29/11/17: Kingsley Amis – Colonel Sun (1968)

Originally published under the pseudonym “Robert Markham", Colonel Sun was the very first "James Bond continuation novel". Ian Fleming died in 1964, but his character was popular enough that 007 would outlast him. Amis offers a more human Bond, prone to anger and weakness, with some suspiciously Amis-like opinions. For example, he notices: “the new, hateful London of steel-and-glass matchbox architecture, flyovers and underpasses, and the endless hysterical clamour of pneumatic drills". Occasionally, Amis offers a curious insight, such as when he observes “that indifference to food and drink which so often accompanies interest in power”.

By today's standards this book could be considered sexist, racist and homophobic. The Chinese strategy is described by one character as “the Chink plan of attack”. Then there are statements such as: “Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, 'classical' look one associates with old coins”. You could argue that the prejudices are Bond's, not Amis's, except that all of the characters seem to share similar opinions.

It’s a consciously low-tech Bond, avoiding gadgets and gimmicks: “In similar adventures in the past Bond had had a luxurious armoury of devices to choose from. This time, he realized without dismay, it had been and was going to go on being a matter of improvisation, guts and what physical skills he could command." Elsewhere, Amis writes: "the tools he basically had to depend on were invisible, intangible, within himself”. This aspect of the novel works well, with the drama emerging from plot and dialogue rather than technological add-ons. In fact, its knifings and torture scenes are fairly brutal – a lot more intimate and believable than the “clean”, almost cartoonish violence of the screen versions of Ian Fleming’s books.

While this is no masterpiece, the plot rattles along energetically and the sadistic villain (a “yellow” Chinaman) is suitably cruel and terrifying. The book gets more exciting as it gathers pace. It’s an ideal read for a long train journey or a wet Sunday afternoon.

29/10/17: Carrie Fisher – The Princess Diarist (2016)

Subtitled "A sort of memoir...", this book recollects Carrie Fisher's time on set filming Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) – or Star Wars, as it was simply known back then. The main focus is her affair with co-star Harrison Ford. She was 19. He was 33 and married with children. The first 100 pages are highly entertaining, written by the older Carrie looking back at her younger self with all of the wit and wordplay of her excellent novels and previous non-fiction books.

There then follows 68 pages from her journals of the time. These are full of self-conscious teenage angst and poetry and don't make for especially compelling material now. They lack detail of who did or said what, instead examining her emotions and fears. The entries aren’t even given dates. If you are reading this for behind-the-scenes Star Wars gossip, you will be disappointed. These pages are more interesting for the way they chart the development of Carrie Fisher as a writer: by this point she was still to learn all of the tics and tricks that would make her prose sparkle. We learn surprisingly little about Harrison Ford, other than that he was quiet, aloof and possibly even a little dull.

The final third of the book is the most fascinating. She describes how it feels to "be" Leia, the character people seem unable to separate her from, and is acutely aware of her fickle, fading fame. She's especially good when discussing the excruciating sci-fi fan conventions she reluctantly began to attend, selling autographs and meeting admirers. It would be easy for her to have savaged her slightly deranged followers, who often tell her their life stories and detail her impact on their formative years, but she learns to regard them with gratitude and humanity.

What's missing from the book is any reference to working with Harrison Ford again in the Star Wars sequels. Was it awkward? How did they get on? What happened when they had to become an on-screen couple three years after splitting as a real-world couple? And what about when the series was revived for 2015's The Force Awakens and they found themselves acting together again? Shortly after this book was published, Carrie Fisher died. With Ford preferring not to comment on their relationship, this slim book may have to be the last word on the subject.

On page 48 there's a photo of Carrie and Harrison – or “Carrison”, as she calls them – smiling together. They look impossibly young and beautiful.

01/10/17: Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

"Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."

This is the best haunted house story of them all. Crucially, Jackson understands that it's what you don’t see that can frighten you the most. She never destroys the brilliantly controlled build-up of tension by revealing the actual face of the evil walled up within the "clashing disharmony" of Hill House. Instead, she lets this take form in the reader's mind. This is a stroke of genius as it allows us to emphasise with Eleanor, whose own mind is being slowly filled and possessed by dark imaginings (which may, in fact, be the 'true' reality of the house). As one of the characters puts it: "an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us and break us apart in a matter of days".

