The world ends at least five times in season four of my writing group’s monthly book corner. Either it was accidentally about apocalypses, or we’re a very dark group. The season concludes with:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams,
- Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake,
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
What is the book corner?
Each month the group takes a break from critiquing our WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose. In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers
Season four began with The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters. We continued with reviews of The Shore, Cat’s Cradle and Uprooted.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
HH2G, as it’s known to people who don’t like writing long titles, was my choice for this season. I first read it in my early teens, maybe even my pre-teens, or did I see the HH2G BBC TV adaptation? At that age, I enjoyed it as a simple comic romp full of absurd digressions and wonderful characters. I know that I heard the HH2G radio series later and the less said about the 2005 film of HH2G, the better.
Loveable grump Marvin the Paranoid Android, ebullient asshole Zaphod Beeblebrox, hoopy frood Ford Prefect and homesick everyman Arthur Dent are all characters that a young man can identify with at different times. Trillian doesn’t get her own story or punchlines, but a female astrophysicist was remarkable for a reader used to a lot of Boy’s Own-style adventures. The absurdity made me question a lot of my world, too, putting into perspective my as-yet-unquestioned Church of England upbringing in 1980s Britain.
I grew into the satire, forewarned and forearmed as my world expanded and I encountered more of Adams’s social, political and cultural targets. I’m happy to be among the generation of nerdy readers who can sum up a situation by quoting lines from Hitchhiker’s. HH2G ends abruptly, so I also re-read Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and it’s arguably a sharper, funnier story. Everyone remembers Arthur and Ford’s apprehension of Earth’s tragic fate, but Zaphod’s encounter with the man who rules the universe is a timeless scene, and no less important.
As a teen, my favourite part of the quadrilogy was Life, The Universe And Everything, probably because it’s got more swearing. Together, these novels had a huge influence on my life and my writing. It’s wonderful to see how much of Adams’s satire and philosophy remains relevant. And Marvin will never not be funny.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Even by the standards of its time, Titus Groan is a slow starter. Peake makes no attempt to draw in his reader: you must be determined to vanquish this beast of literary fantasy. He always finds time for another digression to describe the sprawling, crumbling edifice of Gormenghast Castle, the landscape surrounding it, or one of the many grotesques who rely on the castle and its owners for their existence.
Reading Titus Groan is an epic undertaking of its own and not one I completed in time to discuss it, but I had spelunked deeply enough to have been drawn into servant/slave Steerpike’s ruthless ascent of Gormenghast’s hierarchy. The Groans are a classic aristocratic family, almost certainly inbred, who believe that they have an innate right to rule, though their only duty is to produce an heir to continue their line. Even raising the heir is outsourced. Everyone else within the castle’s influence exists to serve that goal, including the Bright Carvers, a community of peasant savants who live in a romanticised squalor.
The standard reading of Titus Groan casts Steerpike as a Machiavellian villain. I found an antihero who revolutionises a world mired in futile and incomprehensible traditions, and his story compelled me to complete this epic reading. For my taste, the florid descriptions and convoluted sentence structures are crafted to flatter the reader into thinking they’re clever for wading through them.
The BBC adapted the first two novels of the Gormenghast trilogy in 2000. (In classic BBC fashion, they baulked at completing the story when it developed a whiff of SF). The series is without doubt a more accessible way to discover the story, but Gormenghast without Peake’s prose misses the point. Pull on your gumboots and trudge through the magniloquent mire; a remarkable story lurks beneath.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The canon of literature is a big place, and somehow I’d bypassed The Grapes Of Wrath. I almost did it a second time when Kindle sold me a misattributed copy of Grapes Of Wrath by Boyd Cable. That novel is an account of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (both take their titles from Julia Ward Howe’s 1862 “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). The link above should take you to the right book.
Nor did I know that the dustbowl that transformed the American Midwest in the 1930s was a failure of unregulated capitalism and a triumph of greed over compassion, as was the subsequent refugee crisis in California. I was also unaware of Steinbeck’s apparent plagiarism of Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, which lead to her novel being dropped by its publisher. I’m fundamentally ignorance with a keyboard, so this was a long-overdue reading.
