Sarah Pinborough - 13 Minutes (2016)

My review of '13 Minutes' by Sarah Pinborough is up now at Fantasy Faction. This is a wonderful book. Containing barely any speculative or fantastic elements, it tells a compelling and disturbing story about the perils of social life as a teenager that reflects on the nature of the truth, our real identities, and to what extent it is possible to really know other people. Read more at the link. 

Adam Roberts - Jack Glass (2012)

"'Ockham's razor,' scoffed Iago. 'The most ridiculous use of metaphysical steel in the history of thought.'"

'Jack Glass' is a melding of golden age detective fiction and golden age SF, which allows Adam Roberts to play with the classic tropes of both genres. Each of the three sections, as Roberts informs the reader in the prologue, is a locked room mystery, a prison story and a whodunnit, and the murderer is always Jack Glass. The mystery lies in the how and the why, which Roberts shrewdly identifies as being more important and more interesting questions. The book is also a deeper exploration into the reasons and motivations of the murderer; 'Jack Glass' asks if there are ever extenuating circumstances in which murder can be justified, and how much the reader can feel sympathy and empathy for a character who is a sociopathic murderer. Roberts also draws parallels between the sociopathy of the murderer and that of late period capitalism. The far future society depicted in 'Jack Glass' is rigidly hierarchical, in which the great number of the general populace are regarded as a cheap, expendable resource, and Roberts compares and contrasts the systematic inhumanity with Jack Glass' horrific crimes and his view of other people as tools, despite the idealism central to his character. This is a fantastically ambitious book, both in what it sets out to achieve, and its tightly structured mysteries, yet it is consistently compelling and enjoyable.
   The first section of the book, 'In The Box', sees Jack Glass and six other prisoners marooned on an asteroid for crimes against the Ulanovs, the dynasty that rules the solar system. As part of their sentence they have 11 years in which to make the asteroid habitable with the limited tools left to them, at which case they will be picked up and the asteroid sold off as valuable real estate, or die in the process. The asteroid itself provides the locked room, as no one can get in or out of it, and the prisoners provide a cast with a suitably varied and suspicious backgrounds to all act as potential suspects for a murder. But the box in the title refers also to another locked room, the part of Jack Glass' brain where he keeps his murderous instincts shut up so that he can function normally in society. What makes Jack Glass, the Notorious Killer, special amongst a group of thugs, especially when, as Roberts slyly reveals over the course of the narrative, almost all of the prisoners are guilty of murder, but have avoided the Ulanovs' death sentence due to various extenuating circumstances? Murder is generally regarded as taboo for obvious reasons, but given certain extreme circumstances one's mileage might vary, and Roberts explores this thorny moral area through these characters. None of the prisoners view themselves as murderers, and all are quick to point out their extenuating circumstances, despite the fact that none of these make them particularly sympathetic. Jack Glass is initially the most sympathetic character here; his missing legs make him an easy target for bullying, yet despite this he is not particularly resentful towards his fellow prisoners. He frequently tries to keep the peace and stands up for and comforts Gordio, the prisoner at the very bottom of the pecking order. This makes the horrific way that he murders all the prisoners, and the way he uses Gordio's body to make his escape, all the more shocking. Yet shouldn't all murder be shocking? Ultimately we are still looking at the extinguishing of another person's life against their will, however gruesome the method or however the killer justifies themselves, why should the moral line crossed be different? Perhaps the issue is clouded by an economic system that values people as a commodity. As one of the prisoners Mo, an economics student who was arrested for people trafficking, puts it:
 
"Robots are expensive now, but they were vastly more so then. People. though, are cheap, and getting cheaper. They keep breeding, and that means they're always becoming relatively less valuable. We're always the cheapest option. We're always the cheapest option. We're losing absolute value with every generation."