I love the way the very architecture of the building has a harrowing awfulness about it: "Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length..." That wrongness is described so perfectly. (There's no way Stephen King could have written The Shining without reading this novel.)

The book is quite funny in places (notably the characters' attempts at stoical chatter to banish fear), and Jackson is especially gifted at describing the developing relationships between the four main characters. Part of the horror for Eleanor is a social one, and the conversations she struggles through brilliantly illustrate the way a bit of teasing (perhaps cruel, perhaps good-natured) may lead a fragile soul to despair.

Jackson shows how fear can corrupt the soul, and that those individuals who are open and sensitive to what's around them (e.g. Eleanor) are far more vulnerable than the thick-skinned (e.g. Mrs Montague). Furthermore, she suggests that sensitive people may be granted glimpses of a more multifaceted reality – with all the benefits of its sensory wonders and all the drawbacks of its inescapable terrors. This insight resonated deeply with me – particularly upon this second reading, during which the book seemed even richer and sadder.

This short, subtle novel achieves a great deal. Elegantly written, it's so much more than a mere ghost story.

16/09/17: Walter Lord – A Night to Remember (1955)

For many, this is the definitive account of the sinking of the Titanic. Walter Lord weaves together multiple survivor stories in a novelistic manner that comes across like a fast-paced thriller. It's a breathless read, and sometimes you crave the detail and analysis of a more considered study. But he does an excellent job of reconstructing those legendary two hours and 40 minutes (and the immediate aftermath) – hitting the iceberg, the initial refusal to believe anything was wrong, the slow realisation that the damaged ship was sinking, the frantic and pitiful struggle to find room in the few lifeboats available, the horrible decisions about who should or shouldn't stay for those who followed the "women and children first" code of ethics and those who didn't, the band playing on the deck as the waters rose, the terrible scenes as the Titanic went under and the only partially full lifeboats rowed away from the freezing, drowning victims all around them, the long, cold night spent by the survivors drifting in the icy Atlantic, and their eventual recovery by the Carpathia.

For the most part, Lord avoids judgement and focuses on the narrative. He does, however, indicate that the real villain in the story is the class system that condemned to death not only the men in steerage, but also the women and children there. In percentage terms, more first-class males survived than third-class children – an appalling statistic that underlines how the privileged usually make the system work for them while leaving less fortunate souls to sink.

(Note: while reading this, I was continually reminded of the 1982 top 10 hit "A Night to Remember" by Shalamar – not really a suitable soundtrack.)

09/09/17: Frances Wilson – How to Survive the Titanic, or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (2011)

Bruce Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line shipping company, which was responsible for the creation of the Titanic. He was on the famously "unsinkable" ship when it sunk on its maiden voyage in 1912. Rather than observing the "women and children first" policy – the so-called Birkenhead Drill – he escaped on a lifeboat while 1,500 drowned in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. When the inquiry began into why the ship sank and who was to blame, Ismay found himself scapegoated by the press and the public.

It was Ismay's decision to sacrifice the number of lifeboats on the deck for aesthetic reasons: they made the ship look cluttered. As a result: "The Titanic had lifeboat capacity for 1,100 of the 2,340 passengers and crew on board, but only 705 people were saved, of whom 325 were men." He didn't help himself by having an aloof manner and appearing not to understand the gravity of the situation when questioned.

This book expertly tells his story. For every account of what happened on the ship there is another, conflicting account and it is likely that no one will ever know for sure exactly how those two hours and 40 minutes of terror played out.  

Frances Wilson is a literary critic and often draws parallels between Ismay's life and great works of fiction. I liked this aspect of the book, but it might be a distraction for those seeking a "pure" biographical account. In particular, she focuses on similarities with Conrad's Lord Jim ("a difficult read"), whose plot is neatly summarised as "Jim jumps from a sinking ship and then faces a life without honour". She even suggests that Conrad's narrator Marlow should have been the one telling Ismay's story rather than allowing it to be assembled by a set of contradictory witness reports: “It is only when we place Ismay's crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken, his blood to flow and his consciousness to take on an essential extra layer."

