Book Review: Embassytown by China Mieville

Title: Embassytown
Author: China Mieville
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
ISBN: 978-0-330-53307-2
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 405
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

There are very few authors who consistently write enthralling books month after month or year after year. China Mieville happens to be one of them. His books are of the “New Weird” genre and I am not kidding about that. I remember reading, “Perdido Street Station” a long time ago and completely taken in by his style and the magnificence of his writing. Since then I have read most of his books – from King Rat to The City and the City, Kraken and now “Embassytown”.

“Embassytown” for me was not an easy read. It doesn’t start off easy, being the hard-core sci-fi novel that it is. It took me quite a while to get into the book and enjoy it more so only after 100 pages or so. Let me now tell you something about the book.

The book takes place on a planet known as Ariekei. A colony of human beings has formed an improbable and unheard of alliance with an unusual species, the Ariekei, known by those who live on their planet as Hosts. What makes the Ariekei strange is the fact that they have a different language. Different in the sense that they utter each word in two distinct simultaneous voices, without any words, they cannot distinguish between the sounds they employ (I found this very fascinating), the meanings they intend therefore are not clear, and so they cannot lie or recognize meaningful speech (I found this quite futuristic and scary). The only pair of humans, who have been specifically modified for the purpose of coordinating their voices and their thoughts, can communicate with the Hosts. These paired humans are known as Ambassadors.

Avice, the narrator and protagonist of the story makes us see Ariekei right through her childhood and youth – portraying an urban existence so different from ours and yet deep-rooted in universal aspects of city life. In the first couple of chapters, Avice’s complicated history with different powers of Embassytown is detailed, leading to the one evening when everything changes. The overlapping sections are well-paced, revealing the narrative secrets one step at a time. Who is Avice? What happened to her? Why are she and her husband Scile back? What is the actual science fiction element of the novel? Mieville sure doesn’t serve anything to the reader on a platter. The mystery of Ariekei and Embassytown is revealed layer by layer for the reader. The suspense element is right high on the charts and makes you turn the page, wanting more.

Mieville weaves the story so well – taking something as common-place and often taken for granted, language and showing us its real nature – as a jumping-off point – the novel is not as much of ideas as it then becomes of images. The idea of a city in transit and the cultural clashes by synergizing humans and aliens is remarkable and scary at the same time. China Mieville makes the necessary paradigm shift required for the “science-fiction” novel, by bringing out the nuances and elements of the robust world-building and the distinct awe and terror required for such books.

“Before the humans came, we didn’t speak so much of many things. Before the humans came, we didn’t speak.” That is the crux of the book. Embassytown greatest strength lies in the fact that it speaks about the fragility and duplicity of language, about the meaning, its creation and how sometimes language just doesn’t remain a reference point. What I did not like about the book is that the brilliant secondary characters were not explored more. I would have loved to see them shape and have their own voices.

Embassytown is everything you wanted though in a sci-fi novel – weird, inventive and nail-biting intrigue. If you have the patience needed for such a book, then you will not be disappointed by it at all.

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Jeffrey Archer Quiz

So here is the Jeffrey Archer Quiz. You can win, “The Sins of the Father”, his latest book in The Clifton Chronicles. This is the 2nd instalment after Only Time Will Tell. The quiz is on till Thursday, 15th of March 2012, 9 pm. Please leave your answers in the form of a comment. There are 2 copies to be won for 2 winners. Please participate. Please mention your twitter handle (if any) with your answers.

