Flashforward

Two book blog posts in a day – bliss (I have bad hayfever so am only capable of reading – whilst simultaneously holding a tissue over my nose).

Flashforward on TV never totally grabbed me, it was a bit too American and those FBI agents annoyed me, so I stopped watching it after a while, although the husband continued to do so and if I happened to be in the room whilst he was watching it, I knew just about enough to follow what was going on. So when I heard that the Flashforward book was quite different, I was interested.

And Flashforward the book is very different, no annoying FBI agents for a start (phew!) and instead it concentrates on the two scientists Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides who work in CERN, where most of the action takes place. Rather bizarrely, even though one of the scientists in Flashforward the TV series had the same name, when picturing the characters as I read I imagined the actor who plays the scientist Simon Campus (Dominic Monaghan) playing Lloyd Simcoe in the book and the actor who plays Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) in the TV series playing (in my head) the character of Theo Procopides in the book. In the book Lloyd Simcoe in the more senior, more together of the two scientists and Theo the junior partner, whereas in the TV show it’s the character of Simon Campus pulling the strings and is, for want of a better word, slightly more worldly. So it’s weird, like they’ve taken the two characters and swapped them around.

Of course the names are not the only difference; there is no sinister plot in the book, the Flashforward is the result of an accident and most importantly the resulting Flashforward is not of a few months ahead but instead thirty years, therefore Flashforward the book is a lot more sci-fi than the TV series. There is a lot of discussion of the theoretical physics that may or could be involved, with lots of physicist characters sitting round in the staff canteen giving lectures to other physicist characters (and who would therefore already know – that always bugs me) about various interpretations on reality, free will and quantum dynamics and to be honest after a while I was beginning to skim read those bits, as they were a little boring and didn’t seem to be advancing the plot.

There are some similarities to, there is a character (who like the FBI character in the TV series) knows he’s going to be murdered because he doesn’t get a Flashforward and there are various romances.

Overall it was an interesting read, if not initially attention grabbing (the opening chapter with its geographical description of CERN read like the very long opening of a slightly sleepy New Scientist article).I don’t read much sci-fi for adults and I felt slightly jaded when I got close to the end of the book and there was a sequence which seems to be in all the sci-fi books I do read, something I always equate to that weird sequence at the end of 2001. But despite all that, worth reading.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (and Kindle iPhone app review)

One glance at the contents of my iPhone and you’d see that I’m the sort of sucker who downloads anything and I’m always willing to give something a go, so I downloaded the Kindle iPhone app quite a while ago and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second in the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series featuring Lisbeth Salander, the girl with Asperger’s, a mysterious past and a tendency to kick back. A quick play with it made me realise that although the Kindle app on iPhone is better than the only other iPhone e-reader that I had so far tried, the stand-alone The Left Hand of God app (which I think was a free first three chapters and I didn’t even get to the end of the first chapter because the page control was so clumsy), I still wasn’t going to get through this book at a great rate of knots. If anything because the best place for me to read is the bath and I ain’t about to take my iPhone into the bath with me (which basically says about me then that until they invent a waterproof e-reader, e-books are always going to be second best for me). So whilst I’ve been reading The Girl Who Played with Fire, I’ve had lots of other paperback books on the go at the same time, books meant for the bath but crept into other reading times as I became more interested in them than in Larsson. It also doesn’t help that with a paperback book you obviously can’t check your twitter, e-mail or RSS feeds and sometimes picking up my iPhone for a few pages before my head hit the pillow meant my finger was straying from the Kindle icon to another icon instead. However the very negatives caused my trying to read on my iPhone, also proved a bonus, as I’m never normally that organised if I’m out somewhere to take a book, whereas I always take my phone and over the last few weeks I’ve had quite a few appointments where I’ve been sitting waiting in waiting rooms on my own and being able to whip out my phone and read has been lovely.

So, as a result I’ve read The Girl Who Played with Fire quite piecemeal and consequently there were a few scenes when I had trouble remembering which bad guy was which. It was also slightly disconcerting that a bad guy character that Salander devoted quite a lot of time to at the beginning of the book turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story (I kept reading expecting to find a link and never did). However Salander as usual is a wonderful, unusual heroine and the final, relatively close to the end, revelation as to what exactly “All That Evil” was, was a surprise I hadn’t seen coming. I will be reading the next book.