Structurally, The Grapes Of Wrath is a fascinating combination of reportage and drama. It enables Steinbeck to communicate the economic and political scope of the ongoing disaster, equipping us to understand its personal impact on the displaced Joad family. Their powerlessness is magnified by the forces working continually to deny them the dignity of self-reliance that they crave. Contemporary writing often clings so close to intimate perspectives that it struggles to communicate external forces realistically. Instead, authors anthropomorphise social failures into a single villain, insert themselves into the story as a heroic reporter, or introduce a Basil Exposition character to explain the world.
Steinbeck leaves no doubt that the villains of his story are neither impersonal forces nor a single person. It is a campaign of the privileged against the vulnerable. Bankers lend money to smallholders at usurious rates, large farmers treat migrant workers as a disposable asset worth less than livestock and force smallholders to do the same, law enforcement wilfully victimises the weakest members of society, and politicians court the votes and wealth of those in power.
Perhaps the most depressing lesson The Grapes Of Wrath sends to authors is how little power literature has to transform society. The dustbowl and the refugee crisis should be a source of American shame, embedded in the minds of millions of students who continue to read this novel. It is impossible to read without seeing parallels in contemporary recessions, the climate crisis, the treatment of refugees and migrants, and the behaviour of those who have capital towards those who do not. Yet we continue to make the same mistakes and behave inhumanely to those most in need of human dignity.
Still, Steinbeck ends his novel with new life and a family that refuses to give up despite the world doing its best to destroy them. Maybe that’s a lesson, too.
Buy the books
The Book Corner season 5: ungainly adaptations
I hope you’ve enjoyed my impressions of these novels. I’d love to read your comments.
The writing group has now embarked on a new season of monthly diversions: book-to-film adaptations which haven’t worked as well as they should. We’ll start with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion and conclude in 2024 with Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. I’ll try to compile my reviews as we go this time.
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5 replies on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Titus Groan and The Grapes of Wrath: Book Corner 4.3”
In January 2023 I set a goal of posting every week, which isn’t easy when you’re diverted as readily as I am. I managed about three posts a month and I’ll take that for a win. Nerd that I am, I thought I’d start the new year with my top five posts of 2023.
An author, deep in thought. Credit: Anthony Anastas/Flickr
Most popular posts of 2023
When it comes to winning views, my most successful post in 2023 was Planning tools for writing novels, which saw a surge of interest around Nanowrimo in November. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, that second place went to my two-part review of Plottr, the visual storytelling tool.
I was surprised to see that Comparative sentience: what does it mean to be smart, was my third most-viewed post of 2023. Originally posted on my old Medium feed in 2017, I re-posted here after discovering that it was cited in an academic paper. Maurice Yolles at Liverpool John Moores University referred to my work in Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View.
Publishing my first novel in 2022 made me think about the true cost of writing a book. I posted How much does it cost to write a novel in January 2023, and it’s become the next most popular post of the year.
Book reviews have taken up a fair bit of blogging time this year, so I was relieved to see one make the top five. My review of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief took in the book and the 2010 film, but it was timed for the launch of a new adaptation on Disney+. I’m looking forward to catching up with the TV show’s take on the ADHD demigod.
NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus cooking on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Most read posts of 2023
I tend to write long posts, so it’s even better when my content is read as well as seen. Ranking my posts by the time visitors spent reading them, the 2023 winner is the first part of my series of space food: A Taste Of Space. Contemporary Astro Cuisine had an average engagement of 8 minutes and 56 seconds, although when I say visitors, there was just one and I thank you.
Next up came my thoughts on the hard problems facing that hoary sci-fi trope of uploading your mind to a computer. Embodied intelligence: bad news for transhumanists, great news for AIs, was read for an average of 4 minutes 41 seconds.
Book reviews also made for longer reads in 2023, with three posts filling the final slots in the top five of reader engagement. A triple-bill of The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters captured your attention for 2 minutes and 25 seconds. Another book vs film review, for The Gunslinger/The Dark Tower by Stephen King, was close behind at 2 minutes 21 seconds. Finally, a roundup of those unlikely bookshelf-fellows The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Titus Groan and The Grapes of Wrath occupied readers for 1 minute 51 seconds.
My favourite posts of 2023
Nothing beats discovering that I’d written something smart enough to be cited by a genuine academic, even if it was something I wrote six years ago!
I enjoy all of my research-based writing — maybe too much — whether it’s animals in space or Irish mythology. A Taste Of Space became an epic undertaking but it provoked a lot of thought about the future of food for off-world communities. Research is fun but it’s only the beginning: the hard part is turning it into cultures that my characters inhabit.