Ultimately Mo's view of people as an expendable economic resource comes directly from the system he was raised in, which in its own way is just as sociopathic as Jack Glass' use of Gordio's corpse to escape the asteroid.
   The second part of the book, 'The FTL Murders', echoes the classic Agatha Christie set up, with a servant being murdered in the servants' quarters of the Argent family stately home. Here Roberts makes up for the entirely male cast of the previous prison story by focusing on Diana and Eva Argent, the heirs to the prestigious Argent family's fortune as data collectors and analysers for the Ulanovs. Roberts clearly has a lot of fun writing Diana and Eva's vaguely Mitford sisters-esque voices, and his portrayal of them as pampered, privileged individuals serves to contrast the desperate lives the servants were plucked from on overpopulated, violent orbital bubbles subsisting on algae. In this case the locked room is the servants' quarters, but Roberts also explores how the Argent sisters' pampered existence in a tightly guarded and heavily watched house is also a kind of prison and locked room, that isolates them from the experiences and existence of the vast majority of people in the solar system. Jack Glass, in this instance disguised as Diana and Eva's loyal and long-suffering tutor Iago, has arranged the murder as a birthday present for Diana, partly because she loves solving murder mysteries, but also in order to shock her into an empathy and understanding of the worth of other people's lives. Ironically Jack Glass' coldly calculated murder disrupts Diana's sheltered existence enough for her to develop into a more sympathetic and empathetic character. Roberts again expertly manipulates the reader's sympathy; after Jack Glass' brutal murders in the previous section it would be hard for the reader to feel sympathy for the character again, but Iago is introduced as a separate and sympathetic character, both more grounded and wiser than both of the girls he looks after and genuinely caring for them. The reader already sympathises with Iago before the reveal of who he is. The book again asks us why we feel grades of sympathy for victims. In this case, the murder victim turns out to be a rapist, and Jack Glass, rather than violently eviscerating him, simply provides Sapho, the rapist's victim, with the means and opportunity to dispatch him. The reader is forced to confront why they might be more comfortable with this than with the previous murders. Diana's fondness for solving murder mysteries adds a layer of meta-commentary to Iago and Diana's arguments about Jack Glass' actions; when Jack Glass points out that part of the appeal of murder mysteries over mere crime stories is their very morbidity, he is addressing the reader as much as Diana. And in 'The FTL Murders', we begin to get an idea of the stakes of the novel. There is another locked room in the novel: the speed of light, which restricts space travel to the solar system and allows the Ulanovs to exert their rule over the entire human race. There are rumours going round that an engineer called McAuley discovered the secret to FTL travel, and that the Argents, being masters of information, must somehow have this secret on them. Everyone is interested in FTL because it would completely disrupt the power structure of the Ulanovs, giving the people the power to escape the rigid power hierarchy the Ulanovs enforce. However Jack Glass understands that any FTL drive would, by increasing the c in the equation E = mc2, produce an incredible amount of energy, allowing the technology to be misused as a species-killing bomb. Jack Glass claims he is acting to prevent the death of the solar system and the entire human race, which justifies his acts of violence. Again it is up to the reader how much they agree with this.
   The third section of the book, 'The Impossible Gun', has Jack Glass' orbital bubble home as the locked room, and in this case the murder victim is Bar-le-duc, the legendary police officer and the Sherlock Holmes to Jack Glass' Moriarty, who is mysteriously vapourised by a supremely powerful gun moments after arresting Jack Glass in return for Diana's guaranteed safety. This section sees Roberts playing with the SFnal concepts he has built up so far, with the FTL drive acting as the impossible murder weapon, its distortion of relativity meaning that its discharge occurs before Jack Glass fires it, thus setting up the mystery. This section also allows Roberts to explore the world he has created in more depth; while the first two parts of the book were limited by their concepts to specific places, here we get to see the orbital bubbles in which the vast majority of the poor live, breaking just as much of the law as they can get away with in order to sustain themselves without drawing the attention of the police. This shows the contrast between the high technology luxury enjoyed by powerful families like the Argents and the subsistence level that everyone else is reduced to living at. The novel points up the unfairness and absurdity of this situation, even as it acts as a satirical extension of the gap between the haves and have-nots in our world at the present. This section of the book also explores Diana's growth of character, which is wonderfully handled. Over the course of the book she matures from the bratty, spoilt heiress she is when first introduced to a more sympathetic character in charge of her own agency. Dealing with the collapse of her house and the betrayal of her sister, as well as seeing how the rest of the solar system lives and having to take part in their world, forces her to mature, to the extent that she is able to confidently brush off Jack Glass' advances at the end of the book. It is here where Roberts' manipulation of the reader's sympathy really pays off. Jack Glass has become a much more sympathetic character, but by the end of the book, whilst she acknowledges everything he's done for her, Diana is smart enough to walk away from him. For all that we understand Jack Glass' reasons and motivations for what he does, Roberts never quite lets us or Diana forget the sociopath hiding inside him.