Here we go:

1. When Archer wrote the book, “Shall we tell the President?” who was originally featured as the President of the USA?
2. Which Archer story is about a plot by Saddam Hussein to humiliate the Americans?
3. Which Archer book is about four men and their ambition to become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?
4. Which Archer book is about two media barons and their battle to control the biggest newspaper empire in the world?
5. Which short story written by Archer in the collection ‘Cat o’ Nine Tales’, is about how a Bombay con artist ends up in the morgue?
6. Which Archer novel starts on 9/11 and features Van Gogh’s last painting?
7. Which Archer novel is the story of revenge when four men plot to recover the money which they lost to a master con man?
8. Which Archer story features a Soviet plot to make Alaska a part of the Soviet Union?
9. Which Archer novel is about two siblings separated at birth and ends dramatically with one of them defending the other in a murder trial?
10. Which Archer story is about the attempts of a US President to remove the CIA chief who is carrying out operations behind his back?

Book Review: Sold by Patricia McCormick

Title: Sold
Author: Patricia McCormick
Publisher: Pan India
ISBN: 978-1406334050
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 263
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Sold is an account of a young Nepalese girl, Lakshmi who is sold into the sex trade in India by her family for the sole reason – Money. Patricia McCormick writes the book with great sensitivity and at the same does not let go of the bigger picture. The book is told through the eyes of Lakshmi – a thirteen year old, her beliefs (if any), her thoughts and her emotional sense of being, on understanding what she has been sold into.

Sold is written in free verse form and that is what makes it even more heartbreaking, because it is the sad poetry of life that comes through the pages. I had thought I had read enough already about the sex trade in India; however I was proved wrong after reading Sold.

The horrors of the flesh trade come alive in this book and that is most disturbing. As humans, we think we can handle almost everything, well certainly not a thirteen year old talking about how she was drugged and made to sleep with strangers.

I don’t know if this book can be recommended for young adults, and at the same time considering what they watch and see anyway, I guess they can read this book. McCormick’s writing is stark and raw. She doesn’t mince her words and one is not expected to while writing about a topic this sensitive. The story is heartbreaking and yet sometimes uplifting as Lakshmi shows courage to maintain her identity and survive her ordeal.

Such stories stay on and linger with you, even if you cannot do anything about the situation. We will never know what it is to live like Lakshmi did. The empathy will never be lost, hopefully. The book definitely widens the scope of what we know and what we chose to ignore and for that reason alone, I urge you to read this book.

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Book Review: The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

Title: The Third Reich
Author: Roberto Bolano
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-0330535793
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 288
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Roberto Bolaño has always fascinated me with his works – absurd, odd, strange, surreal and brutal at times, he ensured that he left a legacy that his fans will never forget and from this emerges his new book, ‘The Third Reich’.
The Third Reich in bits and pieces did remind me of Ian McEwan’s, ‘The Comfort of Strangers’, but barring the basic plot was where the similarity ended. This book was discovered after his death and apparently quite complete, it is his early work. This work has been beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer. There are traces of immense surrealism in this one, which Bolaño would later use and implement in The Savage Detectives and 2666.

The Third Reich centers on Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, who is taking a vacation with his girlfriend in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava, where he has spent many a vacation with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, they engage in the usual activities – swimming, eating, drinking, sunbathing and making love. However, this vacation is not what either of the couple thought it would turn out to be. All is not well in paradise. They are involved with a local sinister group, called, The Wolf, The Lamb and El Quemado (the burnt one), a South-American immigrant who hires pedal boats on the beach. The four individuals are further taken in by acts of off-stage violence which results in a death and that changes the complete course of events.

The title of the book surprisingly (or not) comes from a game called, “The Third Reich” that Udo plays in a hotel room which becomes something more. I think Roberto Bolaño was obsessed with Germany in many ways. Many of his books deal with German Literature and he also deals with German History in a very peculiar manner.

The novel is delightful. It depicts the war-game scenario to the open, signaling its peculiarities in a poetic, stylistic manner. The book is strange and at the same time it does what it has to – entraps the reader into it. I would highly recommend this book to Roberto’s fans and also to the ones who have never read him.

