The Terror, by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons has written a book about a horrible true story.  The Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, has been in the news, lately.  Climate change means the passage is now often navigable; and the wreck of Franklin's ship, Erebus, has been found, sitting on the bottom of the sea off King William Island, where she sank, over a hundred and fifty years ago.

The Franklin expedition was a tragedy.  Two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, blundered into the Arctic ice, became trapped; the crews succumbed to scurvy and (possibly) lead poisoning.  Despairing of breaking free of the pack, or of rescue, the surviving crew members set off on a Hellish trek across the sea ice and the frozen  North Canadian archipelago in a doomed effort to reach trading posts hundreds of barren miles away.  They didn't make it, and in their desperation they ate each other.  All 129 men died.

This we know, and it should be enough.  There isn't any need to add to what really happened.  A terrific novel could be written describing the disaster.  Simmons, to his credit, tells some of that story, and that portion of the novel is most successful.  He captures what must have been a horrific combination of drudgery and despair, and the horror of the attempt to cross the wilderness of frozen ice, dragging unwieldy sledges improvised from the ships' boats.  That is the best part of the book, awakening sympathy and horror in the reader.  But it is a horror of the pitilessness environment, and the hopelessness of the struggle.  Not of the hostile supernatural presence Simmons decides to add to the mix.  Simmons decides to garnish the already dreadful true events with a supernatural horror.  And it simply does not work.  The concept of a hulking, powerful, swift and remorseless THING hunting down the men of Erebus and Terror sounds chilling - but it isn't.  The scenes where the mysterious beast attacks the men are not frightening, and the beast is never convincing.

The plotting and story-telling is also unconvincing.  Early on, we learn the beast has breached Terror's hull - but nothing more is made of this calamity.  Having gained entry, the beast never bothers to take advantage of it.  There are possible explanations for this - but it is hard to escape the suspicion Simmon's just forgot about it.  After all, late in the book, Terror is able to sail happily enough, in spite of this breach.  Similarly, a crucial set piece relies on the officers ignoring what the crew are up to over the course of several days, in a situation where the least wavering of control and surveillance could lead to death.  Not convincing.

Captain Francis Crozier, the main character, is awkwardly portrayed.  Simmons wants him to to be the one who, if-only-they-had-listened, would have brought them home safely.  His crucial advice is ignored.  But Simmons can not reconcile this with the reality that Crozier loaded up the already-too-heavy boat-sleds with unnecessary junk - books, slippers, soap and silver spoons were all recovered from King William Island, pointing to an expedition planned not by level headed men but by a rabble, driven insane by scurvy and lead poisoning.  Equally, Franklin is presented as bumbling twit.  There is a lot the real Franklin can be criticised for - the failure to leave message cylinders detailing his plans in particular - but he was not a sap or a fool.  He had trekked across Canada twice.  The first time, disastrously, with members of his party succumbing to starvation and cannibalism; but he planned the second expedition, meticulously, drawing on his experiences and refusing to be browbeaten into compromise.  It was successful, covering thousands of miles of the bleakest terrain on the planet.  This man was not a buffoon, and Simmons's portrayal of him as a bit of an idiot is unjust.

Finally, there is a real problem towards the end of the novel.  For reasons entirely incomprehensible, Simmons decides to lard the final pages of his novel with Inuit theology, at a point where the story can least endure it.  Having slogged and shivered with Crozier and his shipmates over several hundred pages, it is hard to resist skipping the protracted mythic sections.  It just doesn't work, and one feels that someone must have mentioned this to Simmons.

There are some good parts to the novel.  It is a swift, page-turning read, for most of its considerable length.  As mentioned before, the simple day-to-day effort of staying alive in the icebound ships is gruelling enough with out supernatural additions.  There are a few shivery moments where suspense generates unease in the reader; and Simmons has certainly done his homework.  He includes a bibliography of sources that serves as a good guide to further reading for those interested in finding out more about this valiant, utterly misguided, attempt to do what was pretty much impossible - make a North West Passage, to the sea.