The book cannot answer all the questions it sets itself. What did happen that night? What would you do in that situation? Humans are incredibly complex; not riddles to be solved. But it's an intelligent, thought-provoking work of historical biography and literary criticism, and in exploring these questions Wilson offers refreshing insights into how any of us might behave when the ordinary and extraordinary come together.

17/08/17: Patricia Highsmith – Strangers on a Train (1950)

Two men meet on a train and start talking. Unfortunately, one of them is an alcoholic psychopath who proposes a double murder that each could commit on behalf of the other. They would have the perfect alibi of being strangers with no real motivation to perform such a crime. Highsmith expertly ramps up the tension as the two men become progressively more tangled up in each other's lives and the unthinkable becomes reality. It's an intense psychological study that digs into the nitty-gritty of the human soul – examining fear, morality, identity – and you can see why it appealed to Hitchcock enough to make a film of it (in 1951).

I saw an astounding theatrical production of this at the Gieldgud Theatre in London in November 2013 – twice. The set utilised shades of grey in keeping with the noir-ish style, while the highly creative use of film projections over the stage backdrops added depth, motion and flair. The super-dramatic merry-go-round scene will stay with me for a long time.

This original novel ends differently from the play, but the premise is so strong that both versions work equally well.

11/07/17: Daniel Rachel (ed.) – Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters (2013)

A book of interviews offering in-depth conversations about the craft of writing songs. It's fascinating how differently these writers approach their work.

Damon Albarn seems restlessly drawn to the discovery of new sounds and directions, identifying "joy in mystery". Noel Gallagher, in contrast, seems to lack any musical curiosity, admitting he'd often rather go to the pub than write songs. He does, at least, acknowledge his failings. On Be Here How: "I listen to those words now and cringe. I was heavily into drugs at that point and didn't give a fuck." It's surprising just how honest he is about the limitations that, ultimately, prevent him from creating great work: "I'm not one of the world's great thinkers. Damon Albarn said this once in an interview: he can 'see four black dudes playing cards in a pub in Notting Hill and write a symphony about it'. I could see the same four black dudes and to me it's just four black dudes playing cards. It's just how you perceive things in life. I'm not a great reader of books; I'm not a great art lover." Later, he says: "It's difficult for me because I haven't got a lot to say."

It's refreshing how articulate and perceptive so many of the book's subjects are – for example, Joan Armatrading, Bryan Ferry, Robin Gibb (Bee Gees) and Squeeze's Difford and Tilbrook. The Pet Shop Boys may be the most witty and chatty of them all. Less interesting are the interviews with Mick Jones of The Clash, Sting and – especially – Annie Lennox.

Particularly illuminating is a conversation with XTC's Andy Partridge, who talks vividly about the process and inspiration behind his songs: "You're digging around in your guts and you pull up an idea, a concept or a thought and it just comes flopping out like some big, wriggly, wet fish. 'Oh my goodness, where was that hiding, whoa!', 'That is so sad, what made me bring that up?' I've been known to blub like an idiot...Sometimes you do go real deep down, scrimmaging around like a lucky dip. Your psyche is this barrel of bran…’'There's something!' I've paid my sixpence: I'm going to hoick it out, but it's not till you've got it out in the open and pull the wrapping paper off: ‘Ah, it's a hand grenade. I've pulled out a really uncomfortable personal feeling,’ or ‘Wow, that's really jolly, I do feel that great.' You can hoick out all sorts of stuff that you're not always expecting to.”

Three small criticisms:
1. The dates of the interviews are often not given. It would be useful to know the exact point that each writer spoke about their career, as in most cases that career was still unfolding at the time of the conversation.
2. The book feels over-designed and the black-and-white portrait photography gives it a certain “coffee-table” seriousness but ultimately adds little.
3. The overviews that introduce each subject could have been much shorter: two or three sentences would have been fine.

01/07/17: Iris Murdoch – The Unicorn (1963)

Bought this in the Oxfam bookshop in Swanage, Dorset, last Saturday.