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Book Review: The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Title: The Stranger’s Child
Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-0330513968
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 576
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

It’s easy to see why this was considered a Man Booker award candidate (Hollinghurst is a previous winner), and a surprise that it didn’t make the short list. Always an interesting writer, Hollinghurst here surpasses anything he’s ever done. Wrapped around a simple concept—the effect through the ages a Rupert Brooke-like Cambridge poet’s verses about an upper middle-class family has on an expanding number of people—the novel drags the reader willingly into the unfolding complications. The poem’s effects ripple outward like splash rings in a pool. The beautifully drawn characters act and react according to their varied natures, but they all remain interestingly unpredictable, in the manner of real human beings.

If, like me, you are happily at home with an unabashed mix up of Brideshead Revisited, Remains of the Day, Atonement, and The Go Between – this will be just your cup of tea. A great Victorian house with requisite chapel, matriarch dowager grumbling around in the background, servants who see it all, ingénue little sister muscling in on matters that don’t concern her, then innocently misunderstanding; whispering secret lovers meeting for affairs, explained knowingly as `in the Oxford/Cambridge way’. The star struck college friend from a smaller, more middle class home – then `Lavender’ marriages; betrayals, hidden sorrow, `What The Butler Saw’, children who could have stepped from `The Turn of the Screw’, all the wicked ways of well bred and well heeled society, with their ups and downs alongside the rest of the social strata; complicated situations that we love to follow.

The device of post mortem adulation and interest in Cecil Valance gives the reader a feeling of superiority, with our already having decided what we think of the chap, from the first section. We know what they can only guess at. Best remembered by snatches of his homoerotic poem washed clean and misunderstood for an autograph book entry, the heroic poet is now depicted as a cold marble sculpture, lying in pomp, forever young while those who loved him linger and lose the golden glow of youth. After the first section Cecil sails through the rest of the century sleeping.

Heavy with innuendo, arrogance, and secrets that despite the confidence of the shining hour truly couldn’t be kept; the Janus faced character of Sizzle Cecil and poor bumbling George Sawle carelessly burn up their brief glory days. The undercurrent of then forbidden love is a heady ingredient, as is to be expected with this author. Descriptions of pre and post The Great War are familiar from other such pieces of writing, yet uniquely and differently avoiding cliché by side stepping the actual action. Later, changes in fortunes intrigue and satisfy. Attitudes to Victoriana, relationships, money, behaviour, work, all shape and re-form. Opportunities arise through chance – “The decisive moments when one saw that the decision had been taken for one”.

I thought it was clever the way he moved into each section – and time frame – with what seemed to be a different set of characters, leading you to think you were going to have to start all over again, but then finding with relief they were still there but in a different guise. Maybe he did that once too often but then it became a pleasure working it out. `Where’s Wally’ for the discerning reader.

Perhaps there was an element of caricature amongst the assembled cast of stock figures, but there was something else going on. Hollinghurst has a trick of showing you the interior of a character, but then shifting the narrative – and emotional – perspective so that you see them through somebody else’s eyes. This is complicated by the fact that the other characters’ views are unreliable; everyone has their own agenda, so it is difficult to pin anybody down and you are frequently prompted to re-assess your perceptions. The way he did this with Paul, one of the later characters was quite subtle. First he seems sympathetic, then less so, then finally you see him mediated through other people and he comes across as hateful. At that point you realise with a jolt that you are judging him through the prism of their class prejudices. A bit like immersing yourself in Jane Austen and having to pull yourself up short when you start primly thinking that certain characters are beyond the pale because their fathers are in trade.

Another thing it does well is to conjure up the different periods convincingly, not so much the gay scene, more changing attitudes to homosexuality and its effects on individual consciousness.

So there you have it. Posh totty, indiscriminate couplings, gay sex, fizzing champagne, lashings of gin, a big juicy read and properly Literary to boot. Magic! The Pale King notwithstanding and with the Murakami translation still to come – Hollinghurst may well have crafted the most satisfying literary novel of the year.