It’s not always fun to review books from a writer’s perspective, especially when I wanted to like a novel and feel let down by the experience. I’ve encountered novels I might never have read and been glad that I did, and hate-read to the end on a couple of occasions. Sometimes it’s been cathartic to get those feelings into a review and rationalise my feelings, but every novel has been provocative and educational in one way or another.
And it’s been rewarding to see that Save Orangutans has been consistently among the top five pages on my entire site. I hope some of you have jumped off to one of the conservation charities to donate.
Kinnitty Pyramid will reveal its dark secrets in 2024. Credit: Alexander Lane
Post predictions for 2024
The coming months will see more reviews as I take on the books and adaptations of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. After that I’m going to look at a few of the books about writing that I’ve enjoyed, though I want to keep reviews at a monthly cadence and leave room for other topics.
The hardest part is choosing a topic from the every-lengthening list and trying to stop them running away into multi-post epics. There will be something about AI, consciousness, research into history, mythology and space travel, and notions about literature itself that all these reviews are making me think about.
As for creative writing, the second Nightmare Vacations story remains mired in edits. I’m determined to get it out by the middle of 2024 and I’ve got several research-based posts in mind to support the launch.
Most book reviewers do it to share their opinions. As a writer, I want to discover what I think about the craft so that I can improve. That’s where the Book Corner comes in.
Book reviewers usually cover new releases and classics (because the algorithms love a classic). My selections are governed by the whims of the Book Corner, which is selected by my peers in a regular writing group.
The Book Corner
The Book Corner began as a response to the reading list for the Creative Writing MA that I completed in 2021. The class had a mixed response to the ten novels we read across a year. After graduating, we thought it would be fun to keep on reading together as well as writing.
Once a month, we take a break from the Poo Vortex of critiquing our own work, enter the Book Corner and criticise published works. The goal is explore them as examples of writing for our own work, and discover how we react to them.
The first season of Book Corner was an alternative reading list of contemporary novels for an MA group. The second drew on our TBR lists. Someday, I should get around to reviewing at least a few of them.
Titles included Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name Of The Wind, two Iain (M) Banks novels (The Business and Surface Detail), VE Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, The World According To Garp by John Irving, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, Himself by Jess Kidd, and A History Of The World In 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes.
From reader to reviewer
The third season of the Book Corner covered recent winners of literary awards for genre fiction. The selection ranged from history to horror, and coincided with the launch of my website. Ever-hungry for content I caught up, with a post on the quirks of award-winning genre fiction. As I wrote, I began to sniff out something about the qualities I value in creative writing.
The fourth season embraced a nebulous concept of novels that we wanted to re-read with the group. The list covered, covering almost a century of writing from John Steinbeck through Kurt Vonnegut to Naomi Alderman. I graduated from a single post to three roundups, and with season five I’ve taken on a post for every novel.
The latest season compares novels with their film adaptations. So far, it’s included Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Over four seasons, I’ve enjoyed most of the novels my fellow writers have selected and I’ve been delighted by several. A few have left me unexpectedly disappointed, underwhelmed or nonplussed. One made me so angry that I’m still unsettled at my response. As I’ve reviewed them in increasing detail, I’ve also had to think about the qualities which I value as a reader and a writer.
Reading as a writer*
One of the opening gambits of my MA at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, was teaching us to read as writers. When you come to a novel as a reader, you’re usually reading for pleasure. Your only hope is that you’ll enjoy the novel.
Every reader rates a novel by placing different weights on the scales of their tastes. Literary readers value language, technique, character and theme above story, world and ideas. Fantasy and science fiction readers tend to weight their preferences in the opposite direction.
Fans of romance, western, thriller and horror are drawn to the formal structure inherent in their genres. Characters matter, but they value the story most on its ability to deliver the beats they expect. Historical fiction readers tend towards literary ideals, but their favourites must also deliver an authentic slice of their period setting.
Not every reader is a genre purist, and some people value writing that reaches creatively across genres. Literary readers tend to think of themselves as above genre.
Reading as a writer is sometimes reduced to examining language in forensic detail. This is absolutely useful to uncover how different genres use language. It’s also a useful for tool for separating the readerly notion of taste from a broader question of quality. However, it’s as important to focus on the big picture as it is to examine the contributions of the copy-editor and proof reader.
Taste, quality and success
For me, reading as a writer looks at how an author employs the different elements of our authorial toolkit. I try to see how well they deliver on the values of the genre.