*

The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad

I finished The Arrow of Gold the other night, which probably makes me one of the elite in Conrad appreciation.  because if you manage to read that book ... Look, it isn't bad.  In places.

Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen.  And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita.  I desperately wanted her to be captivating.  For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable.  But that is not easy to do.  So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.

These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.

There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best.  It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern.  Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.

After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.

I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls.  But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.

To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.

No Stars

A book with a title that I will not reveal for now

Some books really are asking for it.  Take the one I'm talking about now.  No, I'm not going to tell you the title, not yet.  Not until you're ready.  But to explain.  I picked up a novel, by 'Best selling' auther JA Jance, at my local library the other day.  Two things struck me as soon as I looked at the cover.  Yes, I know.  Never judge a ... but just bear with me, okay.  Cliches are sometimes true.  This book's cover was asking for it.

The first thing wrong with it was the title.  Yes, I know, I still haven't told you what it is yet.  I'm a tease.  The second thing wrong with it was the strapline below the title, which proclaimed this book to be 'A Novel of Suspense', a high falutin' wording that vaguely echoed Conrad's line in titles (Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard).  Old Joe could do it of course; but here, proclaiming the book to be 'A Novel of Suspense' only managed to sound both pompous and wistful at the same time.  This wasn't a quote from some gushing hack, mind you.  It was a claim advanced by the novel itself.  Any book promoting itself in such a way is setting expectations that it damn well better live up to.  Paradise Lost, however, does not.

Paradise Lost?  Yes, indeed.  I kid you not.  She called her book that.  Barging fearlessly where angels fear to treat, or something like that, and appropriating a title that might - just might - have a bit of history.

And the funny thing is, it is totally irrelevant.  There's no reason for anything to be called Paradise Lost.  I guess Jance just thought it sounded kinda cool.

The story stumbles along the predictable road of far too many 'series' novels - the tiresome set ups and rehashings of previous entries in the series, the irritating supporting entourage of characters you know you are supposed to love and don't, but which the writer is too enamoured with (or arrogantly thinks her readers are) and the annoying intrusions of the character's personal life into the narrative.  Because, ya know, this ain't a detective story, it's a story about a detective and that means we have to know all about Tough-But-Sensitive Joanna Brady's romantic tribulations and her uneasy relationship with her daughter and ... and, ye gods, if I wanted a family saga I'd read one. 

Plot wise, the novel is very predictable.  The killer becomes immediately obvious applying the standard 'least important character rule'.  This may have been intentional - I'd identified the killer as a prime suspect just because of his prominent placement, then decided he was too obviously a red herring, and devised a somewhat - to my mind - alternative.  Which might be a testament to Jance's powers of misdirection, if it weren't for the crashing sense of disappointment when the killer is revealed.  Scooby Doo did this sort of thing better.

So, no.  Something was lost.  The plot?  My interest?  But not paradise.  It was a long, long way a way from where I was at.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes

You are probably familiar with the phenomenon. You start to read a book, and it is really good. Really, really good. You read perhaps half of it, before exhaustion forces you to stop and rest. The, when you return to the book the next day, it somehow seems to be diminished.

I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.

It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.

(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)

First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:

She shouldn't have put the little one in the paddling pool. Not when she was so tired from night after night of 3 a.m. feeds and splintered sleep. Worse than that, she had been drinking.

Not long after, he sketches a scene where some scarily feasible young thugs run amok, egging each other on to trash a graveyard. It's the stuff of modern middle class nightmares, and well done. It seems, for a little while, that we're going headfirst down a very dark, nasty tunnel.

Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.

Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.

Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.

The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.

It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.