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Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift

Title: Wish You Were Here
Author: Graham Swift
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-0330535830
PP: 256 pages
Price: 18.99 pounds
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

In this novel Graham Swift writes movingly about families and relationships, the secrets that are held inside, the things that go unspoken and that we never know about others, and in particular, even about those closest to us. Jack Luxton and his brother Tom grew up at Jebb dairy farm in North Devon, with parents Michael and Vera. A young Jack sends a postcard from the seaside on the two holidays he takes in his childhood with his mother and brother, in which he writes to his young sweetheart Ellie who lives on neighbouring Westcott farm, proclaiming `Wish You Were Here’.

Years later, an adult Jack, in his new life as a caravan park proprietor on the Isle of Wight, receives news that brother Tom, now a soldier, has been killed in Iraq, and so begins, with the occurrence of this death, the massive literal and actual return journey for Jack, taking a path backwards into the physical country of his past, and into the buried thoughts and people of his past. Primarily, but not always, focusing on Jack, the narrative drifts in time back and forth with the movement of Jack’s thoughts and memories, as they intertwine with the present experiences he is going through.

There is a terrific tension building throughout the novel, right from the scene that is set in the first chapter, in the present, through to the last scene, again in the present.

I felt that Jack had seemed as if he had not entirely been in control of his life, as if somehow others had made the decisions for him by taking their own paths, and he almost has to follow in the wake of their actions. I think this lies at the heart of how much he questions himself and wonders about the events that have shaped his past and put him where he is today.

Graham Swift has touched on the climate of fear post September 11, the resulting war on terror, and, at the core of the novel, the changing outlook for farmers since the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, and how the inhabitants of the countryside has changed.

There is such a sadness hanging over Jack. He is also fearful and begins to imagine some strange scenarios when he returns to the mainland to receive Tom’s remains and to attend the funeral. Indeed, the very opening passage of the novel refers to the feelings of madness that seem to have taken hold of his mind at times.

Altogether I found this an engrossing novel about humanity, one that tries to get to the heart of human relationships, between husband and wife, between brothers, and between a father and mother and son, and the heart-wrenching failings really tear at the reader and illustrate the frustration and heartache that is often simmering beneath our skin or buried but lurking in the back of our minds only to be brought fresh to the fore when something stirs them up.

Book Review: The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood

Title: The Godless Boys
Author: Naomi Wood
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-0330530125
PP: 320 pages
Price: £12.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

A search with a more concrete objective provides the impetus for Naomi Wood’s first novel, The Godless Boys. The Church gained political power over its alternate England in 1950, and a series of riots led to members of the Secular Movement being sent to ‘the Island’, where they and their children now live in isolation. The Malades, a gang of boys born and bred on the Island, have taken it upon themselves to root out any English spies or believers; they’ll attack the houses and persons of anyone they suspect.

In the last week of November 1986, a girl named Sarah Wicks stows away on the last boat of the year bringing supplies from England; she intends to find her mother Laura, who was involved in a church-burning ten years previously, and may have been deported to the Island. Sarah is discovered by Nathaniel Malraux, one of the Malades, who falls in love with her, and tries to keep her existence a secret from his fellow gang-members; inevitably, though, he can’t do so forever.

Wood creates a wonderful sense of place in her novel. Cut off from the technological advances of England, the Island feels like a community out of time, one that’s almost hermetic (an impression reinforced by the fact that we don’t actually see life on the mainland, nor even hear mention of the other countries in our British Isles). It’s a community where the glorious optimism of independence has been replaced by inertia (‘Now the Islanders were free to do what they wanted, and they did very little,’ p. 189). Wood evokes the drabness of this place through the detail in her prose; and her careful use of dialect words (all the Islanders speak a north-eastern dialect; as a rebellion that would have been at least as much political as religious, the Secular Movement appears to have been a largely regional phenomenon) also goes a long way towards constructing the novel’s atmosphere, in a nicely subtle way.

