Preamble for The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin

It's been a while since I've had the time to write a preamble for one of our books. To be honest, I don't really have the time now, it's just that when I found the link to China Miéville talking about The City and The City, which you can find a  link to at the bottom of my summary of our discussion, it inspired me to look for something similar regarding next month's book Robert Rankin's The Brentford Triangle.

I failed.


I did, however, find a video of him reading from the first book in the series, The Antipope, and you can watch that video here. I've been assured that although The Brentford Triangle follows on from The Antipope, you need not have read the first in the sequence to read Triangle. I certainly hope this is the case because I myself have only ever read Retromancer which is the current new paperback.

Regardless, in this 2009 interview with the British Fantasy Society Rankin himself says that he considers Triangle to be the best he's written.

Rankin's newest release is The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions which is a sequel of sorts to H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

There have been some supply issues with The Brentford Triangle as all of Rankin's books are currently undergoing a reissuing into new colourful covers. I've done my best to try and order some in though and should I fail you are all aware of the other retail options open to you *shudder*.

That's all from me, hope you noticed and liked the new logo at the top of the page. Countless minutes were spent colouring it in on Paint! See you next month.

Oh - and should the urge take you. Robert Rankin's official fan club is called Sproutlore and can be found here.

The City and The City by China Miéville

Synopsis

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Besźel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. The City and The City won the 2010 BSFA award for Best Novel, the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke award for Best Novel (a record breaking third for Miéville), and tied with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl for the 2010 Hugo award for Best Novel. It has also been nominated for World Fantasy Award and Nebula Awards in the same category.

What Did We Think?

 China Miéville is continuously praised for the strength of his world building. This is showcased in The City and The City in a manner which is in some ways more obvious than in other novels. The reason for this is that what Miéville has written is essentially a straight-forward crime plot set against the background of the amazing and yet seemingly real cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma.

The straight crime plot was where at least one reader fell out with the book, as we discussed there is a case for saying the book is infact neither science fiction nor fantasy, despite accolades from both camps! If you don't like crime fiction it's unlikely that you'll love The City and The City as it conforms to many of the clichés of the genre, especially in terms of characters' relationships: we see both the classic detective-sidekick relationship, and the detective-fish out of water foreign ace detective tropes repeated here, as is the fact that the strongest female character is the murder victim who never actually appears on stage as a character (at least a living one).

Despite this potential flaw all agreed that the novel had a good strong story, interesting characters and strong pacing. The complexities of the world Miéville has created, which I dare not describe in too much depth here for fear or ruining someone else's experience, are enthralling and reading the book can be compared to being a detective in novel as you work out the intricacies of the location. That said, the concept is so complex that some struggled with the first third or so of the novel and it was suggested (although not unanimously agreed) that some form of introductory short story which established the city from the point of view of an outsider would have been beneficial. Whether this would have detracted from, or added to, the experience of reading the novel was a point of contention.

Whether there was a better way of presenting the city or not, it was certainly a heavily detailed setting which many of us wanted to return to. There were interesting discussions about the possibility of the place (hence it not really being science fiction or fantasy), referencing experiments by Quirkology and real world examples of cultural fragmentation within urban areas (something which clearly influenced the novel).

Overall it was a enjoyable, even lovable novel, which whilst challanging was a rewarding read. However, it is still very much a piece of crime fiction and if you're not a fan of Raymond Chandler then you likely won't like this. That said, the setting is engaging enough that it could still win you over.

Votes were as follows: 10, 9, 8, 8, 7, 4

 

On a personal note: despite ranking this book highly and loving the act of reading it. I wouldn't reccomend it as an introduction to Miéville's fiction, largely for the negative reasons outlined above, if you have the time to tackle such a large book - Perdido Street Station is a superior novel and a massively rewarding read.- Glyn

NEW: Watch a video of China Miéville himself talking about The City and The City here.

EVENT: Conrad Williams Signing

Hey guys! New event news!

Conrad Williams is an author based in Manchester who will be coming into Waterstone's Liverpool One to do a signing to promote his newest release: Blonde on a Stick. Blonde is his first crime novel and features a substantial section set in our very own Liverpool. If that doesn't appeal to you (and you may be asking what it's doing on this blog) then you may be interested to know that Conrad's previous books are of the Horror genre.

He is a past recipient of the Littlewood Arc Prize, and the International Horror Guild Award. He was awarded the British Fantasy Society (BFS) Award for best newcomer in 1993, and best novella in 2008 for The Scalding Rooms. His last novel One was been nominated for the BFS best novel this year. Conrad Williams is definitely on the up and if you want to get in on the action now and be able to tell your friends in years to come that you'd read Conrad Williams ages ago and even have some signed editions then come along and meet him, buy a book or two and get them signed.

The event is on Friday 20th August, 2pm. If you can't make it down I can always reserve some books for you. Even if Blonde on a Stick isn't your style, I've got plenty of copies of One and some of his other novels all waiting. Come along, you might regret it in the future if you don't.

Besides, the majority of authors who come to our store are non-genre so we should do all we can to encourage Liverpool One as a must-stop location for genre authors increasing our odds of being selected to host big names in the future (unfortunately as it stands Manchester Deansgate is the "must stop" location in the North West and we follow in second place).