 

Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers Of London (2011)

   "'It's all real,' I said. 'Ghosts, magic, everything.'

   "'Then why doesn't everything seem different?' she asked.

   "'Because it was there in front of you all the time,' I said. 'Nothing's changed, so why should you notice anything?'"

"'I never worry about the theological questions,' said Nightingale. 'They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen's peace - that makes them a police matter.'"

For all of Tolkein's fetishisation of the countryside, Fantasy lends itself particularly well to describing cities. Cities that have been around for any length and time develop their own mythology alongside their history, urban legends growing entangled around generations upon generations of memories. For a city as old and as rich in history as London, one can well imagine every street corner having stories to tell, every alleyway rich with secret histories. From there it's not hard to imagine a secret world of magic operating right under our noses.
   'Rivers Of London' is a supernatural police procedural. Peter Grant is a young police officer who winds up taking a witness statement from a ghost at the scene of a murder. As a result he finds himself working for the branch of the London Metropolitan Police that deals with supernatural crime, under the mysterious Inspector Thomas Nightingale. What follows is both an entertaining supernatural whodunit and a heartfelt and vivid evocation of the history and mythology of London.
   A lot of the appeal of the book is Peter Grant's narrative voice. Aaronovitch nails the instantly likable cockney charm of the character, whilst conveying that Grant is far more canny than he lets on. Grant's charm and deadpan humour make him instantly sympathetic and an effective audience viewpoint character as well as a compelling and well-drawn character in his own right. Aaronovitch's proficiency with Grant's voice makes the book a breezy and enjoyable read, despite the darkness and violence of much of its subject matter.
   The book is far from just the Peter Grant show, however. Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last officially sanctioned wizard working for the police force, is a fascinating character whom we learn all too little about. He is openly gay, drives a jaguar, is considerably older than he looks, and lives in a Folly on Russel Square with his maid, Molly, a being of undisclosed origin with sharp teeth who practices haemodivination. There is also Lesley May, Grant's colleague and potential love interest. At the beginning of the book, Peter Grant and Lesley have just completed their probationary period for the police force, but whilst Grant is destined for a lifetime of paperwork before being rescued by Nightingale, Lesley is a promising, competent officer about to be assigned to active duty. She is a well-written and developed female character, and her friendship with Grant is very well done; although it never becomes romantic they have a solid and enjoyable friendship that you could imagine leading to something more.
   And so we embark on a journey into the heart of London, through its history from the Roman times to the establishment of the police force and the justice system and back to the present day, with a varied cast and a compelling re-imagining of supernatural lore. 'Rivers Of London' is very well researched; Aaronovitch's eye for historical and architectural detail made me regret not reading this book while I was still living in London. However he is also aware that most of his readers in the modern age will be coming to his books with an awareness of 21st Century popular culture, and doesn't try to ignore it or sweep it under the rug. Thus, Peter Grant can make snarky jokes about Twilight vampires and point out his own book's similarities of premise with Harry Potter. Aaronovitch gets away with it because his book is clearly its own beast, and he comes up with some interesting takes on vampires and ghosts, whilst hinting at other mysteries to be explored more fully in later books. Another part of what makes Aaronovitch's London so well-realised is that Aaronovitch manages to capture the city's teaming diversity, from Grant himself who is half Sierra Leonian on his mother's side to Mother Thames, a Nigerian immigrant, to Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, the Scottish cryptopathologist.
   Aaronovitch is also very good at laying out how the police force works. In order for a supernatural police procedural to work, it helps for the procedural part to be well grounded. While Aaronovitch has the excitement and affection for the puzzle-solving aspects of an investigation, as well as a way with dramatic and destructive action sequences, he also has a good sense of how the intricate bureaucracy that ties the whole police force together works. His descriptions of the modern workplace are dryly amusing, with Grant having to work around how much of the magical world he should be including in his paperwork. There is much wry humour in the hierarchy of the police force as well, with Chief Inspectors Seawoll and Stephanopoulos grudgingly letting Nightingale and Grant bring magic into their murder case whilst trying to hide the actual truth from their boss.
   The narrative glue holding the whole murder mystery together is Punch and Judy, with the murders fitting the pattern of those carried out by Punch in the original Punch and Judy script. The culprit is a revenant, a vengeful spirit comprised partly of Punch and partly of Henry Pyke, an actor whose murder by a successful colleague went unpunished. As well as clever way of providing structure to the narrative, this works because Punch is the spirit of chaos and disorder, the breakdown brought about by the high stress life of living in a big city. Aaronovitch realises that you can't evoke the city without also taking into account its downsides. The Punch side of Henry Pyke's personality goes beyond an angry spirit's desire for revenge; what makes him effective is that he is able to channel all our worst impulses brought about by living in confined spaces together. As well as the murders, Punch's presence causes ripples of violence throughout the city, resulting in a series of minor incidents in which normal people snap under pressure and commit disproportionate acts of anger or violence. I particularly like that the book doesn't stereotype the poorer or immigrant communities as being more prone to violence; many of the outbursts are perpetrated by respectable-seeming middle-class types, and the book wrings some wry humour out of the fact that the climactic riot is set off in Covent Garden by opera goers. There is an excellent scene where Punch manifests on the tube to an exhausted and down-heartened Peter Grant and tries to break him, but Grant sees Punch for what he is and is able to resist.
 