Book Review: The City and the City by China Mieville

Title: The City and the City
Author: China Mieville
Publisher: Pan
ISBN: 9780330493109
Genre: Fantasy, Literary Fiction
PP: 373 Pages
Price: £7.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Beszel and Ul Qoma are two entirely different cities: one, grubby and loud; the other, rich and artistic. When Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad gets involved in a new murder case, he finds himself straddling both cities as increasingly bizarre clues reveal themselves to him. The only danger is Beszel and Ul Qoma exist simultaneously in the same location: twin cities joined by a sense of perspective and dimension. It’s absolutely critical that citizens, and Borlú in particular as a policzai, exercise complete control over “seeing” and “unseeing,” “smelling” and “unsmelling,” “hearing” and “unhearing”–the methods taught to citizens and visitors of both cities where one must see only what exists in one city at a time. To acknowledge the existence of the other in anything but an academic or conceptual context is to invoke the wrath of Breach.

The City & The City isn’t your typical Miéville novel. It is if you take into consideration the inclusion of economics, politics, and his unmistakably dense, cryptic dialogue and narrative. Otherwise, it remains a detective novel of the hard-boiled variety: Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler rolled up and re-made with Miéville’s characteristic SF bend. It’s not as looming or horrific as Perdido Street Station or The Scar (or even King Rat), but he always infuses his cities with as much character as the rest of the cast; Besz and Ul Qoma are no different. In fact, their very existence is vital to the reader’s understanding of the book.

Tyador is the narrator and comes to us through the first person, a choice that sometimes makes a book exclusive and harder to read. That’s not the case here. The suspense of the murder and the snaking trail that leads Borlú far from his home and the murder is heightened with the slow, teasing revelations the reader experiences as Borlú does. There is no panicked gripping of the pages as we, frustrated, hope against all hope Borlú escapes an omniscient evil–no, we are all subject to the consequences of the story as it unravels, no one knows any more than anyone else. We can’t fault Borlú for falling into unseen traps or revel in any dramatic irony.

The writing was harder for me to get into than other works by Miéville. I don’t know if that was due to time or if he did become a bit more elusive and stingy with his exposition. The good thing is Miéville always assumes an intelligent reader and reveals important details to us as they would normally come along. He does not stop to describe the unnecessary–everything adds to the flavor of the cities and the heavy ambiance of mystery. In particular, the description of the two cities is from Borlú’s perspective as a local. This made it a little difficult for me to catch on earlier as to what was going on with regards to his locale, and about 50 or so pages into the book, a vague, musing explanation is given. There is no scientific explanation for their existence and no explanation for the all of the odd terminology Miéville uses freely, but this I liked. Instead, words are given a context for our understanding and the novel progressed smoothly. Fans of Miéville’s writing will still enjoy the dense prose, albeit a little foreign in the new terrain of detective fiction.

The murder takes a backseat to everything else Borlú becomes entangled in. Instead of driving the narrative forward, the murder becomes an accessory to a greater element: the mysterious and mythical Orciny and the much feared Breach. At times it seemed like an odd combination: detective fiction and SF; the narrative reflected this dichotomy in the priority switching of the plot, but for the most part, I was kept in suspense and found myself not caring where the narrative took me, but that I was carried along the journey well entertained.

My only disappointment comes from the ending. I liked where Borlú’s path led him and the transcendent, if annoyingly explicit commentary of the novel, but felt a huge lack when it came to my hopes in the existence of a greater power. I guess I put too much stock in the fantasy of the novel, but I did enjoy it.

Personally, I would have enjoyed the metaphor of the book a lot more if it wasn’t spelled out for me in the end, by which point I’d already caught on, but overall think it was wonderfully executed. In a novel that questions “where it is that we live”, Miéville captured the frustration, and ultimately freedom, that comes from a close examination of our own philosophical existence with the larger world around us. I’d definitely recommend this to fans of China Miéville for the novelty of a break from his usual writing, but also to newcomers. The City & The City is well worth the read.