Everyone will have a different description of what success looks like. I’m a fan of John Gardner’s notion that a storyteller must deliver the experience of a continuous waking dream. Anything which interrupts that dream signifies a failure, although there are exceptions.
I look foward to writing that is so profound that I have to stop and think about it. Great books can use language so challenging that you need a couple of read-throughs. The writer’s aim is not to wake the reader from their immersion in the experience. If they want to throw your book across the room, you’ve definitely failed.
You can analyse an author’s techniques at microscopic, macroscopic and meta levels.
The microscopic level covers language, style, metre and dialogue. I look specifically at opening lines, the voices of the narrator and their characters, and the eternally-debated balance of “show vs tell”. The macroscopic level concerns structure and rhythm. I’m interested in how they function on the level of the chapter and the entire novel, if they conform to or subvert formulas like the Hero’s Journey, and the depth of characterisation. Last but far from least, on the meta level, theme emerges and elements like symbols motifs become significant.
Most writers also agree that there some fundamentals that reach across genres. These include consistency of style, the voice of the author, and delivering the promise of the premise (even literary fiction has to do this).
The mundane and the fantastic
As a writer, I’ve begun to see literature, readers and writers falling into two camps: the mundane and the fantastic. (I could write a whole post on this and I’m not even sure it’s an original notion.)
They’re not discrete categories, but literary success and failure often result from writers straying too far from home. Often, mundane readers are uncomfortable with the fantastic and fantastic readers are underwhelmed by the mundane. Writers, too.
Mundane isn’t an insult. It describes a world of everyday concerns, where characters and events are things that you could confidently encounter at your front door, in the news or the pages of a history book.
Mundanity is constructed of things which neither the reader nor the writer needs a great deal of imagination to conjure. Crucially, both sides of the experience are comfortable in that space. Works of crime, westerns, romance, historical and literary fiction are typically mundane.
The fantastic: commit or fail
The fantastic requires a writer to imagine something which is not in the everyday world. In the fantastic mode, both readers and writers enjoy exercising their imaginations. The fantastic element might be very small, but chaos theory teaches us that even small changes can have dramatic effects.
Ghost stories typically introduce the fantastic into a mundane setting with terrifying impact. Magical realism is a precise, subtle application of the fantastic to mundane settings. Science fiction and fantasy can operate within the mundane, or eschew it for entirely imagined worlds.
Whatever the degree, a fantastic writer must be willing and able to execute those changes for their entire world. Literary failure results when writers of the mundane take a fantastic premise on which they are unwilling or unable to commit.
There’s nothing wrong with using the fantastic as a device of the mundane, revealed as trickery, imagination, mental illness or hallucination (even if it’s sometimes a cliché). However, if a writer decides that the world has been fundamentally changed by their premise, refusing to explore those changes and how they affect your characters represents a gross failure of storytelling art.
The Book Corner continues
And if fiction is anything, it is the art of telling stories, mundane or fantastic. As a reader and a writer, I simply find the fantastic more satisfying.
Mundane fiction sometimes feels like it engages only half of my mind because my imagination is ticking over. I won’t deny that historical fiction or an unsolved mystery can be as transporting as any space opera. Original and engaging characters can exist in any setting, and the most successful mundane literature exceeds its quotidian trappings to become fantastic.
The final works of the book vs film season will be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. I’m hoping for fantastic results.
* Reading As A Writer is, ironically, the title of a book on the topic which I found neither helpful nor entertaining.
Cover image: NASABooks image: Svetlana Buzmakova/Shutterstock
Amazon has updated Author Central and asked me to recommend five books for five questions. Here’s a few more for your TBR.
If you’ve never heard of Amazon Author Central, it’s like a micro-site for every author. You can host a bio, photos, and now suggest books you like.
For the update, Amazon asks you to choose books based on five questions, but one book is never enough. I’ve added a couple more to each category and built on the 120 characters they gave me to explain them.
What’s a similar book [to Blood River] that readers would like?
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks. I said: “The found diary of a small group cut off by natural disaster and faced with a ruthless, violent primal competitor.”
Devolution was suggested by a friend who read Blood River, and it’s got a few similarities to my first Nightmare Vacations novel. Brooks is best known for World War Z, which also uses an epistolary format to tell a story that’s too big for one narrator. Here it’s used to solve the challenge of a narrator whose fate must remain a mystery as the terrifying antagonists close in. He adds a framing narrator and fictional experts for external context which drives tension in the central story. Devolution hits a gripping pace as the primal monsters pick off survivors, although I didn’t like the central characters very much.