No star

White Riot by Martyn Waites

There are some good things you can say about Martyn Waites's White Riot. First of all, he's taken the title from a song by The Clash, and it's an established literary fact that any book that does so must - at least - have a good title. In fact, as he took the title of another novel from a Nick Cave song (The Mercy Seat), and another from The Pixies (Bone Machine) we can probably go as far as to say that Waites has excellent taste in music generally.

Second, he's got the cojones to take on a searing topical, controversial issue: racial and religious tensions in Britain, suicide bombers and the rise of extremism all feature in White Riot. Even better, he does it from an broadly progressive point of view, rather than opting for mere sensationalism, or pandering to prejudices. And - unlike a lot of progressives - he likes an bit of gore. No simpering middle class handwringing from the sidelines. Within the first few pages, some poor chap has had his luckless head kicked right in, and that's just the start.

But that's about it.

And, unfortunately, each of those virtues is also a weakness; and there's a more fundamental (pun intentional) problem as well. While I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time, a couple of days spent reading his book isn't. Unfortunately, he's just not that good a writer.

So, anyway, we're in the North of England. A young Pakistani man is found brutally murdered. Another dies in a botched attempt at a suicide bombing. Skinheads prowl the streets, looking for victims. The neo-fascist National Unity Party and equally dangerous Islamic counterparts square off. meanwhile, former 70s radical Trevor Whitman is receiving nasty phone calls from someone who seems to know a lot about his past. Too much.

Plot specific stuff aside, this is a novel in a serial - the title page bruits it as "A Joe Donovan thriller", a claim that leaves me somewhat cold. Joe who? Sorry, you'll have to try harder. Someone or other - I think it may have been Truffaut - suggested great titles sound familiar even the first time we hear them (which doesn't explain the very blah Jules et Jim). think The Blair Witch Project. Or White Riot. Or The Mercy Seat. The original songs, I mean, not the patchy thrillers dressed up in their finery. There's a frission of recognition even if you've never heard of them before. But "Joe Donovan" doesn't do it for me. Didn't he have some hits in the 70s? Does this explain the music obsession?

Now, I am not a fan of the modern tendency to franchises. I appreciate they have to happen - readers and writers both like to have familiar names and faces, and watch the narrative of the investigator develop over many books. We are now in the MacDonalds and Starbucks era of crime writing, however, and franchises are deliberately constructed from the start, rather than allowed to develop with at least the appearance of organic growth. Let it be remembered that old Phil Marlowe only ever appeared in a handful of novels. Sherlock Holmes cross dressed his way through a few more, and a gazillion short stories, but he didn't drag his personal problems into every one of them. Apart from his crush on Irene Adler, he didn't seem to have any issues to confront. But nowadays the characters and the issues precede the story. Perhaps, the issues preced the characters.

Anyway, this is a serial novel, and it does not wear it lightly. A good deal of time is spent refering back to the previous novel, The Mercy Seat. Joe Donovan has a son, who was abducted, and when we first meet him, he's a mess, a grief racked, obssessed mess, trying to trace his missing child. Fair enough. His fixation has lead him to disband his 'Information agency', Albion, alientating his colleagues, Peta, who bear their own scars from previous novels - Amar, literally, bears scars and is almost crippled at the start of the novel - though he seems to recover quite dramatically as the story progresses, his injuries fading into the background.

This is another thing that irks. The Albion team smack of the CSI / NCIS / House ensembles. What happened to the lone knight errant stalking the mean streets? True, the knight might have been allowed a squire for company, but now-a-days he seems to be accompanied by a whole gaggle of annoyingly 'vivid' characters, whether he stalks the mean streets of some American city, a hospital or Newcastle. Which is a problem in the limited scope of a novel, when the multiferous characters also have such riven backstories and so many personal challenges to confront, beyond the ones placed in their way by the villans of the piece - who barely get a look in for chapters at a time, so busy are Donovan and his entourage slaying their own dragons.

