Confession of a laggardly book reviewer: I finished this book several months ago but I’ve only now got around to writing a review. Unfortunately, sitting down to write my review, I realised I couldn’t remember anything about the book. So, cheating, I looked up some other reviews. And I still can’t remember the story.
So I think we have to chalk this novel down as one Koontz’s misses. However, since I do know that I whipped through the book in pretty quick time when I read it, it can’t be all bad, just forgettable. So maybe a three-star read.
When I was growing up, I would sometimes hear my mother talking to my Nonna and be completely baffled by what they were saying. They were speaking dialect. My mother’s family comes from a little village in Piedmont, Italy called Pavone and my mother’s first language was not Italian but dialect. The dialect of her village lay midway between Italian and French. So, for instance, hot and cold in dialect were cald and fredd but in Italian they are caldo and freddo and in French chaud and froid.
But to give an idea of just how specific these dialects were, there would sometimes be words I overheard that completely stumped me. I asked my mother once what they had been talking about and it turned out that my Nonna had been using a dialect word from her native village, which was about 20 kilometres away from where she lived once she got married, and that word was completely different from the Pavone dialect. That’s how regional Italian dialects were.
Which brings me on to Pinocchio. When Carlo Collodi wrote the story in 1881, Italy had only been unified into a single country for ten years. The problem was, while it was now politically one country, most of the country could not speak, nor understand, most of the rest of the country. Everyone spoke their own dialects of Italian, with many of these so different from each other as to be mutually unintelligible.
It’s hard to maintain a country where people don’t speak the same language. Italian nationalists had decided that the Florentine dialect, in which Dante, Boccaccio and Manzoni had written, was the purest and best form of Italian, the one to be elevated to the status of national language. But Dante and Manzoni are not exactly classroom texts – and still less Boccaccio, whose tales in the Decameron can still make the readers’ eyes widen in shock at their sheer rudeness; certainly not acceptable in 19th-century classrooms.
Which was where Carlo Collodi stepped in. His tale of the wooden boy, crafted by Giappetto the carpenter, who comes to life but has an unfortunate tendency towards nose-lengthening lying, became hugely popular when published and immediately found its way into Italian classrooms up and down the land.
So it was Pinocchio, the wooden boy with the big heart but spectacularly poor judgement in friends, who taught generations of Italians to be able to speak to each other in the same language. Very few stories have been so crucial in a nation’s history. Indeed, without Pinocchio, there’s a good case for saying that the always fissiparous elements of Italy would have split apart into their constituent republics, duchies and kingdoms, all of which had longer histories and more deeply ingrained loyalties than the Italian state.
A little wooden boy became the father of modern Italy. Che sorpresa!
As none of us have much of it, let’s cut to the marrow: this is a book about time as understood through the equations of special and general relativity. So it’s to do with frames of reference, the speed of light, and lines of causation. It’s not a philosophical history of time, still less a mythical or religious view. But if you want a clear and concise formulation of what Einstein’s equations tell us about time within the constraints of relativity, then this is your book.
There is a memorial plaque screwed to a bench in my local park. “John Townson, greatly missed, never forgotten.”
I remember John Townson. I do miss him. But the plaque would be more honest if it read: “John Townson, greatly missed, will be utterly forgotten in 80 years.”
The vast majority of us make our way through this world and then leave it, to some regret, some tears, and protestations of eternal remembrance. But the truth is that most of us will be completely forgotten within two generations of our deaths.
Writers hope to escape this forgetting, that by their books they might achieve an immortality that their bodies cannot. Unfortunately, a visit to any second-hand bookshop will show this not to be the case: shelves of unread books by forgotten authors.
Which is where Christopher Fowler came in. For a decade he wrote a newspaper column in which he revitalised the work of a forgotten writer, and these columns are collected in this book. The majority of the writers, like Fowler himself, write in the detective/thriller genre and most I had indeed never heard of (although one glaring exception is Georgette Heyer: I would be delighted for my work to be as ‘forgotten’ as hers).
The book is a collection of lives and Fowler’s sometimes waspish, sometimes warm, assessments of their work. At the end of it, any bibliophile will be left with a list of writers to investigate.
And I was left with the hope that when I am dead, some other writer of Fowler’s talent might come along, take my dusty books from a forgotten shelf, and introduce them again to new readers.
Angels continues the Oxford Very Short Introduction writing streak: it’s excellent. A short (as it says) introduction to angels, from their first appearances in Near Eastern Mythology, their spread through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to their modern reinvention as figures of the New Age. The book runs parallel threads through history, theology and art history, using each to inform the other.
Robert Heinlein was the Jekyll and Hyde of SF writers. Dr Jekyll wrote tightly plotted stories that whisked the reader into a future that was assumed as part of the story’s structure so that it did not require any long explanations as to how the young hero might be able to ride a rocket to the asteroid belt. And it always was a young hero, for these stories were aimed at teenagers – they’re now called Heinlein’s juveniles. There’s not a wasted word in them.