Sphinx

I bought Sphinx by TS Learner as I’m in the middle of editing my own Egyptian novel and I try to read anything Egypt related that catches my eye, although this book is adult fiction and my book is for 9-12 year olds. This book was a struggle to get into, the descriptions of the places were great but the plotting was a bit dense and it was ages before anything of interesting significance actually happened, particularly as the early parts of the book were taken up with the character of Isabella, an archeologist, who is thankfully killed quite early on (trust me, that is not a spoiler). For the rest of the story we follow her husband in a quest to do something with the final artefact his wife has discovered and I say ‘do something’ because for the majority of the book he doesn’t actually know what he’s meant to do with it. The book does pick up a bit about half way through as Isabella’s husband (see the book is so memorable and even though I’ve only just finished it, I can’t remember the character’s name) is chased by various bad guys and he meets various side characters who are significantly more interesting than himself but towards the end the book lost me a bit again as it changed from an action thriller to a more mythological type story, consequently it took ages for me to finish this book because I kept finding better things to do, like falling asleep!

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Another audiobook (I’m getting through them at a rate of knots at the moment, although this one is fairly short), Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ had always intrigued me, if anything I was highly attracted to the font used on the cover, but it also sounded interesting. Actually read by Pullman himself (and he’s a good narrator, although the particularly rough beggars did sound a little odd with thick Northern accents), it is a retelling of the story of Jesus but in Pullman’s version Mary did not have one child in the stable, she had two, twin boys, Jesus, a healthy robust child and Christ, a sickly mummy’s boy. At first it seems that Christ is the chosen one, performing small miracles and studying the holy books, whilst Jesus plays with his mates in town. But as the two grow up Christ sees the attraction in a highly organised religion where miracles are performed as proof of God, in effect a way to get in the punters, whereas Jesus sees his relationship with God as highly personal and although is showing signs of also being able to perform miracles absolutely does not want word to get out about them, he also finds the idea of organised religion abhorrent.

It soon becomes even clearer that Jesus is the ‘chosen one’ and he gathers together his band of disciples and starts to travel round the country, whilst Christ stays in the background, recruited by a mysterious Stranger to record Jesus’ words. At first he records the words faithfully but with the encouragement of the Stranger begins to edit his brother’s words and events that surround them, so that would fit more closely to Christ’s and the Stranger’s ideal of bringing together the Church.

Written in the style of a fable, this wasn’t a particularly enjoyable listen / read. I listened almost because it felt ‘good for me’ if anything else, put it this way, it’s not a story you could relax to and I found I had to concentrate more to stop my attention drifting elsewhere. Luckily, although short, the audiobook is sectioned into some very short chapters, so it’s easy to skip back if you’ve realised you’ve missed something.

I’ve read a lot of writing advice in my quest to become published myself and you often come across the advice of ‘try not to write with an agenda’ , obviously agendas are probably a pretty common source of inspiration across literature but I think in most cases they’re a lot more heavily disguised. The veneer of Pullman’s agenda was paper thin and it was obvious I was listening to a rant against organised religion. Note the emphasis on the word organised, I don’t think Pullman has anything particularly against people having a personal relationship with a God, more against what organising that relationship does, the bodies of people decreeing arbitrary rules, the dislike of people different from you and the editing of stories to fit their own purpose.

Overall it was interesting though, I particularly enjoyed the more subtler touches, like the angel appearing to Mary disguised as a boy from the village as so not to alarm her (when Pullman had already made it clear earlier in the text that the boys from the village had found her attractive) and in another section where a dove flies over Jesus as he is baptised, Christ at first imagines what the dove would say if it was a messenger from God and then goes onto claim later on that he actually heard the dove speak.

Under the Dome

Yep, another audiobook I absolutely adored. This is the second Stephen King novel I have read / listened to, I hadn’t read any at all until I read his book On Writing, which made me resolve to read at least some of his fiction work, so I read Duma Key, which I liked but was a little disappointed by the ending. However when Under the Dome popped up as an option on my Audible account, I have to admit one of the principle things that attracted me to it was its length (35 hours), because as far as that account goes I prefer maximum wordage for my buck, so I downloaded it.