The entourage further complicate matters by being, well, teeth grindingly awful. They seem to have been designed as a (hem) Representative Patchwork Of Modern Britain. So, apart from Joe himelf, whose gruff exterior hides a decent and progressive soul (but who is tormented by the loss of his son and family), there's Peta, who is a tough chick in a man's world (Who is battling alcoholism and has some major family issues to confront); Amar a smart Asian techie (but who is recovering from serious injury and assessing his life. And he's gay, of course.); and Jamal, who is young, funky and black (But has a troubled past of his own). So we've got a white bloke, a white chick, an Asian man and a black kid. It's painfully obvious Waites is striving to cover all his PC, Cool Britainnia bases. But at the same time, to make these characters more than just tokenistic by ladling Troubles over them. Which simply doesn't work. And far, far, far too much of the novel (and this review) is spent watching these characters deal with thier Troubles. it's tiresome, and - ironically - this attempt to make the characters deep simply makes everything shallow. There are too many characters, they are too confronted, we don't really feel much for them. And there's a plot as well? Oh, do I have to invest in that, as well?

The plot? Well, beyond the summary above, it's pretty meat and two veg stuff. Dark Powers are stoking racial tensions to their own ends. The story relies on two massive coincidences (at least) to work. One, a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. In the other a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. You see how this works? Now, that sort of thing might be okay in the opening chapters, to get stuff moving - but the second encounter takes places in the heart of the novel. Worse, What Is Going On is pretty obvious from about the midway point. The only amusement after that is afforded by trying to second guess yourself as the plot trundles forwards, and the bad news is that there isn't actually any stunning surprise revealed in the final chapters - it really is as obvious as all that.

Which might have been quite clever in its own way, but it isn't. There was one possible twist Waites could have included. It seemed obvious to me, after I'd spotted what seemed to be the far-too-obvious possibility that turned out to be what-was-actually-going-on-all-along. But Waites eschews this possibly more interesteding twist - and, even worse, he blandly, directly mentions it, so the luckless reader isn't even left with that shred of possibility to cling to.

All these problems wouldn't matter quite so much if only Waites was a better writer. Hell, Raymond Chandler deployed some shonky plots in his novels - one of them even turned on that most nonsensical of mystery cliches, The Unrecognised Twin. But he could write, so we didn't mind. Oh, and we only had Marlowe to worry about, not a gaggle of characters all competing for our attention and emotional commitment. There's a blah, couldn't-really-be-bothered quality to the prose. The point I first thought Things Might Not Be Going Well was on page 9 - PAGE NINE - when the luckless Sooliman Patel is beaten to death. As the blows rain down, "He thought of his mother, his family. Tried to imagine their lives with out him. Their grief." No you fucking didn't, sport. When you're getting beaten to death with baseball bats studded with nails and razors, you don't lie there thinking beautiful thoughtd. You writhe on the floor, weeping and shitting yourself, gibbering and begging for the pain to stop. Then a couple of pages later, Sooliman's remains are discovered:

Marion screamed. And kept on screaming.

She was still screaming when the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later.

Over done, much? Hammer Horror called. They want their tripe back.

The whole book feels like it needed to be scoured by a vindictive editor. Apart from dubious descriptions like the above, there's some truly astonishingly bad figurative language. At one point we're told a tousled Trevor Whitman looks like "Wayne Coyne after a particularly intense Flaming Lips gig." Oh, really? I've never been to a Flaming Lips gig, intense or otherwise. I've no idea what Wayne Coyne looks like. If you're going to make pop culture references, at least make them broad enough for people to reconise (Another time, less absurdly but more blandly, he's a "Walking Gap Ad"). Nonsense like this clutters every page; it is almost like Waites decided to pad his word count by adding idiotic similes into every third paragraph.

And sometimes, the writing is simply incompetent:

Fenton, suitably chatised, shrank backwards. Natrass said nothing until he was out of earshot.

Wait a minute. How can he shrink back out of earshot, yet remain in the same room? Donovan and Natrass are not whispering surreptitiously to each other. They're talking Fenton is going to be able to hear, unless he leaves the room. Which needs to be stated.