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy (1985-1987)

"Brains and guts, the insides of a man. We always talk about trying to get inside a writer to understand his work better. But when you get right down to it, there's not much to find in there - at least not much that's different from what you'd find in anyone else."

'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster comprises three linked novels that work together as a deconstruction of the noir detective genre. 'City Of Glass', 'Ghosts' and 'The Locked Room' all offer variations on a similar, outwardly simple detective plot: a man gets pulled in to a seemingly straightforward private investigator job, and his fascination with his target ultimately consumes him. This framework allows Auster to explore themes of obsession, alienation and loneliness, as well as to play various metafictional games, as his hapless PIs find themselves playing the roles of Don Quixote or Captain Ahab as they obsessively hunt down their missing man, with the increasing suspicion that they are merely characters in a novel, acting out a preordained part, all against the backdrop of a hyper-real, magical realist New York. Auster draws parallels between the life of a writer and the life of a private detective - seemingly glamourous, but in reality composed of large stretches of the dull and mundane, while they diligently untangle the correct thread from an infinite tangle of possibilities, whether that thread be the truth about a crime or the perfect sentence. Ultimately the trilogy reveals itself to be about words; the space between words and their meanings and the impossibility of objective observation.
   All this makes 'The New York Trilogy' sound pretty compelling, and while it is certainly a striking, ambitious work with many interesting ideas, I did enjoy it but not without reservations. Auster's metafictional conceits are reminiscent of Italo Calvino's, yet he frequently lacks Calvino's dazzling wit and invention. His exploration of unresolved ambiguities and a mutable city recalls the work of M. John Harrison, without ever quite achieving Harrison's insight or expertise with prose. The premise of the trilogy is similar to that of Jonathan Carroll's 'The Land Of Laughs' and Christopher Priest's 'The Affirmation', yet Auster doesn't ever go as far as Carroll and Priest do in deconstructing their protagonists and the worlds built around them. Paul 'The International Bestselling Author' Auster is also guilty of a certain smugness, whether in the way his narrator expresses surprise that, "given the seriousness and difficulty of Fanshawe's work, and given the public's tendency to stay away from such work, it was a success beyond anything we had imagined possible," in the way he tells the reader at several points the reaction he ought to be having to the text, or in the way he carefully explains all the literary allusions he invokes in case the reader is not well read enough to have spotted them. Although as a cultural ignoramus who only reads grubby paperbacks with garish spaceships and dragons on the covers, actually I found the latter rather helpful for writing this review. Were I being charitable I would say that this actually quite effectively sets up the reveal that the narrator of all three stories is not Auster himself, something that is played with in 'City Of Glass' anyway, but the character that narrates 'The Locked Room' all along. More problematic than any sense of retrodden ground or problems with overall tone on my part is Auster's treatment of his female characters. 'The New York Trilogy' is clearly intentionally in dialogue with the noir detective genre, a genre not renowned for its well balanced portrayal of female characters in the least, so it is unsurprising that the male protagonists only see the female characters in the book in terms of their attraction to them. This is actually quite interestingly explored, as Daniel Quinn's infatuation with Mrs. Stillman is part of what makes him come a cropper, and Mr. Blue assumes that his girlfriend will indefinitely wait for him while he spends all his time on this one case and never even bothers to call her, and of course she doesn't. What is still problematic is the way that all the female characters in the book are entirely defined by their relationships to the invariably male protagonist and antagonist. Which again is genre appropriate, but surely the whole point of post modern engagement with the genre is that you can deconstruct and explore these limitations without falling into them yourself. To go back to 'The Land Of Laughs', Jonathan Carroll manages to make Saxony a likable and engaging character with agency, whilst using how oblivious Thomas is to his poor treatment of her to show us how messed up Thomas actually is. It shows that its possible to give your female characters depth and agency even if your first person narrator is incapable of acknowledging this; I would have liked to see at least an attempt at something like that here.
