The Portable Door story, 'In Your Dreams' and 'Earth, Air, Fire and Custard'. As with Shikasta and The Crystal Cave, I'm interested enough to eventually read the follow ups to see how it all turns out but not so interested that I'll be rushing immediately to do so, the way that I did with A Song Of Ice And Fire.

There was one quote I particularly liked regarding the perils of dealing with people who know magic and that was:

The very worst your kind can do to each other is kill someone. That's practically Vegan when you consider what we get up to sometimes. 

Overall my reaction to the book was mixed and I think I'll only give it a 6/10

Book #33 The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

The Crystal Cave

One of the most enduring legends of British culture is the story of King Arthur and his magician Merlin. The Crystal Cave is another re-telling of that story. Well, I say "another" it was published in the 1970's originally and drew my attention based on the fact that it was in the list of great forgotten reads alongside Cronin's 'Keys Of The Kingdom'. My copy is second hand and rather quaintly cost £1.50 at time of publication, imagine paying £1.50 for a paperback now...I am reliably informed however that £1.50 in its day would have been considered roughly the same as £6.99 now.

This story differs from the usual in that it focuses entirely on Merlin. The Crystal Cave is the beginning of a trilogy and is followed by 'The Hollow Hills' and 'The Last Enchantment'. I believe that a fourth novel 'The Wicked Day' was later added as an afterthought. Arthur does not appear at all in the novel, having not yet been born the story concentrating instead on Merlin's life before Arthur, beginning with him aged six, and chronicling his childhood and the developing of his magic skills.

Much of Merlin's magic with the exception of when he falls into trances and prophesises, is that which we would call maths or science today which reminded me of the Arthur C Clarke quote:

" Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

In Merlin's time, engineering was advanced science and therefore magic. Merlin's people skills also make it appear to others he can read minds when actually he just has good intuition and is pretty astute. I liked the addition of this element of realism to the tale making it less far fetched than some Arthurian stories. Set in 5th Century Britain, Stewart writes in the notes at the end that Arthur was probably a real man which is something I was never sure about and Merlin a composite of several different men associated with him. The idea of Merlin the magician has endured however, and I think most of us would like it to be true.

I can't understand why as someone who reads such little fantasy I've read so much of it lately, perhaps because it is escapism from the tolls of daily life. The Crystal Cave though about Merlin bears more similarity in setting and tone to A Song Of Ice And Fire rather than say Harry Potter and I think this is in its favour. It also bears zero resemblance to the poorly written and badly acted Saturday family series Merlin on the BBC so hurray for that.

Overall, I think that I preferred the first half of this book covering Merlin's childhood and adolescence a quick, enjoyable read over the second which dealt with political changes in early Britain which was slow reading and slightly bored me. The next book in the trilogy picks up were this left off and covers the childhood of Arthur, at least I think it does, and so is the beginning of the Merlin/Arthur story, and I will probably pick it up and read it at some point. I felt it was a competent, enjoyable novel, yet not a compulsive one.  I also think it has more potential as a young adult crossover novel than as strictly 'adult contemporary fiction'.

I am a bit worried that I've fallen behind with the Challenge I really need to read 7 more by the end of May so that I have a chance of being halfway with 50 books by the end of June, halfway through the year. 7 books in 17 days seems a bit of an impossible goal.  I haven't dug myself into a hole quite yet there is time for my numbers to even out so fingers crossed, wish me luck.

The Crystal Cave gets 7/10

Book #1 - Monsters Of Men by Patrick Ness

Monsters Of Men

Monsters Of Men in the final book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness. It's virtually impossible to write about Monsters Of Men on its own without spoiling the entire trilogy for those who haven't read it, so instead I'm going to write about the trilogy as a whole. The first book, The Knife Of Never Letting Go was read by a friend of mine who came by it through work and enthused about how great it was, I eventually got round to reading it late last year as part of my holiday reading. The Chaos Walking Trilogy to my understanding, is marketed at teenage boys in the Young Adult section of libraries and book shops. I'm a 29 year old woman with an English degree specialising in the Classics, and I thought this trilogy was utterly fabulous to a degree that I have a writers jealousy at not having written it myself. In the first book 'The Knife Of Never Letting Go' we are introduced to Todd, the last boy left in his town, Prentisstown, all the other boys having past the age of 13, the age at which a boy becomes a man in his community, and finally his birthday is approaching.

Through the writing we learn that Todd and his community are settlers from our own planet earth, who have come to a new planet and colonised it. We learn that when they arrived, three things happened:

a) Some kind of virus wiped out the female population leaving only the men left alive

b) The effect of the virus on the men and the animals meant that all their thoughts could be heard, the sound of all their thoughts creates The Noise, a permanent collective buzz in their community.This affords no man privacy or secrets. Comically, The Sheep, mostly say 'Sheeep' and Todd's dog Manchee doesn't say much more than 'Todd' and 'I need a poo' but you understand the oppressive nature of having no private thought for all concerned.

c) Following their arrival the humans had a war with the indigenous population The Spackle which they successfully won.

And then, just as he approaches manhood, Todd comes across a surprise in the marshes...it's a girl...a human girl.   
   

And so, the trilogy begins. Although I can't say much about this book, Monsters Of Men, what I can say about the overall trilogy is that its fantastic and compelling, making you desperate to read the next book once you've read the first, an example of how dystopian fiction can be done for young people, I've never read anything like it in that age group. I found Monsters Of Men slightly disappointing for certain reasons and so can only give that book 7/10 but the entire trilogy is a 10/10 MUST READ.

If you have teenage children, get it for them and sneakily steal it, and if you don't just get it anyway!!!