So, as I said, I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time.

Do you think he'll be asking me round?

The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside

This book was a great disappointment. Some books can be tedious, banal and incoherent without being disappointing. If you expect a book to be those things - if, say it is written by Wilbur Smith - then you won't be disappointed. You'll get all that in spades.

But I expected a lot of The Devil's Footprints. I was vastly looking forward to it. Everything boded well. A menacing title, a nice cover (black and white, embossed, with the author's name and title in blue - very stylish), an intruiging setting, and an intruiging blurb which suggested a lot about the malignant lingering nature of evil and how the land itself can be imbued with wickedness. And all I get is an interminable account of a middleaged plonker ruminating about stuff. Very, very dull reading and thoroughly inconsequential.

There is a plot, of sorts, or at least a haphazard collection of half plots, but which don't really seem to come together into anything much. An an old folk memory is recalled, about the night the Devil walked through Cold haven; a family tragedy is described; the narrator, an ostentatiously self absorbed nonentity, describes his links to the family hit by tragedy; his relationship from some years before with the suicidal mother who immolates herself and two of her children because she has become convinced her husband is the devil; his earlier, less pleasant role as target of her brother's bullying; and his suspicion that he might be the father of the surviving child of the conflagration. All of which sounds like it might amount to something; none of which does.

No star

Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker

In 1863, with the Civil War dragging on interminably, Lincoln imposed a draft. It wasn't popular. People were sick of going off to war and getting blown to pieces; they were disgusted because rich people could pay $300 - a year's wages for a poor man - to buy a substitute to take their place; and they were angered by the conundrum that they were going off to fight to liberate black slaves in the South, but the blacks in the Northern weren't enlisting to fight. That blacks weren't allowed to enlist wasn't relevant. Hate doesn't need logic, just excuse. The people of New York were pissed off, and did exactly what people have always done when pissed off by the high and mighty - they set out to set the town on fire. Scorcese used the Draft Riots as the backdrop for his film Gangs of New York, but opted to skip around the racism at the core of the riots.

In Paradise Alley, Kevin Baker confronts it head on. The book is rife with the casual racism that must have imbrued society 150 years ago. Baker also does not flinch from littering his pages with words like 'nigger', which may cause some well meaning editor a headache in years to come, if the recent travails of huckleberry Finn are anything to go by; and he describes the lynchings and brutality of the riots, which Scorcese seemed to have overlooked, somehow.

The story describes the lives of a handful of characters during the riots. The main focus of the narrative is three women - Ruth, Deirdre and Maddy. Their menfolk also feature, alongside a swirling cast of characters. Of particular interest are Ruth's husband, Billy, and her psychotic ex, Johnny. The former is missing, and as a black man in the middle of a race riot, that's not a good thing. The latter has just arrived bac in town, thirsting for revenge against Ruth, Billy, his sister Deirdre and her man, Tom.

So there you have the plot, in a nutshell, and the problem; which is that Kane chooses to frame his narrative as a series of intersecting personal stories, which necessarily regulates the riots to the background. The book isn't quite about the riots and it isn't quite about the crisis in the domestic arrangements of Ruth; and even though it is over 600 pages long, it doesn't seem big enough to accomodate both.

This problem is accentuated by Baker's use of multiple narrators. This seems spurious, as the book is narrated, on the whole, in the third person (one narrator is allowed the luxury of first person point of view - he's a writer, yah know, one of the annoying wink-winks in the story). Three of the characters - Ruth, Deirdre and Maddy - spend a lot of time together and witness a lot of the same things, and Baker thinks he is obliged to cover the same ground repeatedly, even when the new point of view adds nothing new, or the event described is trivial. Do we need to know how Maddy falls asleep with her head in Deirdrie's lap, first from Deirdre's point of view, and then from Maddie's? Do we need to be told at all?