   Limitations aside, there is a lot that 'The New York Trilogy' does right. 'City Of Glass' explores the relationship between language as a series of words and the abstract concepts it is designed to convey, and likens writing to detective work in that the writer must find the correct word to convey these concepts to the reader, despite the gulf between them. This dissociation is reflected in the characters, the narrator and the author himself. Daniel Quinn is a writer of detective novels who is swept up into a mystery when someone phones him asking for Paul Auster, Private Eye. Quinn winds up masquerading as Auster and taking the Private Eye job. Auster later turns up, but it turns out he is a writer, not a private investigator, and the narrator even takes Quinn's side against Auster in the end, claiming that Auster has treated the character poorly. Quinn's nature as a fictional character is explored, as he disappears after he runs out of pages in his notebook. The lavish meals left for him in the empty house after his breakdown could even have been written in for him by the narrator looking out for him. Of course this is only effective in so much as Quinn is convincing as a character. Auster goes to great lengths to give him personality and depth, hopes and dreams. We spend enough time in his head that we buy him as a person, which provides the tension when we are faced with his nature as a fictional character.
   Quinn's job is to trail Peter Stillman, a man who went to jail because he locked up his son in a basement and didn't talk to him as part of an experiment to discover the original language of humanity before the fall of the Tower Of Babel, and so get closer to the words that hold the true meaning of that which they describe. Stillman has now been released and his son fears that he will try to harm him in some way. The longer Quinn trails Stillman and tries to untangle the sense from his seemingly random actions, the more tenuous his grasp on reality becomes. Quinn eventually has a complete breakdown, and winds up living in an alleyway opposite the Stillman house and going with as little sleep as he can deal with so that he can watch the house as diligently as possible. He later finds out that by this stage Stillman has already killed himself, so he has been in effect watching a man who no longer exists, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. By this stage he has become the lead character in the retelling of 'Don Quixote' that Auster discusses with him when they meet, leading to the narrator's sympathy with him.
   'Ghosts' plays with similar themes and ideas. In a very Calvino-esque move, all the characters in 'Ghosts' are named after colours that represent them. The main detective is Blue, his mark is Black, indicating his shadow-like status as Blue's double, and the man who set up the job is White, indicating his status as an unknowable blank. As Blue holes up in his apartment to watch Black, it slowly dawns on him that Black has been hired by Mr. White to watch Blue, locking both of them in an existential stalemate where they are both relegated to the ghost of each other. Blue and Black ultimately have similar breakdowns, and it ends the only way it can; the two attack each other, and once Black is killed, Blue is free to walk off the page at the end of the story to whatever fate awaits him. 'Ghosts' explores the obsessive nature of both the writer and the detective. Blue and Black's lives are reduced to a life of solitude as might be favoured by a writer; they spend all their time shut in their rooms, composing their reports on each other. Both their actions are so dependent on the actions of the other that, by the time they realise the true nature of their situation, neither of them can walk away from it.