"Some while later Marian began to walk back through the wrecked gardens. The moon had been quenched in cloud. She had not been outside. She had had to detach herself from the archway almost by pulling her hands off the stone, so alarming did everything seem both in front of her and behind her. She had never felt quite like this before, alone in her own mind; and yet not quite alone, for somewhere in the big darkness something was haunting her. She said to herself, I can't go on like this, I must talk to somebody. Yet to whom and about what? What had she to complain of, other than the loneliness and boredom which was perfectly to be expected? Why was she suddenly now so frightened and sickened?”

Primal landscape meets primal emotions as a young woman called Marian Taylor goes to work as governess at the remote coastal location of Gaze Castle on the west coast of Ireland.

Iris Murdoch writes in an extraordinarily vivid style. This novel is a sort of multi-dimensional love triangle: a group of characters isolated from the rest of the world have developed strange interconnected lives. Each of them is obsessively connected to Hannah Crean-Smith, an almost supernatural enchantress who exerts some kind of hold over every character. Murdoch explores the tangled threads that tie them together, then lets them steadily unravel while ramping up the drama with huge skill. In the hands of a lesser novelist, this sort of subject matter could easily become a mere soap opera. But Murdoch really gets inside her characters, their motivations and their inner conflicts.

At some point every person seems to love/hate/fear/desire every other person. You could argue that it's overwrought, or just allow yourself to be swept away by the intensity and enjoy sentences such as these: "It's odd, she thought, there is no one to appeal to any more, not even Peter. There is no outside any more. Everything is inside, the sphere is closed upon itself, and we can't get out. Pip had gone, he would wait and watch no longer. Effingham had deserted to the world of ordinary life and reason. She and Denis were ruined servants. The human world was at an end. Now they could only wait for Gerald to come down and whip them to the stables and turn them into swine."

20/06/17: Patricia Highsmith – The Two Faces of January (1964)

Borrowed from East Barnet Library.

A brilliantly plotted thriller detailing an obsessive love triangle. (Is there any other kind?) Con artist and Scotch-sipping alcoholic Chester MacFarland and his pretty young wife Colette are travelling in Greece when Chester is tracked down by the police. In a confrontation at his Athens hotel, he accidentally kills a detective. He covers up the incident and escapes to Crete with the help of Rydal Keener, another American traveller, seeking adventure and powerfully drawn to the couple (Chester reminds him of his father; Colette reminds him of his cousin). The three are now tied together by the act – and by colluding in covering up for it. They become increasingly dependent on one another as they take flight. Chester resents the hold that Rydal has over him. Colette is attracted to the young man, who treats her more respectfully than her own husband does. Rydal wrestles with his strange attachment to each of them. This tense triangular relationship drives all of the drama that follows...

It's a dynamic, exciting read that expertly sustains the tension across 300 pages. Highsmith lets you understand the motivations, fears and desires of the three characters in such a way that you can relate to all of them, however desperate their situation becomes. She explores what that desperation does to human relationships and what happens to morality and rationality when people find themselves under extreme pressure. Heady stuff, and I didn't want it to end.

Note: The Two Faces of January was made into a 2014 film directed by Hossein Amini, which is just as compelling.

05/06/17: Alain de Botton – The Course of Love (2016)

This was £1.25 from North London Hospice in Whetstone.

Like his earlier book, Essays in Love, this is a philosophical novel that examines a romantic relationship in forensic detail. Rabih and Kirtsen, meet, fall in love, get married, have children, and so on. The author uses their relationship for a wider rumination on love – what forms it takes, how it works (or doesn't work) at various stages, and what it means to be a couple. The book is at its best when it most closely follows the novel form – for example, he expertly captures the petty and awkward nature of arguments. However, there are regular italicised passages in which the somewhat dry, cold "philosophy voice" takes over, and these brief commentaries interrupt the flow. That's obviously intentional – for some reason he doesn't want you to become fully absorbed in this as a work of fiction – but it does tend to make the book less effective.

Ultimately there’s a message of kindness behind The Course of Love – a subtle suggestion that we might be able to become better people over time if we survive the obstacles life throws at us.

12/04/17: Don DeLillo – Zero K (2016)

One pound from All Aboard in Chipping Barnet.

From the back cover:

"Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, who happens to be the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled. There, bodies are carefully preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. 