This tendency towards redundancy is apparent in the final fate of the berserk Johnny Dolan. It's cleverly foreshadowed, but the realisation is fluffed. The reader can see what is happening, long before the befuddled Dolan; Baker continues to describe what happens anyway. There are also pointless flashbacks to Ireland during the potato famine. These are supposed to describe the experiences of Ruth and how she met the hateful Dolan, but they are drawn out at such length the suspicion is that Baker simply wanted to write about them. Some of it is shocking; some of it is amusing; none of it is really necessary to the actual story.

This is compounded by some clumsy plotting. Early on in the narrative, Maddy shows her lover the network of tunnels that lie under the rancid streets of New York; the reader realises (the creak of the plot is a give away) This Will be Important Later. And it is. Of greater concern is the dubious MacGuffin at the heart of the storyline focused on Ruth and Dolan - a 'Box of Wonders' (a sort of 19th century iPad). This just seems silly and this reader became tired of it very quickly.

I was also worried by the voices of the characters. Most of them are flat and the characters have the smell of cnentral casting about them. They sound exactly the same, and none of them sound like what I think a semi-literate 19th century American should sound like. Most of them sound suspiciously like well educated 20th century Americans, in fact, using all manner of fancy words and idioms. This is a difficult balancing act to get right, but I think Baker fails to achieve it. None of his characters seem to speak for themselves, have distinctive thought patterns, or exist for themselves.

There are some good things about the book. First of all, it's unflinching focus on the racism and violence that characterised (characterises?) American society. Second - and this may contradict what I said before - there is some intriuging secondary detail, particularly the competing firefighting crews. Some characters seem work better than others - Deirdre's husband Tom, for example, bitterly reflecting on just how he came to volunteer to fight in the war. Baker - Like Tom - seems to be more comfotable in the company of men and describing masculine pursuits like fire-fighting, rioting and shooting each other. Those sections of the book are far more interesting and gripping than the sections - interminable sections - where the focus is on Ruth, Deirdrie and Maddy.

But overall, it's a poor effort. Too often, I found myself wanting to button hole Baker and demmand, "If you cared enough to write 650 pages, why were you content to make such a botch of it?" because it should have been a great book. Instead, it's merely an almost-okay page turner.

The books I read in 2010

1. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Treasure, revolution, thwarted love, madness and incomparable structural manipulation by the Old Man of the Seas. ****
2. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. Over-rated book about books that tries to hard to be clever and succeeds only in irritating. *
3. Wicked Beyond Belief by Michael Bilton. The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Grim but compelling, slightly marred by the author's clumsy style. **
4. The Climb Up To Hell by Jack Olsen. Account of a disastrous attempt on the Eiger's North face. The first half is riveting, the second less so. **
5. The End Of Iraq by Peter Galbraith. Dissection of Why It Went Wrong. Overstays its welcome, slightly, but contains a lot of important information. **
6. Henry VI, Part One by William Shakespeare. One of Will's least liked and least played works. Much of it may be the work of collaborators. No star
7. Henry VI, Part Two by William Shakespeare. Enthralling account of the War of the Roses. Diffuse, just lacks the impact of the best tragedies. ***
8. The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Maladroit 19th century psychological murder mystery. Pretentious, witless, and incompetently executed. No star
9. Henry VI, Part Three by William Shakespeare. The climax of the War of the Roses. Not as good as part Two, but still remarkable. **
10. Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram D. Wolfe. Big, painstaking triple biography of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin up to 1914. ***
11. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson. Witty, but too short to give an idea of his accomplishment to newcomers, or deliver new insights. *
12. The Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King. Popular history of God's Own Country. Wide in scope but shallow in analysis. **
13. A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr. Poorly executed murder mystery in dystopian London. No star
14. Real World by Natsuo Kirino. Murder disrupts the solipsistic lives of Japanese teenagers. Starts well but seems to lose its way towards the end. *
15. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse. The bombing of Hiroshima and the ending of an entire way of looking at the world. Long and slow, but potent. **
16. A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter. Witlessly plotted multi-murder mystery, and nasty to boot. AVOID
    