Author Central alt picks
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. As much an art piece as a novel, it’s still a terrifying story and an awesome piece of narrative construction. Read this in a physical format where you can relish the footnotes and appendix items.
Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix. Grady Hendrix writes fun horror stories with entertaining and original concepts that I wish I’d thought of. Horrorstör is best enjoyed in a physical format that embraces its play on the IKEA catalogue.
What’s a book you couldn’t put down?
A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, 1) by Arkady Martine. I said: “The Teixcalaan duology is a masterclass of intimate love story set against an epically-crafted space opera drama.”
This came to me through our reading group’s award-winners season. I read the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, as soon as there was a gap in my reading list. I’m suspicious of literary awards, but novels are deserving of their plaudits.
Technically, AMCE is a planetary romance in which an ill-prepared ambassador becomes embroiled in the politics of a civilization that considers her barely human, and falls in love with her handler. ADCP reunites the protagonists in a full-scale space opera that expands and challenges the set-up of the first instalment. Both novels do what SF does best: they pose big questions and tell gripping personal stories against an epic scale that shows off the author’s craft and imagination.
Author Central alt picks
Wool by Hugh Howey. An engrossing post-apocalyptic thriller with sequels which cleverly reinvent the premise each time. The Apple TV series absolutely nailed the first book of the Silo trilogy, which is an unexpected delight.
The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin. I liked The Fifth Season but I found its sequels in the Broken Earth trilogy unputdownable. This is how literary SF should be: unashamedly imaginative storytelling that crosses genre boundaries, with challenging narrative styles, deep and consistent worldbuilding, and a human story at its heart.
What’s a book that left an impression on you?
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I said: “Like the IgNobel Prizes, HH2G made me laugh, then it made me think, and it continues to do so 40 years later.”
I’ve written at length about HH2G, and it’s best enjoyed with its first two sequels, Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and Life, The Universe & Everything, which complete the immediate story of Arthur Dent and friends. Adams shows a more mature perspective in Sol Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless, as he did in his Dirk Gently novels. The entire HH2G sequence is shorter, more fun and just as clever as any number of literary doorstops.
It’s strange that the story of a middle-aged man and his equally non-youthful friends is listed by Amazon as a best seller in “Teen & Young Adult Humorous Fiction eBooks”, but that’s algorithms for you. What a depressingly stupid robot, as Marvin would say.
Author Central alt picks
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick. The inspiration for Blade Runner portrays a richer world than Ridley Scott’s iconic neon-and-titties noirpunk, but the the fundamental questions of humanity and our illusions of self-worth remain.
Milk and Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad by Evan Dorkin. If you think Itchy & Scratchy are the best part of The Simpsons, Milk and Cheese will appeal to you. Any similarity to my cheeky little pals, Bongo and Sandy, is entirely incidental.
What’s a book that opened your eyes to a new perspective?
The Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead. I said: “A steampunk alt-history that sheds new light on the politics of the darkest chapter in American history.”
Whitehead presents an unflinching picture of American slavery that needs no reimagining, but his vision of a real underground railroad enables a slide into alt-history. Escaped slave Cora adventures into a parallel world that asks difficult questions about attitudes to race and gender equality, throughout civil rights movements and progressive politics, from the 1800s to the present day.
Author Central alt picks
The Sellout by Paul Beatty. This is a dark but undeniably funny satire on racial politics that refuses to compromise. It’s also a charming tale with a powerful real-life back story.
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. An accessible non-fiction book that creates a new context for many of the incomprehensible events occurring in the modern world.
What’s a book that is important to you?
Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks. I said: “My favourite Culture novel, combining grand space opera with a personal melancholy. Banks at his best.”
All of the Culture novels are important to me, for the sheer breathtaking fun of his writing, for the shocking twists, for the characters and societies which populate his universe. Look To Windward is special because of the personal melancholy which unites its protagonists, even though one of them is an AI of staggering power and the other is a sentient feline driven by a widow’s grief.
Author Central alt picks
Happiness by Aminatta Forna. I was still at odds with my grief when this popped up on my MA reading list, and Happiness helped me to accept it. As a writer, I love Forna’s prose and her use of structure to reveal both the story and its meaning.
