A glorious journey through early-medieval Britain in a story that brings the many different cultures of the time to vivid life. Artemis is a splendid heroine who highlights the many roles women played in these societies.
Laura kindly sent me an ARC to read and review.
The Eisenhorn novels were the very first Warhammer 40k novels I read about twenty years ago now. Since then, I’ve read many more and, rather improbably, even written some. So I decided to go back to my original door to the 40k galaxy to see how they would read coming at them with the eyes of a writer of these stories as well as a reader.
The answer, of course, is very well. Dan Abnett is a very, very, very good writer, with an unmatched ability to coin words that not just fit into the 40k universe but with a single word engage the reader more fully into that universe.
But now, working from a 40k writer perspective, I’m pretty sure I know how Dan pitched the idea of these novels originally: this was James Bond in 40k. But James Bond with a 40k twist – which means that there’s no sex but even bigger guns. What the Eisenhorn novels and the Bond films share is a breakneck pace with a huge range of exotic locations: unusually for 40k, the stories escape the usual round of polluted hive cities to take in a far wider range of planets, some of which seem like they actually might be quite pleasant to live on (so long as you have money).
In another Bond trope, there’s an unusual emphasis on fine food and drink, with many meals described in loving detail. As an Inquisitor, Eisenhorn unfortunately couldn’t really have an interest in gambling, which is a shame as I’d have loved to have read Abnett’s take on a 40k casino.
As the stories progress, the tie to Bond lessens as the story and characters grow into themselves, but, yes, I still think that’s how they began, when Dan emailed the editors at Black Library and said, “Let’s do Bond in space!”
Ten years ago, I was at the London Book Fair for the launch of the first of my novels about 7th-century Northumbria, Edwin: High King of Britain. I was particularly pleased with the book because it was a fascinating period of British history and no one else had written about it. I had the market all to myself.
Only, I didn’t. At pretty well exactly the same time, Matthew Harffy published The Serpent Sword, the first in his Bernicia Chronicles, telling the story of kings Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu through the eyes and actions of a sometime member of their warbands, Beobrand.
I was, I must admit, pretty gutted. But then I realised that Matthew was going the independent route with The Serpent Sword while I had a proper publisher. I settled back to count my royalties while I let Matthew eat the dust of my sales. With that backing, surely my books would win the battle for Northumbria.
Only, they didn’t. Matthew’s Bernicia novels have sold by the bookshelf, shifting over half a million (!) copies in total. Mine have sold respectable amounts but nothing like as many as his.
So when Matthew put out this book (with Steven McKay, who’s also sold many more books than me) I bought it because, frankly, I wanted to know how he did it.
And that’s exactly what they tell you. With no froth, no spin, no filler: it’s a book to read in an afternoon but with the distilled experience of a combined twenty years in the trenches of writing, publishing, marketing and selling books. As such, it’s invaluable, and I will be putting their ideas into practice. Maybe, just maybe, I might begin to then start catching up!
There aren’t many boys today who grow up with the ambition to fight in a war – but that’s what Roland Bartetzko always wanted to do. Growing up in the old West Germany, there was the chance that he would have to do exactly that, should the Soviet tanks roll West. So Bartetzko enrolled in the German army, training as a paratrooper. But then, in a miracle that was so unexpected we have pretty well ignored it ever since, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended without a shot being fired.
Great for the rest of us, bad for a young German who desperately wanted to test his mettle in a proper war. But in the aftermath of the dissolution of the old Eastern bloc, the old tensions that had been suppressed under communism rose to the surface again, first in what had previously been Yugoslavia. War broke out there, the first war in Europe since the end of World War II. Now Bartetzko had his chance.
Signing up as a volunteer for the Croatian Defence Council, Bartetzko got to taste war at first hand. And not just taste it: he dived in head first. Because this is the strange truth that it’s important we recognise: for most people, war is hell. But there is a small sub group of men for whom war is not life: never do they feel more alive, more energised, more vital than when their lives are on the line. Bob Crisp, South African cricketer, WWII tanker and, according to Wisden, ‘one of the most extraordinary men to ever play cricket’ was one. Crisp later told his son that he “loved the war. He enjoyed it. He thought it was fantastic“.