When Jeff is invited to join Ross at the compound, he finds that among those about to surrender their bodies is Artis, Ross' younger wife, whose health is failing. Slowly, as Jeff prepares himself to bid 'an uncertain farewell' to his stepmother, he finds himself confronted with humanity's most unanswerable questions – about the legacies we leave, the nobility of death and the ultimate worth of 'the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth'. 

Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world – terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague – against the beauty and humanity of everyday life."

Unusually, the cover blurb is pretty much spot-on. This chilly novel strips away all certainties, just as Ross Lockhart's cryogenic facility represents a portal between worlds and an opportunity to question our assumptions about the meaning of life and death. The location is brilliantly Kafkaesque and Ballardian –  both facelessly corporate and enigmatically designed – leaving DeLillo much to explore and many questions to dangle before the reader. How does the facility change those who live there, work there and speak its jargon? Why do the screens in the corridors show brutal disaster footage? Is this footage part of the propaganda PR for the cryogenics project – an encouragement to leave behind a world in turmoil? What, if anything, lies behind the doors in the corridors? What is the function of the mannequins encountered by Jeff? The mysteries pile up and the lack of simple answers builds a claustrophobic atmosphere. DeLillo plays with elements of science-fiction, but rooted in a grittily real-world setting. He seems to love the "remote bunker" motif, which has appeared in his previous novels.

The book draws the driest possible humour from its sublimely deadpan delivery. Some of the spoken questions in the dialogue don't bother with question marks. Amid all the clinical talk of the Convergence, DeLillo displays a rich empathy for the three main characters and you quickly become drawn into their worlds. He covers many fundamental topics: is it only the fact of death that gives life value? What does life mean if death can be avoided – or delayed? What responsibility do you have to parents, children, lovers? And what would happen to love, language and religion if human lives are no longer finite?

It's addictive and profound.

30/03/17: David Crystal – The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works (2016)

A book about eloquence ought to be written eloquently, and this one is. Linguist David Crystal examines the topic in detail: what, exactly, makes a speaker "eloquent"? Why do some people have this gift, but not others? Is it even a gift, or is it a skill? Are we naturally eloquent in childhood and, if so, why does this ability fade as we grow older?

Although it's not described as such, the book is partly a guide to public speaking. From simple technical tips as obvious as checking how the microphone works to more profound observations about the fundamentals of how humans engage with each other, David Crystal offers practical suggestions that will improve the reader's oratory skills. But it's more than a functional how-to guide. He also looks at the great speeches by politicians and world leaders and assesses what made them effective. In particular, he analyses Barrack Obama's victory speech from 4th November 2008 and points out how successfully it broke certain rules while conforming to others.

He assesses everything from the musicality and rhythms of a speech, to the use of rising and falling volume and their effect on the listener. His friendly approach is highly accessible and often entertaining too.

28/03/17: David Leney – The Landfill (1988)

"Listen very carefully. We've got a thing going, see. Tape-recordings. Confessions, if you like. You can hear them on one simple condition: once you listened to even a single tape, you gotta record your own. And that's it. So, if you've got the guts, you go ahead and hear one. Just remember, yours had better be good and it had better be true. We don't want any Goldilocks rubbish. You'll find spare tapes in the glove compartment of my car. We'll give you three days to do it."

Danny Vickers likes to play alone in the landfill site, where he sometimes sits in an abandoned American car. One day in the car he finds a tape player and some cassettes. He starts listening to the tapes and uncovers a secret world of young landfill visitors who have been recording and sharing their stories.

Only in the 1980s would a Puffin book revolve around tape cassettes. Although it works as a novel, this is essentially a collection of short stories cleverly woven together by one central plot device. It's highly entertaining, and touching without being sentimental. With a complete avoidance of cliché, it rings true about how it feels to be a vulnerable child in a world of uncertainty.

07/03/17: Nick Papadimitriou – Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley & Hendon (2009)

"In order to 'frame' the zone within which the murders described in this book occurred I undertook a series of long walks crossing the borough in order to examine the site of each killing. It quickly became apparent that Barnet was not the featureless zone I had presumed it to be. On the contrary – a quiet yet brooding power lurks in our hilly region of serried rooftops and arterial roads."