Mr Heinlein’s Hyde wrote interminable novels with only vaguely discernible plots whose main points appeared to be to advocate for guilt-free sex for everyone and, in particular, for men with their mothers (yucky but true), where no woman appeared whose nipples did not go ‘sproing!’ within a few moments of meeting our narrative hero. I was a teenage boy when I read these stories and the female form was a matter of intense interest and complete mystery to me at the time but I still thought this was icky. These stories were supposedly for adults and they are almost all dreadful.
I grew up with Heinlein’s juveniles and loved them. I moved on to his adult books and, having read the few decent ones early (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers) manfully ploughed through the nipple-springing dross (Time Enough For Love, I Will Fear No Evil) before finally giving up on The Number of the Beast.
I thought I had read all Heinlein’s juveniles so it was with delight that I discovered one that I had missed: Citizen of the Galaxy. I settled down to it, expecting to return to the effortless storytelling that had transplanted me into the future when I was young… only to be bored. Reader, I am truly sorry to say this story does something unique for Heinlein. It is tedious. It is humdrum. It drags on until you start looking to see how many pages before it ends. Looking at when it was written, 1957, it stands just on the cusp of when Heinlein stood on the brink of becoming a preacher rather than a writer. While it doesn’t have the worst excesses of his later works, there are signs. Read his earlier works instead.
You know, I think I might be the problem here. The story begins brilliantly, with an obscure present-day scholar specialising in an even more obscure 18th-century poet being given the chance to travel back in time to meet the object of his studies – only to be marooned in the past. There are beggar kings and warlocks, and all sorts of villains and goodies, although every character has depth, and the story is turbo-charged, powering through adventures in London and Egypt.
So, I ought to love it. And for the first half I did. But then, to be honest, I started getting a bit lost. Because the hero, and the villain, and various other people, all start swapping bodies and I simply lost track of who was who and why they were trying to kill/flee from/avoid other characters. Now, if I had read this when I was 18, when my brain was like a sponge and I could soak in all the details of a story, then I wouldn’t have had any trouble following our hero through all his changes of identity. But now, with my brain pretty full, it all washes through but much less sticks – so I got lost.
So, my apologies, Mr Powers. I think you probably wrote a brilliant story but it’s one I am no longer able to appreciate.
This is basically Groundhog Life – but before you going throwing claims of ripping off ideas at Ken Grimwood, his book came out in 1987 while Groundhog Day came out in 1993. So Grimwood’s in the clear – unless, of course, he’s like his hero. For his hero, Jeff Winston, is maundering along into dissatisfied middle age when – he dies. And wakes up, 18 again, but with all the memories of what happened during the next 25 years of his life.
It’s the ultimate do-over. A whole life, with all the knowledge of your previous life, where you went wrong, where you went right, and everything that happened in the wider world to give you a leg up this time round.
It’s a wonderful exploration of the opportunities and temptations of such a situation and a book so good that I did something I very rarely do with novels – I read it again. The first time I read this was about eight years ago and now I’ve replayed it and it’s just as good second time around – not quite what Winston finds. Highly recommended.
If the characteristic art of World War I was the poem, that of World War II was the novel. Perhaps it reached its highest form in Evelyn Waugh’s incomparable Sword of Honour trilogy, but there were many other fine novels reflecting on the war, such as The Cruel Sea, Schindler’s Ark and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
This isn’t quite one of them. Elleston Trevor went on to write the successful Quiller spy series under the pseudonym Adam Hall. Squadron Airborne is formed from personal experience during the war; it largely follows a single squadron through a few weeks of the Battle of Britain, looking equally at pilots and ground crew, the point of view changing frequently. He does a good job of showing the importance of the ground crew to the whole battle but, presumably because the language was so second nature to him, he uses air force terminology so liberally throughout the book that it’s often hard to understand what exactly is going on: I still don’t know what a mag drop is and why it’s important.
Read for an insight into how all the members of a squadron played a vital role in getting and keeping the planes airborne.
It’s been a long, long time since I enjoyed a bad book so much! OK, that’s a little unfair. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars isn’t really a bad book: it doesn’t push propaganda or advocate for any of the usual nihilistic philosophies that you find undergirding most of modern literary fiction. It just sets out to tell a story, a relatively old-fashioned story at that: a space opera. Galaxy spanning, bouncing planets, a go big story dialled up to the nth power. There were a lot of these in the early days of science fiction but it’s been years since I read anything like this and, yes, I had a blast: sentient symbiotic body suits, evil aliens, FTL drives, battles in space, all the classic tropes of space opera.
It’s great fun to read a story where the writer commits so completely to going BIG with not the slightest consideration of probability. So our heroes can cross the galaxy and arrive at an unknown star to find not only the baddies arriving there too, but previous characters, likewise left thousands of light years away, turning up too. The book is delightfully full of unlikely meetings, a nearly perfect heroine with an unfortunate tendency to accidentally kill the people closest to her, and aliens both evil and ugly.
Objectively, the book breaks many of the fiction writing rules you find in how-to-write-your-novel books, from telling rather than showing through Mary Sue characters to the aforementioned coincidental meetings so by those measures it ought to be terrible. But it isn’t. The sheer enjoyment of the writing carries it through.