My first impressions weren’t particularly favourable, I thought the narrator Raul Esparza had an annoyingly sleepy tone of voice, so as he described the main character Barbie fleeing the town of Chester Mills after a confrontation with the second selectman’s son Junior and his cronies the night before and suddenly this impenetrable, invisible dome comes down, blocking his escape and killing the occupants of a plane and several motor vehicles that crash unknowingly into it, as well as a woodchuck that it cuts in half, it’s as if Esparza is going to fall asleep any minute.

However as I got into the book and got to know more of the vast legion of characters that occupy Under the Dome, I began to appreciate Esparza’s talents a lot more, as most of the time he was very good at voices (except for the very elderly characters who inexplicably all sounded aristrocratically English, I don’t know, maybe that’s what happens to the Maine accent as its occupants get older) and I soon descended into that blissful audiobook state where it wasn’t like having a book read to me, it was more like listening to a movie with my eyes shut. I even appreciated the way how Esparza read out the chapter numbers, varying his voice according to the character featured in that section and their emotion, flat, happy, scared.

The cast of characters in Under the Dome, like I said, was a very long list and King provided an expert lesson in switching point of view for all of them, written in third person, you still felt as if you were in each character’s head in turn, from the brilliantly, horribly, nasty Big Jim, father of the aforementioned Junior and the town’s second selectman and used car salesman, who seizes the town’s entrapment for his own personal little dictatorship, but in his mind genuinely believes it’s the right thing to do and it’s God’s will; to his violent son Junior who even scares his own father and is harbouring a problem that sees this character descend into being the most horrifying monster; to Barbie, the short order cook and Iraq War veteran, who become’s Big Jim’s Boogie Man; Julia the repressed editor of the local newspaper; Rusty the town’s physician’s assistant, forced to become it’s only doctor; the skateboarding kids who add some mobility to the action; even Horace, Julia’s Corgi has a significant role that we see from his viewpoint and there are so many more important characters on top of that. King also occasionally switches to omnipresent narrator, at one point literally taking us for a walk through the town, visiting each character in turn just before the proverbial hits the fan, sort of emphasising this is what we’ve got and this is what we could lose.

As for actual plot, there’s plenty, hinted above with Big Jim and his monster of a son Junior, I don’t want to risk spoiling the plot too much with a review, as there are plenty of surprises, particularly at the beginning when we learn the characters motivating secrets. So I’ll just say imagine what would happen in your town if you were suddenly cut off by an impenetrable dome and the people making a play for power had motives you had absolutely no idea about and were prepared to do anything to defend them. Add into the mix a drug crazed religious lunatic lurking in the woods on the outskirts of town and the children of the town having fits were the hallucinations they see are all the same and hint at something terrible happening at Halloween, alongside the physical effects on the local climate the dome is causing and you have one exciting book.

And that book’s long lead up made me worry, as I mentioned in the beginning of the review, I liked most of King’s Duma Key but not so much the end, was the same going to happen here? King had made escape from the Dome seem impossible, so how was it all plausibly going to end? I of course won’t say how it ends but will say that King ties in everything  very nicely, bringing together aspects of the characters scattered throughout the book and bringing it all together to make a very believable ending.

Pandaemonium (Audiobook)

Warning: I’m about to gush over another audiobook

I’m using my Audible account to catch up with books I want to read, but haven’t quite got round to yet and Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre was high up there on that list. I love Christopher Brookmyre books, he’s one of the few authors where I make a point of reading all their work but I was a little disappointed by his last book, A Snowball in Hell, it wasn’t as funny as his others, however Brookmyre principally is not a comedy writer, he’s also a lot more than a thriller writer to, in fact I’m not quite sure what he is, but he’s brilliant and from listening to Pandaemonium, he’s improving his game all the time.

Once again, there wasn’t a laugh out loud, split your sides moment in this book either, although plenty of wry moments, but I can see where he’s going with that now, for a start having a laugh out loud, split your sides moment in a book featuring deep philosophical discussions on the nature of religion, quantum physics, the nature of responsibility and the effect of a teen killing, growing up as a teenager and at the end, an absolute blood bath, may not have been totally appropriate.