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds is a master of hard SF who deserves wider recognition. I still remember the awe I felt when the nested timelines that he braids together in Chasm City unlocked a sucker punch finale.
Which books would you suggest for Amazon’s Author Central questions? Let me know in the comments below.
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Tropes abound as the second trio from season four of my writing group’s monthly book corner takes in feminist speculative fiction, a classic of SF satire and a contemporary fairy tale:
The Shore by Sara Taylor,
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut,
Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
What is the book corner?
Each month, our writing group takes a break from critiquing WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose.
In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers. For the book corner season 4, we took a more relaxed approach.
Catch up on The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters: book corner roundup, season 4.1.
The Shore by Sara Taylor
I didn’t finish The Shore in time for our group discussion, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to keep going.
The poverty porn in Shit Creek USA forms opening chapters that felt like a grab bag of modern lit-fic tropes. It’s true that racism, misogyny, domestic violence, drug addiction and systemic poverty in isolated rural communities are what makes America great today [irony warning]. Still, it’s a well-trodden road and I need more to lift a novel out of the broken kitchen sink.
Eventually, the time-jumping story reveals magical realism and an SF flavour that’s seen it likened to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The disjointed narrative is both a help and a hindrance, jumping through time and around the islands of the Shore. You get a different flavour of grimness but it takes time for the threads to pick up pace. Persistence is rewarded as the connections emerge, which is where the magic of this story lies.
The time jumps also presented problems for the group as a whole. Several readers questioned the longevity of objects and locations which return to enable later storylines. As a Kindle reader, I couldn’t make much use of the family tree at the opening of the novel because it’s too small to read.
Taylor’s dystopian future is closer Atwood’s dark realism than Mitchell’s soaring imagination, and occasionally too accurate. After all, a future without Roe vs Wade is something Americans no longer have to fear; it’s here today.
An imaginative final third elevates The Shore. The sexually transmitted plague and its apocalyptic social consequences are startling, original and betray a dark wit that I would have welcomed earlier, but maybe her target audience wouldn’t have followed that journey.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle escaped my youthful Vonnegut phase, so I was delighted to find this on the list. It’s a typically concise, dark, absurd and witty example, playfully skewering political and social themes of his time.
In this apocalypse, a banana republic in the Caribbean gains control of ice-nine, a chemical which makes water freeze at room temperature. It’s a ‘good’ banana republic, though, with an anti-communist dictator friendly to the US and an absurd religion. Bokonism was created specifically to offer purpose and community in the face of the island’s insoluble poverty and squalor. Vonnegut leaves no doubt that Cat’s Cradle is a satire of the scientific and military cultures behind the nuclear arms race: the story opens with his narrator collecting stories of what people were doing when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
It’s also very enjoyable: the story moves fast and each of the 127 chapters is a joke with a punchline. Meanwhile, the narrator is led to his fate by an inevitable comedic clockwork, despite his attempts to escape or control it. Tropes are harder to judge when you’re reading a 50-year-old novel. Even when characters seem like dated stereotypes, it’s easy to assume that Vonnegut was satirising something that’s been lost to time and a Transatlantic perspective.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
I read a lot of fantasy in my teens but this is very different to those D&D-style stories. Presenting as a fantasy romance based on Polish fairy tales, Uprooted makes clever use of its influences and genre tropes to craft an original, surprising and emotionally satisfying story.
On the surface, it’s the story of a young woman who unexpectedly becomes the servant and then apprentice to a powerful wizard who’s much older than he seems. They form an unlikely bond as they’re pitched against an insidious, inhuman evil and court politics. It would be easy to mistake Uprooted for a coming-of-age magician’s tale with a strong romance subplot and file it under YA fantasy romance.
It’s definitely not YA, though. Novik plays with expectations along the magic and romance axes as the heroine’s adventures expand our knowledge of this world. A final act twist overturns the assumptions you’ve been fed, in a way that’s both narratively and thematically satisfying.
The court scenes are sometimes run with the tropes rather than against them, but they’re more than made up for by the emotional intimacy of Novik’s magic system, observations on class and gender politics, effective action pacing and vivid world building.
More reviews coming soon
My opinions coming up in the final part of season four on:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams,
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake,
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
It’s time for The Book Corner season 4, part 1, a list loosely themed around books that had shaped our writing journeys. With nine very different books, I’ll give my tuppence-worths in three instalments, starting with:
The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk.
What is the book corner?