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in... is a multi-author, multi-region local-history series. All of these books have absolutely horrible cover designs. I've never previously wanted to read a "true crime" or "local history" book, but was delighted to learn that Nick Papadimitriou – author of the astonishing Scarp – had written the account of grisly misadventures relating to my local area. He states that "my aim in writing was to evoke a dark and destabilising resonance – echoes of events murmuring below the streets, roads and parks which form the backdrop to our everyday". It covers the period of c. 1500 to 1959 and becomes more compelling as it reaches the modern era. 

Unlike Scarp, it's a book of character portraits, but his fascination with "deep topography" still informs the writing. It's very much filled with a strong sense of place and it helps that I know many of the streets and exact locations he describes. The 1931 murder of the Edgware tramp "Pigsticker" appears in Scarp as well, so was clearly one that caught the author's imagination. 

This grim book makes for fascinating reading and reminds you that people haven't changed very much. The ordinary, matter-of-fact nature of the crimes – often committed in the name of love or as a result of sheer foolishness – makes them especially powerful to read about.

27/02/17: Alan Partridge with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons and Steve Coogan – Alan Partridge: Nomad (2016)

"When I stroll, my heart swells, my mind races, my soul soars. For that is the power of walking. It doesn't just transport us, it transports us – which I know is the same word twice, but the second time should be said louder and slower."

Borrowed from Hendon Library. In Alan's follow-up to his 2011 "autobiography" I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, he details his "Footsteps of My Father" walk from Norwich to Dungeness. The joke is sustained well – a brilliantly extended digression. Over time (and across radio, TV and now the written word), Steve Coogan has deepened his character. We see him growing older, if not wiser, and refining his many prejudices. As his personal and professional history builds up he has become ever more compelling. As always the humour and tragedy come from the vast gulf between the way Alan sees the world and the way the world sees Alan. It's linguistically inspired, too, with Partridge mangling his words, sentences and metaphors throughout. Rather than a lazy TV tie-in/cash-in, it's a highly sophisticated character study for which the authors deserve great credit. It takes a special talent to write this "badly" while simultaneously constructing something so clever, amusing, sad and convincingly human.

09/02/17: Connie Willis – Doomsday Book (1992)

This was £1.99 from Barnardo's in Whetstone. The "SF Masterworks" series is usually reliable, so I tend to pick them up when I see them. The plot? Young historian Kivrin Engle is sent back in time as part of a university research project using the "net" time-travel technology of Oxford in the year 2054. This is sophisticated enough to prevent intervention in the past from changing the course of history – although quite how is never explained. Instead of "arriving" in 1320 as intended, Kivrin is accidentally dropped in 1348 during the Black Death pandemic. (This is given away on the back cover, but she doesn't learn it for herself until p.390.) Meanwhile, the Oxford research team is hit by a deadly virus and the two seem to be ominously linked...

While it's based on an intriguing premise, I found there was way too much rushing about, fussing around and breathless interchanges between too many characters – a lot of baggage for a fairly simple plot. It could have been tightened up considerably. It can be tedious and frustrating reading about characters' incomprehension of things you, the reader, have already grasped or had explained to you. These passages go on for way too long. A lot depends on certain characters being unable to ask or answer certain questions. Some paragraphs could have been cut altogether: "Mary flicked the light on and went over to the tea trolley. She shook the electric kettle and disappeared into the WC with it. He sat down. Someone had taken away the tray of blood-testing equipment and moved the end table back to its proper place, but Mary's shopping bag was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He leaned forward and moved it over next to the chairs. Mary reappeared with the kettle. She bent and plugged it in." I was expecting the bag or the kettle to reveal some importance in the plot, but these are just needless details. Likewise, parts of the 1348 sequences, while interesting, read like a historical soap opera.

Most problematic is that 2054 doesn’t feel futuristic at all. Phones have live video, but are constantly engaged and failing. Oxford still has a Debenhams and Blackwells, and there are still newspapers and a struggling NHS. More importantly, in terms of the way people speak and think, there is little attempt to reflect the ways life has changed.