Christopher Brookmyre is like Dan Brown souped up on speed and an intelligence implant; tackling one of Brown’s favourite topics in this book, the Catholic Church, Brookmyre has us following a group of teenagers and their teachers on a retreat in the Scottish Highlands, to recover from a brutal killing in their school. He also takes us into a secret underground base, where there is an unusual anomaly which has made the MOD reach for the Vatican on their speed dial. You can guess where the teenagers are staying; above the underground base.

There is a vast cast of characters and Brookmyre in particular portrays the teenagers very very well, which in comparison with the adult characters, makes the adult characters a little more indistinct, but only because the teenagers are written so well. My only criticism of the teenagers is that they seem to be extremely intelligent teenagers, who despite obviously being sex, drink and video gamed obsessed, alongside mucking around in class, must have been paying attention somewhere. Brookmyre writes the teenage girls in particular extremely well, with their multitudes of insecurities. Each teenager character is well rounded and distinct from the other teenagers, even to an extent when I reached a point where we were with two female characters and I sat there listening and I thought about one of the girls, “I bet she reads Neil Gaiman” and a few minutes later, the character pulls out a copy of Sandman from her bag and uses it to make a pertinent plot point.

Down in the secret base there is a battle between the scientists, the military and the Vatican. There are some good parts here to, I particularly liked one of the character’s ponderings about hell on earth, where at several points he wonders whether he actually died during an accident months ago and failed to realise it and instead hell has come to him. An idea echoed by the teenagers a little later in the book.

There is lots of talk of parallel universes, alternate time lines and dark matter, which I lapped up with enthusiasm. I always like it when my fiction reading / listening, coincides with some non-fiction reading / watching, as I’m also in the middle of reading Michael Brooks 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and he talks about dark matter a lot in that.

The latter half of the book is very violent, as the daemons that having been coming through the anomaly make their appearance. I loved how the violence was very sudden. You see it on TV and with a lot of writers, if something is going to happen, you get the build up, the anticipation, if it’s TV, the creepy music and that can be great for building anticipation, but with Brookmyre it was so sudden and unexpected (even though you had an obvious idea that the daemons were going to appear at some point), so almost matter of fact, it made it a lot more shocking. There are scenes with characters talking to each, seemingly safe, you think they’re safe, they look as if they’re playing out completely different plot points altogether and then mid sentence someone gets a knife in the throat.

There are some really thought provoking discussions in this book about the battle between religion and science and how we create what we perceive and how our behaviour can affect others, a really good book.

On a final note, this audiobook was narrated by Kenny Blyth, another skilful narrator to add to my personal list of favourite narrators.

The Children's Book

Ok, please excuse me whilst I gush, but I absolutely loved this book, adored it. I listened to it in audiobook format and in audiobook it is long, over 30 hours I think, so only liking to listen to audiobooks when I’m alone with no risk of being disturbed, it took me a while to listen to this (as I don’t get that much me time). I started listening in November and finished listening today and was almost sad for the recording to finish, the lives of the families in The Children’s Book, growing for such a long amount of listening time, I wanted to know what happened next. The audiobook was helped massively by its narrator, Nicolette McKenzie, who was fantastic , she does a lot of work for Radio 4 I think, her range of voices was fabulous. I’ve listened to audiobooks now where if it’s a male narrator, all the female characters sound the same and the male characters not much better, basically it sounds like the narrator slightly altering their voice and the same with female narrators, but with McKenzie, her voices all sounded so different, it was less like listening to a book being read to me and more like listening to a radio play.

As for the story itself, well, put it this way, it’s the first time I’ve listened to an audiobook and then gone out and bought the book to. I just know this will be a book I’ll listen to or read again, over and over and for me, very few books reach that distinction (I know lots of people who have a whole league of books they like to reread, but I normally much prefer reading something new).

The story is set between 1895 and 1919, a period of time I’ve always found interesting (I was always glad at school, that my history GCSE ended up being the modern history syllabus) and one I found even more interesting about the time I started listening to The Children’s Book, as I’d recently watched Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain, a programme I’d found fascinating.

The Children’s Book is a little bit of a weird book, it almost reads like a work of non-fiction in places, as if someone has written the biography of a group of families that used to party together, a little imaginatively in some places and quite dryly in others, with lots of in 1907 so and so did so and so, sort of thing. AS Byatt has interspersed her characters with real life people and events, which made the whole thing seem even more real.

