Procrastination

As another way of not working on my thesis, which is due in a mind-boggling short space of time, I thought I'd provide some brief reviews of non-thesis related books I've read this year. I mean, seeing as I won't be doing the Readathon properly this year and all. They'll be brief...

Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon
Not my favourite of his, but it had some good bits. It's Chabon, how can it not have good bits? I still think "The Final Solution" is my favourite Chabon to date. Or maybe "The Yiddish Policeman's Union".

Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child
Jack Reacher is back, and he's still a total legend. Also, learned how to spot a suicide bomber. Also learned that if I actually DID spot a suicide bomber, I'm probably doomed. Liked this one much better than the one before ("Nothing to Lose"), which I think I mentioned ended a bit strangely.

Twilight and New Moon - Stephenie Meyer
Yes yes OK I confess, I read two of those vampire teen romance novels. And by golly they are really not that dissimilar to Mills and Boon. There was a lot of jaw clenching going on and plenty of erratic heartbeats and generalised gazing. Oh, and did I mention unresolved sexual tension? Great stuff. As a consequence of reading the books I also watched the filum, and developed a slight crush on the poor lad who plays Edward Cullen, who's young enough to be my - um - much younger brother. I've also started to develop a list of "Questions people never seem to get around to asking vampires", like:

• So, like, what's the greatest gig you've ever seen in all your 600 years?
• Did you ever meet Disraeli? What was he like?
• Is there any substance to the rumour that aliens helped build Aztec temples?
• So what happened to the Amber Room, already?
  
• Do you guys go totally nuts when girls get their periods? (Sorry eww gross)

I suppose it's because everyone's too busy trying not to get bitten, or mooning around wishing their immortal beloved WOULD bite them so they could be together for ever and ever. But if I found a vegetarian vampire he/she and I would be having a long chat, let me tell you.

By the way, how much does Edward Cullen's room rock in that film?? NB This reaction clearly puts me in the "Enjoys 'Grand Designs' far too much for own good" age bracket.

Drood - Dan Simmons
I didn't get into this one as much as "The Terror", but still an enjoyable read-a-bit-before-bed novel. I will never be able to think of Wilkie Collins in the same light again though, the misogynist bastard!! Old Chas Dickens didn't pull up so well in that regard either!!

Is that really it? Crap. I want to read novels solid for a month. Gotta finish this thesis first though...

Let the Right One In

By John Ajvide Lindqvist
Well there was no mistaking that this was a vampire story, because it says “A vampire love story”, right there on the cover! Unfortunately it is a rather sordid and gruesome vampire story (I know, I know – what should I expect??), devoid of any trace of hope or humour. (Unless you count the odd smirk about character names that sound like IKEA furniture). Unremittingly grim. Also it is written in that kind of style that forgoes proper sentences. Yes.

Set in Stockholm, our main character is Oskar, who is thirteen and bullied at school. Another child, Eli, and a man who Oskar assumes to be her father move in next door. People start being killed, gruesomely, which of course those foolish police assume is the work of a serial killer. Well, they're half right. So, who do you think the vampire is??

I don’t feel I have the energy to write much more about this – it was depressing. Every character’s relationships with everyone else were crappy. Everyone is unhappy, sad, deeply ashamed about some aspect of their lives, cruel, or all of the above. What can I say? These vampires aren’t the sexy doomed vampires of Anne Rice, or the trendy, sassy doomed vampires of Buffy, they are just doomed. Eli’s “Father”, Håkan, is a particularly revolting character, being a pedophile and all. Bleah. And seriously, what love story?? Still, this kind of realistic, gritty vampire novel might appeal to many readers.

I'd read Fangland instead. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute either, but there is something about it that lifts it out of the unrelenting gloom…

Rating: 5 out of 10

Star of the Sea

By Joseph O’Connor
Really I picked up this book because it was on sale (only $3.95!) and because the cover blurb mentioned something about a monster stalking the decks of a ship, at night. So naturally I thought it would be about vampires. Really, there should be some kind of government inquiry into book jacket blurb writers because needless to say this book has nothing to do with vampires. OK, possibly I am obsessed with vampires, but what would you think the word “monster” is meant to represent, particularly when associated with “night”? (Apart from werewolves, maybe).

Lack of vampires not withstanding, this book was actually very absorbing. When I am trying to recommend a film to someone, I might say “I wouldn’t mind paying full price for that” or “Cheap Tuesday flick, man” or “Wait for it on video, bud” or just a bald “Don’t bother”. I think Star of the Sea classifies easily as a Cheap Tuesday book, possibly even a “Wouldn’t mind paying full price”, so feel free to ask for a lend of my copy.

The Star of the Sea is actually about the Irish potato famine. There are many characters involved, one of whom is a poor Irish peasant who has been appointed the task of murdering an Irish aristocrat on the trip over the Atlantic to America. Though the present-day plot is set on board, there are many flashbacks, in order to highlight who the characters are and how they got that way. It is very successful in showing the reality of the famine and how shocking it must have been; also the realities of travelling by ship back then and how yucky that must have been; also also some of the realities of immigration, and how enormous a decision this must be.

There is even a bit of post-modernism in there (I think it’s post-modernism, anyway, you post-modernists will have to tell me) where the aspiring author character despairs of writing a novel about the famine because it is impossible to write about something so terrible. And yet – we are reading a novel about the famine!! How post-modern.