Another was Adrian Carton de Wiart whose Wikipedia biography famously begins: He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.”
Now we can add Roland Bartetzko to that list. For with the Croatian war over, Bartetzko did not go home to Germany but instead volunteered for the even more shoestring Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting a guerilla war against the Serbs, seemingly against impossible odds, until NATO came to the rescue of the Kosovans.
But this is not a book about why Bartetzko wanted to test himself in battle – he barely touches on that. Instead, it’s actually a manual of what to do and what not to do if you should find yourself fighting as a guerilla against a vastly more powerful enemy. It includes how to set up an ambush, what to do when pinned down by a machine gun, the importance of foot care and many other aspects of practical war craft from a man who knows it better than most people. It’s laconic, clear and honest.
Bartetzko is still the war dog. Too old, he says, to fight against the Russians in Ukraine, he is still near the front lines, bringing supplies and equipment to the soldiers there. It’s a remarkable book from a fascinating man – but a man who appears oblivious or unwilling to ask questions as to his own fascination with war.
There was once a man who became famous throughout the realm for his wit. He played with words, leavening them into the lightest of souffles such that they tripped off the tongue of the players, or wrought them dark and hard as people read of the corruption of innocence. He became a byword for world weary cynicism and any man might quail upon whom the writer turned his tongue.
Yet in his other works, this apostle of abandon and philosopher of despair told tales of the purest innocence, with not a hint of irony nor a soupcon of cynicism; tales of the purest, self-sacrificial goodness, tales to make the hardest man cry and the bitterest woman weep.
Which was the real man? Read them and weep, weep tears of a joy so sharp it hurts.
The mystery is why this was my first reading of James and the Giant Peach. I am 61 years old. The book was first published in 1961 so it’s actually two years older than me. It must have been on the book shelves of the children’s library that was my favourite place to go as a bibliophilic boy. As a child, I read. In fact, reading was pretty much all I did do! My favourite days were the Fridays before bank holiday Mondays because then you could take two books out on a library ticket rather than the usual one, which meant I could borrow eight books rather than the usual maximum of four. But to give you an idea of just how much I would read, I’d normally have finished all eight books by the end of the bank holiday weekend.
Yet in all that time, and among all those books, there were none by Roald Dahl. Now, trying to visualise the library (since closed) in Archway where I went for my books, I am pretty sure there were some by Roald Dahl there. But, for some reason, I must have picked them up, read the blurb, and then put them back again. The only reason I can think of for why I did this is that it was Quentin Blake’s illustrations. I suspect that, as a rather serious-minded boy, I would have found his caricatures off putting. I preferred the more realistic drawings to be found in Enid Blyton books. And then, as I got a bit older, I began to disdain books with pictures. So I think that Roald Dahl fell into the gap between my artistic appreciation and growing taste for more ‘grown-up’ books.
However, the plus side of this is that I can read his books now and come to them completely fresh. And what a delight James and the Giant Peach was. I read it in a morning, while staying at a friend’s house in the country, with everyone else recovering from a surprise birthday party and me settling down upstairs with a book plucked from the children’s (all now grown) book shelf, as the sun shone over the fields.
In particular, the story is a masterclass in drawing characters with a a few words, as exemplified by the caterpillar announcing, “I am a pest,” to James with evident pride. The story is wild, the aunts whom poor James is sent to live with are truly vile, and the giant creatures who travel with him in the giant peach are each marvels of imagination and the writer’s craft. A wonderful book – I will have to read Dahl’s other books!
In 2004, Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, one of the best fantasy novels of the century. In 2006, this was followed by The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories set in the same milieu as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But then we had to wait until 2020 for Piranesi, as astonishing a book as I have read in the last twenty years.