Conrad's Blog and His Twitter Page

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Synopsis

In a world where people born with an exceptional skill, known as a Grace, are feared and exploited, Katsa carries the burden of a skill even she despises: the Grace of killing. She lives under the command of her Uncle Randa, King of the Middluns, and is expected to carry out his dirty work, punnishing and torturing anyone who displeases him. Breaking arms and cutting off fingers are her stock-in-trade. Finding life under his rule increasingly unbearable Katsa forms an underground Council, whose purpose is to combat the destructive behaviour of the seven kings - after all, the Middluns is only one of the Seven Kingdoms, each of them ruled by their own king and his personal agenda for power. When the Council hears that the King of Liend's father has been kidnapped Katsa investigates ...and stumbles across a mystery. Who would want to kidnap him, and why? And who was the extraordinary Graced fighter who challenged her fighting skills, for the first time, as she and the Council rushed the old man to saftey? Something dark and deadly is rising and creeping across the continent, and behind it all lurks the shadowy figure of a one-eyed king ...

What Did We Think?

Reception of Graceling was decidedly mixed. On one hand it was seen as being well paced, a good read and hard to put down. Whilst on the other, it was thought to be badly plotted, with 2 dimensional characters and stilted dialogue.

Praise for the concept was near-universal. The idea of the Graces was well received: mutations which imbue the bearer with an uncanny skill such as fishing, dancing, or killing, but which also mark their carrier with eyes of different colours, its an original and likable idea. The intrigue surrounding the protagonist Katsa’s Grace however was not so all generally loved being perceived by some as a lazy plot twist which was often inconsistently used.

Many, even those who thought the novel well plotted, agreed it was a story with two distinct parts. For many who disliked Graceling, the first half, with its court intrigue, was more engaging than the second and hence the book’s enjoyability decreased. Others, however, found the second half to be much more exciting and the villain of the piece to be chilling if not completely terrifying. Most readers agreed that the book seems to suffer from the by now oft seen “first book syndrome” and Cashore seems to have crammed all of her ideas into this one, quite slim (c.370 page), novel. As a result some aspects are under developed, we would all have liked to learn more about The Council for example, as they seem to have served no purpose in the plot of Graceling other than to enable Katsa to go on the mission which sets events in motion, and to pop up and save her bacon in the penultimate act.

Whether this was a girl’s book was a hot debate, not helped by the fact that all of the male reader seemed to be nonchalant about the novel at best, and at worst hated it. Certainly, this is a rare example of a female writer of fantasy and a female protagonist. Po, the strong male, is introduced as a love interest but Katsa never relies on him, indeed she supports him far more than the other way around. So, certainly this is a feminist fantasy, but the consensus was that it was unfair to consider it a girl’s book purely on this basis as novels such as Daughter of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts have similar themes but are immensely enjoyed by both genders. Whatever the gender, it was agreed (and is marketed as such) that it's certainly a good novel for younger readers who are thirsty for some old-fashioned adventure.

On the whole this was seen as a first novel with promise, but role of women the novel aside, did little to improve upon tried and tested fantasy tropes both in terms of plot, character, and world building.


The votes were as follows: 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Synopsis

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ...I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen
 

What Did We Think?

(notes to follow)

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

Synopsis

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

What Did We Think?

Vonnegut's most acclaimed work is a darkly funny book, peculiar and strange as it hops around all over the place. Part memoir, part (anti)war fiction, part science fiction, its a very difficult book to categorise. For example, we're reading this as part of a science fiction/ fantasy book club - so is it science fiction? We found that depends wildly on your reading of the text. So slight and carefully crafted is the plot that it can be read as being all a wild delusion on the part of Billy Pilgrim, that the time travelling and alien abduction are the result of his Dresden induced trauma interplaying with the dementia his daughter is certain he has. On the other hand you can read it as a literal truth, that it happened (or happens) exactly as Billy claims it does. In either case, some found the lack of definitive science fictional content, particularly with regards to the nature of Billy's time travelling, to be disappointing.

Something that was almost unanimous was a feeling that the novel was extremely honest. There was a sense that Vonnegut contemplated deeply on the question of how to write a war novel, how to understand the point of war. If any. Again, Vonnegut's skill as a writer shone through in that you cannot clearly say that this is an explicitly anti-war novel, rather it is a story which emphasises the pointlessness and pathetic nature of war and leaves you to draw your own conclusions, it very pointedly avoids soapboxing.

Another point of discussion was that of Billy Pilgrim himself, a character Universally seen as being almost unbelievable pathetic, and yet also painfully normal. An observer in his own life he was found to be both frustrating and hard to sympathise with. It was decided that this aspect of his character was almost certainly deliberate and could be a point about passivity and acceptance, or it could be a criticism that people tend to cruise through their lives without sieving the moment. On a more practical note, it could be that Pilgrim's passive nature was a narrative necessity in order to add credence to the idea to the Tralfamadorian model of time being fixed and free-will being non existent.

Overall, feeling towards the book was positive although there was significant disagreement over several issues raised. The group found it hard to agree about what the book actually stood for, or what certain sections and elements meant. Rather than a criticism of the novel however, this is testament to the complex and engaging nature of Slaughterhouse 5.

The votes were as follows: 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10

The audio book received considerable praise from Al, it's narrated by Ethan Hawke and has an interesting interview with the author at the end.

Also: in reply to a sub-discussion we had. Yes, the book has been banned and censored from its publication in 1969 right up to the modern day. It ranked 46th in the American Library Association list of the most frequently banned/challenged books to 2000-2009.

Changing Permissions

After some feedback at the last session I've tweaked the permissions on the blog to allow anyone to post a comment, irrespective of whether you have a Blogger account or not. This means the blog is more exposed to spam but hopefully I can keep on top of it and clean up any mess before it becomes too intrusive.

Enjoy the freedom folks :-)

- Glyn

P.S. Discussion summary of Slaughterhouse 5 coming soon.