The book is written as if it is a “piecing together of the facts”, well after the events occurred, and so is written from many different viewpoints and includes parts written as the Captain’s Log, unpublished memoirs or fiction by some of the characters (drawing heavily on actual factuals, of course) and so on. Also, in between each chapter the author has included an extract from letters written by Irish immigrants to the US. Chapters are subheaded things like “In which are sketched certain recollections of The Star of The Sea; the condition of her passengers and the evil which stalked among them”. (Seriously, stalking evil-doers? That can only mean vampires!). I found this all a bit of overkill and distracting from the story; I think it would have worked much better had the author left out all the frilly clever bits. All the chopping and changing made the story seem a bit overworked and diminished its credibility, rather than adding to it. I think the author did A Lot Of Research for this book and By Gad He Was Going To Use It All.

Still – it did make me stay up past my bedtime.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Fangland

By John Marks
It’s been a long time since I read any horror, because, you know, me and horror don’t get along so well, so I’m not sure if I’m correct here, but I think this book might, well, be sneaking over into the horror genre. There are no ice picks involved, or chainsaws or people being skinned or anything (not directly, anyway) and the book cover doesn’t make use of dripping blood; the horror it contains is more of an intellectual quality - the horror that has been inflicted on real persons throughout the centuries.

Interestingly, also, Fangland is a post-9/11 horror story; the horror that was nearly 3000 people’s last moments (plus all the associated shock and emotional damage that was the survivors’) is woven into the narrative. I’ve only read one other book that was quite so directly a post-9/11 novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; and although I thought Foer’s book was excellent, I think Fangland was more effective at capturing what the events of that day did to the city of New York.

Fangland is a modern take on the vampire legend, and at the start I thought it was going to be a bit too clever for itself, but I ended up really quite liking it. I will look for other novels by John Marks. It is set (for a good part of the action) in the offices of a television current affairs program (The Hour) in downtown New York, located just next door to the holes that exist where the World Trade Centre used to stand. The rest of the story is set in Romania, as we follow what happens to one Evangeline Harker, who has been sent there by her bosses at The Hour to assess the possibility of a story on an Eastern European crime lord called Ion Torgu.

The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of different characters; for me it was Evangeline’s voice that read best, challenging my pet theory that it is difficult for men to write convincing female characters and vice versa. (I can’t really test the vice versa; male characters written by women often seem quite convincing to me, but what would I know? You blokes will have to confirm/deny). Not all of the book works for me and there are, to paraphrase the C&C Music Factory, a few bits that made me go “Hmmm” - such as the scene in which Evangeline uses her sexuality to fend off an attack by Torgu. To paraphrase the evil Mexicans in For a Fistful of Dollars, “ehhhh??” I suppose at least it wasn’t the same old “vampires are sooo sexy” thing that most authors peddle. But overall, the book was moving and chilling…if you feel in the mood for a vampire novel, definitely read this one over Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

Rating: 8 out of 10

The Queen of the Damned (2006)

By Anne Rice
I’m always a bit suspicious of books that contain the word “frisson”. It turned up relatively early in this book, but at least I didn’t notice a repeat offence. This book all seemed a bit silly at first, but I got sucked in (Ha!) by all those eternally youthful beautifully beautiful dark and mysterious and sexy vampires. Really, it did start to bother me after a while that they were all so attractive. Rice even muses, through the voice of her hero vampire Lestat, are there any ugly vampires? Well I think I spotted one, but he didn’t last very long.

This book is the third in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, following Interview with the Vampire (the one made into a film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt; not bad, from memory, surprisingly…) and The Vampire Lestat. To sum up, Lestat has gone and woken up the Mother of All Vampires (I’m not kidding), the titular (that’s for you, Ian) Queen of the Damned, Akasha, who has been dormant for thousands of years, but now she’s awake again and this time she’s a lot crosser.

For some reason, the Queen seems to be killing off all the vampires, except for our favourites of course. What is she up to?? We find out along the way how vampires came to exist and what the Queen’s badass dealio is anyway. I got a bit addicted to the whole story, if a little impatient with all the descriptions of how gorgeous and tortured everbody was.

Rice even manages to weave in some serious topics, a la Cocoon. For example, if someone offered you a smoothie that would make you immortal, would you drink? (Ha!) If someone dangled a tempting tidbit in front of you that would make your loved ones immortal, would you bite? (Ha! Ha!) Also, more to the point, would you ask them first?? Would a world run by women really be any less violent than one that’s still pretty much ruled by men? (You’ll have to read the book to see how that one fits in). She also offers some interesting alternative theories as to how embalming and mummification came to be the dominant way of honouring the dead – as opposed to eating their corpses, of course. (I must confess I began to be persuaded of the merits of this option – eww!! Boy, I was really sucked in).

This book was written in 1988 and I’m wondering if that was the same era as Virginia Andrews and Flowers in the Attic and so forth – it has that same kind of outrageous gothic scandalous mixed up relationships thing going. Hmmm…must re-read some good old Virginia Andrews sometime…

Rating: 6 out of 10

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (2003)

By Washington Irving
In case you were wondering, this book bears very little resemblance to the recent movie of the same name – there is a headless horseman in the book, and many of the characters’ names are the same, but that’s about it. There are no wicked stepmothers, no crazy witches, no secret Wills, no bizarre dreams about long-dead parents, no magical symbols drawn on the floor, no autopsies and not much of a love story. Also, the hero isn’t anywhere as good-looking as Johnny Depp, but then dentistry wasn’t as advanced back then, was it?

The book isn’t very scary either, but it was written in the nineteenth century and tastes were different then – after all, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, everyone seems to sit around drinking cups of tea, despite the presence of an all-consuming evil that could destroy the world at any minute.

It is well written, and kind of cute, but not very relevant, somehow – it’s good, but not compelling. I can’t see that many people would find it very interesting these days. It does have the advantage, though, of being very short.

Rating: 5 out of 10