In these Brexit days, it’s interesting that the book has a side story about protests urging Britain to exit Europe, so the author predicted this correctly – albeit several decades after it actually happened.

Despite the above reservations, I trudged on and – surprisingly – slowly found myself becoming engrossed. You want Kivrin to make it home and you want the ill people to get well, so you keep reading. By the last 200 pages I was totally hooked. Is it science fiction? Just about (because of the time travel theme). Is it a "masterwork"? No.

30/01/17: Nick Papadimitriou – Scarp: In Search of London's Outer Limits (2013)

"I felt growing in me a pulsating county consciousness. I could sense sun-heated scraps of corrugated iron beneath which adders sheltered, bin liners of rags strewn in wastes by remorseless A roads, scentless mayweed on gravel mounds nodding in the breeze by wretched abandoned orchards, languid afternoons spent sitting and sipping white wine in the gardens of big houses on the edge of the Hertfordshire atom towns, generations of owls and cats ruthlessly terminated by strychnine. I became a squirming energy spewing forth rats and roaches, disused fire extinguishers rusting in derelict office blocks in Hemel Hempstead or Stevenage. I roared, a fiery demiurge, below the pantiled bungalows, the pubs decked out in brewer's Tudor, throwing all this multiplicity into the world in my fury before subsiding back into the humming darkness of the undifferentiated planetary mass."

"Scarp" is the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment. Nick Papadimitriou walks this landscape and writes about it with a poetic, almost mystical sensibility. He seems to fuse with the landscape itself, "becoming" the places and histories he describes. In one stunning chapter he inhabits the mind of a rook who lives across the ages and charts the changing world.

In a spot-on Amazon review, someone named "JF Lawrence" explains it thus: "Scarp the place is a secular locus of the mysterium, ungraspable by its seer as he trudges across its plains, traces its causeways and culverts, notes with a botanist’s rigour its flora and an animal lover’s gentleness its fauna, relates tales of local characters and their fortunes, inhabiting them like a psychedelicised dybbuk, uniting his consciousness with that of the earth and elements. Scarp the book is the testament of a unique and extraordinary mind that has created itself in the image of the numinous north London/Hertfordshire/Middlesex mindscape, a book of visionary hope, a deconstruction and reintegration of its subject and its subject’s perambulating magus."

I enjoy reading what's called "psychogeography" (see also Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, and the work of Rebecca Solnit). This may be the most imaginative book so far in that loose, expansive field. In fact, it reaches way beyond mere psychogeography – that label can only limit what this book achieves. With its flights of fancy and deep eccentricity, it creates an entirely new form, absorbing nature writing, local history, and surreal, impressionistic autobiographical monologue that flits between fiction and non-fiction with no hang-ups about being consistent with either. This truly remarkable book "blew my mind", genuinely changing the way I think about my environment. How many authors can do that?

Excitingly, Nick P is working on a follow-up with the wonderful title Middlesex/Codeine Linctus.

06/01/17: Frank Herbert – Dune (1965)

Dune was on my shelf a long time before I finally started reading it this week. I'm rather fond of this book, even though parts of it seem not especially well written. In places, it's philosophical and almost psychedelic. But it's expansive, too, ambitiously creating an entire world – and a universe beyond. I also have a slight attachment to it because my Dad read the entire series of six books during the 1980s (with different jacket designs). This old paperback is from 1968 and when I opened it the spine immediately cracked in several places. One other curious thing about this novel is that the exact same image was later used for Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, despite the picture clearly illustrating aspects of the Dune story (such as the blue eyes of the Fremen on Arrakis). Was there really such a shortage of sci-fi art at this time?

01/01/17: Lawrence Block – Sinner Man (2016)

Borrowed from Barnet Libraries. This was Lawrence Block's first crime novel, somehow lost for 50 years and only published again at the end of 2016. There's an interesting afterword about its tangled history by the author, who himself never saw a copy of the original book. As for the novel itself, it's a fast-paced thriller about a man whose wife dies after he hits her. Rather than own up to the police, he takes off and begins a new life working with the Mafia. Initially, everything goes to plan, but of course it can't stay that way... This is an entertaining read. Not up there with the best of Block, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless.