The trouble with books written in the first person and entirely from the viewpoint of the narrator is that you have to like the narrator, or at least enjoy spending time in his company, for the book to work. Which is sad because Alien Clay, which is otherwise an excellent book with a brilliant narrative twist, has a narrator whom I cordially disliked. There’s no particular reason for the dislike; it’s the literary equivalent of that person who you just don’t click with.

The narrative twist, or technique (which I fully intend to nick!) was this: the hero and a group of comrades find themselves marooned far from base on a planet which the previous two thirds of the book has established as unremittingly hostile and dangerous. But with no hope of rescue, they decide to try to walk back to camp through the alien jungle, a journey which they estimate will take them five days. Everything in the book so far has set this up as virtual suicide and surely the crux of the story. Adrian Tchaikovsky sets his characters off, walking into the jungle, into danger and doom and… The very next chapter is them arriving safely at camp, five days later, with everyone having successfully survived the walk.

It really wasn’t what I expected. The story then splits. Part of the narrative continues forward, telling what happens after they return to camp, while part of the narrative spirals back to their trek through the jungle. And it turns out that what they do in the camp is the result of what happened to them in the jungle. It’s a very clever narrative trick and, as I said, one I fully intend to use myself.

So, despite a narrator I don’t particularly like, the book is so well written that it deserves a four-star rating.