Each month, our writing group takes a break from critiquing WIPs to examine a complete, published novel. Everyone picks a book, based on a loose theme connected to making us better writers. If nothing else, it’s a great way to broaden my reading beyond the SF I’d probably choose.
In season three, we looked at award-winning genre fiction to find out what literary awards can teach writers. For the book corner season 4, we took a more relaxed approach.
The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet
My notes for The Murdstone Trilogy begin with three words: “MEAN MEAN MEAN.”
It’s a very clever but horribly mean-spirited dark satire on creativity, publishing, genre fiction, social media and even Peet’s own novels. Yet this satirical take on fantasy isn’t simply mean, it’s outdated and narrow. It’s no surprise that The Murdstone Trilogy was lauded by literary critics who sit outside genre fiction. It’s a poor take compared to the joyful genre satires created by authors like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.
The bitterness is less surprising when you look at Peet’s career. He was a decorated children’s author whose success dried up after several books. The Murdstone Trilogy was completed and published not long before he died from cancer, aged 67. The protagonist is an author insert, settling scores with people and places, even denigrating his own work. With death on the doorstep, Peet was apparently unafraid of being attacked for racist, transphobic and ableist characters. It’s another question how critics in 2014 ignored tropes that would have been unpleasant in the 1980s.
Read without context, The Murdstone Trilogy is often wonderful, with landscapes that reminded me of Alan Garner. There’s an extremely effective conceit that shows the protagonist receiving entire books from one of his characters, used to great effect as the plot develops. Vivid characters and unique voices populate a Faustian tale of authorial desperation, which twists ever darker towards a nihilistic ending that allows no redemption.
My fellow readers described The Murdstone Trilogy as a “bile dump” and “writing to spite the reader”. I can’t help feeling sorry that Peet’s life led a talented writer to pen a final novel that’s so embittered. Neither can I imagine Pratchett leaving such an tragic legacy.
If you liked The Murdstone Trilogy, I’d love to know why.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Disclosure notice: I have a soft spot for Naomi Alderman. She’s the lead writer on Zombies, Run, a story-running app which has kept me going for well over a thousand kilometres since 2013.
The Power is a dystopian SF tale, a feminist take on superpowers which might be pitched as The Handmaid’s Tale meets A Canticle For Leibowitz via World War Z. It’s the story of young women around the world who gain the power to shoot electricity from their bodies, told retrospectively by a male historian in a matriarchal future.
The framing narrative is essential to understanding the story, and in itself critiques both the story and the act of writing. Alderman’s narrators and protagonists of both genders are unreliable, broken and betrayed. Their actions and choices are consistent to her world, and she’s not afraid to show that power corrupts women as much as men.
On this second reading of The Power, I was struck by its prescience. She describes too well a Qanon-style conspiracy group that inspires terrorism, while both states and organisations undermine peace for their own aims. As for a nuclear apocalypse beginning in the Caucuses, I hope that’s not too accurate.
It’s not a perfect novel, but it is bold, unflinching and original. Did The Power electrify you? Let me know in the comments.
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk is one of those authors who manages to be Marmite on a book-by-book basis. I started Invisible Monsters in a good mood, thanks to a dedication which every writer will recognise: ‘…my editor, Patricia, who kept saying, “This is not good enough.”’
Invisible Monsters is difficult to review without spoilers. It’s a story about identity and deception in which everyone is telling lies or withholding information. I can reveal that it’s shocking, funny, sad, sharply satirical and thoroughly non-linear. If you find it too straightforward, there’s now a Remix that’s so non-linear it comes with instructions.
The cast is small, but it’s often hard to keep track of because everyone has at least two identities, so it rewards at least one re-reading to see how the story emerges and how it’s disguised. I enjoyed the ride, although I sometimes feel like Chuck Palahniuk is a small child, telling very rude jokes in the middle of a crowded room to make sure everyone knows how naughty and clever he is.
But he is both very clever and very naughty. I’d love to come up with a basic story as sick and brilliant as the linear narrative of Invisible Monsters. I get a headache imagining how he chopped it up and nested the pieces into a Russian doll of reveals, each of which tells you the previous layer was an illusion yet maintains the wit of the characters, dialogue and situations.
How did you feel about Invisible Monsters? Too shocking? Too confusing? Let me know, below the line.
More reviews coming soon
The Book Corner season 4 continues with:
The Shore by Sara Taylor
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
The Book Corner season 4 concludes with:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams,
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake,
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.