17. Give the boys a Great Big Hand, by Ed McBain. Fine dialogue & characters. Plot an afterthought to hanging with the boys on the 87th precinct. *
18. Cypress Grove by James Sallis. Murder mystery that strives to be big on atmosphere and setting and character, but is fatally short on plot. No Star
19. If This is a Man by Primo Levi. Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz. ****
20. The President We Deserve by Martin Walker. Bill Clinton's early life, political rise in Arkansas and his first term. Little insight, but adequate. No star
21. Infinite Loop by Michael Malone. The story of Apple Computers. Gargantuan ego, genius, madness, venality, incompetence and decadence. Astonishing. ****
22. 1977 by David Peace. Murderous, nasty peek at the underbelly of Yorkshire. The squalor and violence is justified, but the plot untimately becomes incoherent. *
23. Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones. Revisiting Jones's novella disappoints - the narrator's voice sounds contrived and even its brief length seems stretched. No star
24. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. Partly successful crime drama based around real life case. Contrived and lacking the breakneck fury of his later work. No star
25. The Shout and other stories by Robert Graves. Enjoyable, diverse collection. Perhaps too consistently whimsical. **

Book review: Who Moved My Cheese?

Possibly the worst book ever written is the toe-curlingly awful Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, MD.

It really is one of the most remarkably awful things I've encountered in book form, and no opportunity to scorn it should be missed.

Frighteningly, it sells by the ton and has received four hundred and thirtynine 5 star reviews on Amazon (so far ...) though, hearteningly, it has also received 398 1 star reviews. Websites have been set up to spread its trite message further and celebrate its unbearable naffness. Many people I know who are sensible and successful - far more sensible and succesful than I - swear by it, and cite it as a inspirational book, second to none. But it is awful.

I read it when my wife was loaned a copy through her work, when that company was going through one of its regular restructures (as it is again, now). The book tells you how to regard these changes as opportunites and challenges, not as obstacles. I suspect it's appearance in the soon-to-be-liquidated department was not exactly a coincidence.

So, basically, when your employer tries to piss all over you, instead of protesting or - Heaven forbid - involving the union - you have to thank them for giving you a chance to explore your potential elsewhere. I kid you not. It doesn't advocate biting the hand that feeds you, so much as kissing the hand that slaps you.

The means of putting this wondrous message across is ... um ... cheesey (I suspect I may not be the first person to make that joke. But, what the Hell?)

A group of old friends meet up and discuss their lives. One of them starts to tell a story that is mean to illustrate the correct way - in the opinion of the good doctor - to face up to change. Whatever happens to you, roll with it. Embrace change. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is athe literary level the book operates at. And there isn't a sherd of irony in it.

The story teller mentions that , when his company was gonig through changes, some people clung onto their old fashioned ideas and sufferred losses as a result. How foolish of them to think they might have had any rights what-so-ever, or that anything other than acceting your redundancy notice with a smile and a heart felt thank-you was the right way.

The book is short, which is the best thing that can be said for it. Most of it consists of a parable recounted by the narrator in the group of friends, illustrating different ways to deal with change.

Everything below is absolutely true and faithful to the book. I have not invented it. This is true. This exists. Adults pay money to be told this, and say 'thank you.'

The parable describes the experiences of two 'Little People' (That is, proles, like you and me), and two busy little mice. For reasons that are never made clear, they live in a maze, and every day they eat cheese which is delivered to the same spot by POWERS UNKNOWN.

I repeat: I am NOT making this up.

Then, one day, the cheese isn't there. The little people sulk and protest, unable to accept that SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. The mice immediately scurry off through the maze, and find more cheese.