The story starts in 1895, with the discovery of a scruffy looking boy called Philip hiding in the museum that was to become the V&A, by Tom, the son of a famous writer of children’s books and Julian, the son of one of the museum keepers. Tom’s mother, Olive Wellwood, is meeting Julian’s father, Prosper Cain, in an attempt to research material for one of her books. The boys bring Philip in front of Prosper Cain and Olive decides that Philip needs to come home with her, to Todefright, a beautiful bohemian home in the country, full of children, beautiful things and imagination. Philip, who just wants to make pots, ends up going to live in Purchase House, somewhere completely different from Todefright, with the (what we would these days call) bipolar genius potter Benedict Fludd and his dysfunctional family. It turns out though that things aren’t so functional in Todefright either.

We follow the Cains, two separate branches of the Wellwoods, the Fludds, Philip and his sister and various German relatives, as the children in the families grow up and go through historic events such as the suffragette movement and head unknowingly towards the Great War. There are deaths and marriages and births and with each event you feel (or at least I felt) simultaneously happy (in the case of a marriage for example) for the couple and sympathetic towards the characters that are going to have the nose out of joint by the event. I caught myself several times smiling and going “Awww” at happy events, something I think you only get when a writer has made the characters seem so real that you actually care for them*.

I loved how AS Byatt zoomed and soared throughout the book; taking a very expansive view at some points (notably at the beginning of chapters) and then zooming in on minute details. As I settled into the book, I began to learn instinctively that the zooming in on detail meant that something was going to happen. It’s not a trick exclusive to AS Byatt I know, but I thought she did it very well, it felt like the hush before a storm, almost like the creepy music or the ramping up of the score, on TV or film. There were, for me, a couple of key events in the book, where suddenly everything changed and you knew that they were coming, with this trick. The character of Dorothy, just simply undressing after a ball at the V&A (I won’t say what the event was that came immediately after the undressing scene, but oh my jaw dropped) or the character Tom walking along the beach, after a spectacular case of bad parenting, with my favourite lines in the whole book, simply a description of walking of pebbles;

You have to think about walking on pebbles. Every time you put your feet down, the pebbles impress themselves, hard and recalcitrant through the soles of your shoes.

That makes me feel the pebbles through my shoes, reading that.

From a personal viewpoint I love how AS Byatt has written in one book about my twin loves; writing and craft (although the principal craft featured is pottery, there is silver smithing and a little embroidery to). She even writes heavily about the V&A to (my favourite museum). The amount of research she must have done is amazing and yet she has skillfully inserted it into the book, yes at times it feels like a lecture, but for once that leads to the curious non-fiction tone of the work and is far better than some books I’ve read where you’ve had characters in the beginning of books sitting in pubs giving lectures to each other, just so the reader is up to scratch with the history of the period before the story actually begins.

It’s an odd book in another way in that it includes, throughout the story, stories for Olive Wellwood and some poetry from one of the other characters. I liked Olive’s fairy stories, they added a dream like quality to the whole thing.

As for the climax, the Great War, I have to admit, I don’t read many war stories and I’m sure there are lots of them out there that make it sound as grim as it actually was but I think the length of time we had got to know these characters, from childhood, prior to the war, made their horrible deaths even more horrible.

All in all, there are few books that make me wish that I was actually there, the early 20th century sounds such a fascinating era to grow up in, not the easiest of eras, I have to admit, but at least for the middle class, there seemed so much hope and opportunity for change, so many ways they felt they could go about it. Yet there was still the painful class divide and the restrictions, just breaking down, on what women could do. But I’d have loved to have been at one of their Fabian camps, throwing pots, putting on plays, earnest discussions late at night . . .

*This is where I become, very probably the only person ever to invoke 24 in a review of The Children’s Book, but it was a similar effect in last night’s episode where, over the phone (what was it about last night’s episode? It seemed like about 80% of the key conversations were over the phone) Jack Bauer and Renee Walker, very simply declare their, well at least affection, for each other**. It made both me and Mr. Lacer go “Awww” involuntarily and you only get that when knee jerk response at a character’s happiness when the writers have put in enough effort to make you care about them.

**You of course now know, this being 24, that Rennee now has to die.