Books REVIEWS
MYSTERY DRAMA HARI KUNZRU Gods Without Men (Hamish Hamilton) ●●●●●
Not many books start with a coyote smoking pot. But then Hari Kunzru is not your average novelist. His latest endeavour is a dazzling collection of snapshots taken at various points in time between 1775 and 2009, as we dip in and out of an assortment of lives centred around The Pinnacles, a mystical rock formation in the Californian desert. Kunzru introduces us to lonely sky-watchers, a
British rock star ridden with existential angst, a Goth escapee from Iraq, a young couple struggling with their autistic son, cults of dodgy ‘saucer people’, missing children, and men as animals and animals as men: all of whom are cleverly linked in this intricately pieced together tale. With the world in constant flux, people go to the rocks searching for meaning, patterns, signals, any form of escape, while the author’s sharp wit, well-executed reveals and masterful use of language and tone ensure we are hooked from beginning to end. (Camilla Pia)
HISTORICAL FICTION MARI STRACHAN Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers (Canongate) ●●●●● Life, thinks Non Davies, a rural Welsh housewife in 1920, is like a tablecloth: ‘smooth and rough, worn thin so that it is almost a hole in places.’ It’s a prosaic description from a woman who presents a similarly functional façade to the world, her feelings internalised within a warmly descriptive and leisurely paced third-person narrative. And there’s a lot of emotion to get out. Davies is married to widower Davey, a veteran returned from the Great War amidst the announcement of his apparent affair with a nurse who treated him, and the sinister fog of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Non, in turn, raises Davey’s children and dwells on her own near-infidelity. Strachan, the author of The Earth Hums in B Flat, offers a general purpose historical family saga. But it’s one that’s dressed up with crisp narrative ability, a non-judgmental eye for the often irreconcilable complexities of love, and no small amount of mystery to strengthen the blend. (David Pollock)
SURREAL DRAMA AL KENNEDY The Blue Book (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●●
Her first novel since 2007’s Day, celebrated Scots miserablist AL Kennedy’s sixth full-length work of fiction attempts to mess with readers’ minds in a way that few other authors might dare. The Blue Book is laced with cryptic wordplay and magic numbers and has an audacious habit of analysing the reader through the fourth wall as it unravels its tale of two former fraudster mediums and on-off lovers trying to make sense of their deeply complex relationship aboard an Atlantic cruise ship. Beth has fled the psychic life but can’t quit Arthur,
her enigmatic former partner-in-crime, who has
attempted to right previous wrongs by fleecing rich people to subsidise free psychic healing for society’s vulnerable. Their twisted lives and the indulgent prose with which Kennedy elucidates them are near-impossible to get a grip on and the plot never gets up a full head of steam. But if a strange romance with a head-spinning twist sounds good to you, you’ll probably love it. (Malcolm Jack)
ACTION COMIC ALAN MOORE & KEVIN O’NEILL The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century — 1969 (Top Shelf/Knockabout) ●●●●● Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill take their science fiction and fantasy literature homage/parody into previously uncharted realms with their most contemporaneous jaunt yet. Part two of the Century trilogy takes the heroes into London at the end of the flower power era. The hippy dream has become a bad trip, a turn of events that dovetails neatly with the wicked wizard Oliver Haddo’s apocalyptic scheme to summon an anti-Christ (first hinted at in Century: 1910).
With the third and final instalment (set in 2009) yet to come, things don’t quite come to a head in part two. But en route to the finale, Moore and O’Neill have a hell of a lot of fun taking the mick out of late 60s London, rammed as it is with druggy pop stars, sexed-up occultists, gay gangsters and pornography. Almost every frame is stuffed with pop cultural references, from On the Buses to Get Carter. It’s groo-vee. (Miles Fielder)
ALSO PUBLISHED PAPERBACKS
David Nicholls
Apparently, this is the time of year for lying back on a soft surface (a hammock maybe, or some sand) and flicking through a soon-to-be well-thumbed paperback. But while that word might make some people immediately conjure images of trashy airport bestsellers, there is plenty quality in the realm of post-hardback fiction and non-fiction. With Lone Scherfig’s film of the novel about to take off, One Day (Hodder) by David Nicholls will no doubt receive a boost into its already very healthy sales figures. For the 12 of you who haven’t read it, the story covers a relationship between Emma and Dexter, who meet at their graduation ceremony of 15 July 1988, and what happens to them on the 20 anniversaries that follow.
And there’s an equally eye-catching set-up to The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Windmill) by Aimee Bender. Rose, aged nine as the book opens, has just made a curious discovery: she can tell the mood of the person who has cooked the food she’s just eaten. As with One Day, it’s both sad and beautiful.
Probably more silly than sad and/or beautiful is Russell Brand’s unit-shifting Booky Wook 2 (Harper). Is it just us or was that title quite amusing on its first hearing, but increasingly irritating with each passing mention? You get the feeling that Mr Perry might at some point like to pen a book that is part-philosophical study and part-love story, which revolves around a mysterious incident. But he might be better off leaving that to experts such as Jostein Gaarder, whose The Castle in the Pyrenees (Phoenix) covers all those bases. (Brian Donaldson)
102 THE LIST 4–11 Aug 2011