I would like very much, with such an extraordinary writer, to be reading new work from her every year. But reading her novels and stories, it’s clear that this will never happen: Clarke is a writer who sweats the words onto the page. They are pulled out, extracted, removed from somewhere deep within with all the effort and pain that such deep excavation requires: we are fortunate to have had as much as we have had from her.
That’s not to say that the writing is forced or laboured: far from it. What it is, is precise. Every word, fits. Fits precisely into its immediate context, within sentence and paragraph, and its wider context within the story. The stories have the feel of faceted jewels where every face has been cut and polished to perfection. Such polish cannot be achieved save with time and effort: I shudder to think how much thought goes into every page that she has written. So thank you, Susanna. This reader, at least, appreciates what you do very much.
He’s sold millions of books and has thousands of eager readers. I have sold thousands of books and have a few hundred eager readers. But the strange thing is, in most respects I am a better writer than Dean Koontz: my dialogue is better, I don’t grandstand my political views, and I edit out the second purple prose sentence rather than leaving it in.
But there is one area in which Dean Koontz is a much, much better writer than me, and 99.999per cent of other writers: he is the absolute master of the story hook. Of the ‘what if’ idea upon which the story turns, the idea that drags the reader into the story and keeps them there until the end, wanting to know what happens next.
What is astonishing about Koontz is his ability to come up with so many brilliant story hooks, each different but almost all of them compelling. In The Bad Weather Friend, Benny Catspaw, a hero for whom ‘nice’ is a compliment as well as a completely accurate description, has his life systematically dismantled by nefarious forces, only to take delivery of a seven-foot-tall bad-weather friend, a superhuman protector known as a craggle. Frankly, we all could do with a craggle and I wish I had one too. Reading how Benny deals with his craggle, and how the craggle deals with Benny, makes for a wonderfully entertaining story – although, strictly speaking, the title should have a hyphen: The Bad-Weather Friend.
Mr Koontz, I salute you. I may have a better grasp of the craft of writing but you far exceed me in your understanding of its heart: then what happened?
In the canon of Heinlein’s works, ‘juvenile’ actually translates as mature and substantial. His ‘adult’ works on the other hand, generally appear to have been written by a sex-obsessed teenager (‘I Will Fear No Evil’) with a peculiar fascination for incest (‘Time Enough for Love’). So read his juveniles and skip his adult works. ‘Time for the Stars’ ranks among the best of his juveniles, with a notable lack of the usual garrulous father figure character, a fascinating dynamic between the identical-twin lead characters, and a notably deep exploration of the motives and reasons for long-distance exploration.
I first read White Fang as a reading obsessed child, probably when I was about ten. I remember I also read The Call of the Wild at about the same time. I remember I preferred White Fang to The Call of the Wild for two reasons: first, that it has a (relatively) happy ending and, second, because of the dog fight scene, when White Fang, who before had killed every dog put in his way, is defeated by the slow, plodding advance of a bulldog.
Rereading it many years later, if anything my enjoyment of the book increased. What a writer Jack London was. The prologue, of the two men at death’s edge trying to keep alive through the northern winter as they are pursued by a wolf pack, is as visceral a piece of writing as I’ve ever read. Then, as the focus switches to White Fang himself, Jack London proves that a great writer can break just about every writing rule out there.
One of the things they tell you when writing is show, don’t tell. If your hero is a crack shot, have him shoot the ace out of an ace of spades rather than just telling the reader he is a marksman. But in White Fang, Jack London does a lot – a lot! – of telling. He tells us White Fang’s inner life, his outer life, the life of the north, wild and human. He does this because he won’t succumb to anthropomorphism and give White Fang a personal voice: he is a wolf and does not speak. So London tells us what he thinks and feels and does, and he does this so well that the book makes one really believe that this is how an animal thinks and feels and behaves. If one reason to tell a story is to enter into a world that we cannot personally know, then White Fang does this as well as any story ever written.