   'The Locked Room' is the final book in the trilogy, and actually by far my favourite of the three. The eponymous locked room is not the classic murder mystery set up, but the secret part inside all of us that is essentially unknowable to anyone else. The story follows the narrator, later revealed to be the narrator of the other two stories in abortive attempts to relate this story, who discovers that his childhood friend Fanshawe has disappeared. Fanshawe's wife, Sophie, gets in contact with the narrator on Fanshawe's instructions. Fanshawe was, naturally, a writer, and left instructions that on his death Sophie should contact the narrator to look through his manuscripts and decide if they are worthy of publication. The narrative takes on the aspect of 'Moby Dick', as Fanshawe changes from the Ahab to the narrator's Ishmael to the narrator's own personal white whale as he becomes obsessed with tracking the missing man down. I think I find this novel the most compelling of the trilogy partially because it has more moving parts, a wider cast for Auster to play with, and partly because Auster gets those intense male friendships so right, the experience of living in each other's pockets to the extent that your identities begin to merge, and being unable to shake it off even after that other person's gone. There is something sexually sublimated about this; Auster explores this in the way that every sexual encounter the narrator has he is standing in for Fanshawe in some way. It gets pretty Freudian. Everything gets tied together, but not in a way that allows any of the characters or the reader to make any sense of it. Quinn and Peter Stillman show up, their incidental role to the story showing how they manage to take on the archetypal roles required of them in 'City Of Glass'. In the end, 'The Locked Room' is about how unknowable somebody else's life is. You can have all the facts and dates, but these tell you nothing of that person's internal life; any life can take unexpected turns at the last moment, and no life story is over until that life is over. As much as the narrator's identity merges with that of Fanshawe, the inner core of Fanshawe that makes him himself is forever unknowable to him.
   'The New York Trilogy', with all its questions about identity and meaning, ultimately deconstructs the very nature of the detective. The detective is the person who walks into the chaos of the crime scene and, through his superior powers of observation and his ability to understand other people's motives, creates order and resolution by solving the crime. However the contradiction at the heart of the detective is that, because he has to be a compelling character, because he has to have some stake in solving the mystery, this makes him as far from an objective observer as possible. What makes Philip Marlowe compelling is that he cannot walk away from a mystery; he has this internal sense of justice that means that he has to solve the mystery even if he doesn't wind up bringing the criminal to justice. However he cannot stop himself from becoming emotionally involved in the case, and the man's an emotional trainwreck as it is; an alcoholic loner prone to violence. How can he possibly hope to understand the objective truth without his subjective position, the thing that makes him narratively compelling, colouring it? With his lack of patience and tendency to jump to conclusions, he's utterly unfit for long term surveillance or collecting evidence. He is a creature who acts on instinct and hunch. Auster's three iterations of the detective novel explore how these qualities, the qualities we most associate with private detectives, make one utterly unsuitable for carrying out the job. They also show how a tendency to get inside other people's minds can be something that completely drives you mad, whilst not providing you with that critical information that might help you solve the case.
   With all its unexplained ambiguities, characters shifting identities, missed opportunities, and unsolved mysteries, Auster also explores how unlike real life crimes the crimes in mystery novels are. A good mystery novel is a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine; marvelously intricate, beautifully designed, fascinating, and incredibly impractical. The idea that murderers leave a series of clues that interlock in just the right pattern for the detective to solve the mystery is compelling, but not at all like how solving murder cases works in real life. Real life is built on ambiguities, misunderstandings and coincidence; there is rarely a logical pattern to be discerned that can give the keen observer the unadulterated truth.
  At the centre of the three novels is New York City itself; a Borgesian labyrinth fraught with hidden significance, secret messages and red herrings, as much a state of mind as a physical city. Each street corner is laden with historical or literary significance, each building haunted by the passions and dreams of those who lived there before. Ripe with decaying grandeur, it is exactly the right place to set a deconstruction of the noir detective genre.