Eventually, the little people realise that they should follow the example of the mice and go in search of new cheese, instead of sitting about bewailling the change that has befallen them. As they go, they daub the walls of the maze with maxims, just inc ase the readers of the book are too dim to work out the lesson for themselves.

It one of the most patronising books I've ever read. And it is wrong. No consideration is given to the idea that a change may not be appropriate, or that the 'little people' should protest when their jobs are out-sourced to China, that workers - for the book is really telling workers that they need to accept just that sort of thing, hence the reason it appeared in Mrs Lurgee's workplace when the 'little people' were having their cheese moved - might have a say or a stake in the company they work for. Change is always good, especially if it involves you losing your job. Be grateful, grasshopper, for the chance to experience poverty, insecurity and hardship.

The only thing worse than the tedious, obvious, insulting narrative and preachy lessonering, is the way the book is written. It is written in a curdled style that made me want to puke. It made Woman's Day read like Raymond Chandler. Sugary doesn't begin to describe it.

And, I repeat, this book sells by the million, to successful, presumably intelligent, business people. What is so wrong with the world that this is allowed to happen?

Is there no God?

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

I doubt I have ever read a worse book than this. Let me make myself clear. This is not irony. I will not, with some intellectual pole dancing, reverse this judgement and reveal that this is, in fact, a great book. I mean An American Tragedy is a dreadful book.

A book can be bad for many reasons: paucity of ideas; clumsy characters; psychological shallowness; bad writing; lumbering self importance; unjustifiable length. An American Tragedy combines all these features in a positively indecent display of literacy ineptitude.

The story is simple enough. Clyde Griffith, a young man from an impoverished background, attempts to improve his lot by attaching himself to a wealthy branch of his family. Initially successful, his dreams of social advancement are compromised when he gets a naive young girl, from an even less socially auspicious background, pregnant. Faced with the destruction of his hopes, he murders her. He is caught and brought to justice.

That is the story in a hundred words. Dreiser stretches the tale out to almost a thousand pages. He manages this feat by practising redundancy. This is a writer who never found an idea idea so banal or obvious that he didn't think it worthy of repeating at least three times. The novel, with this repetition cut out, would be significantly reduced in size. I'm not suggesting it would be improved: there is an abundance of other flaws to be addressed. But at least the ordeal would be reduced.

So, what can the reader who ignore my warnings expect? Sludge. Dresier writes in a style that combines of plodding prose with hysterical hyperbole, outlandish metaphors, and occasional descents into complete incomprehensibility. Here's a taster, from the crucial central section, where dim Clyde schemes the murder of bland Roberta:

Indeed the center or mentating section of his brain at this time might well have been compared to a sealed and silent hall in which alone and undisturbed, and that inspite of himself, he now sat on thinking the mystic or evil and terrifying desires or advice of some darker or primordial and unregenerate nature of his own, and with out the power to drive the same forth or himself to decamp, and yet also without the courage to act upon anything.

Say what? Is it really necessary to specify that this brooding takes place in the "center or mentating section" of his brain? Why resort to the crudely anatomical "brain" at all? The whole first section could be reduced to "Clyde's mind might well have been compared ..." But no, even that's too redundant. "Might well have"? Don't shilly-shally, Theodore, might it or might it not? Assuming it might have, we now have "Clyde's mind was like a sealed and silent hall ..." But does it need to be "sealed and silent"? Let's just call it silent. In fact, let's forget the hall altogether. It's a clunky and cliched simile and, worst off all, pointless. It says, in effect, that Clyde's head was like a place where Clyde sat thinking. Now maybe I am just a Philistine, but I'm not convinced such a revelation merited such torturous phrasing, nor am I certain that this too-long novel would have been significantly weakened by excising the passage altogether.

Dreiser's genius is that he can produce sentences like that on almost every page. Here's another one:

And this, while not producing a happy reaction in her, had the unsaisfactory result of inducing in Clyde a lethargy based on more than anything else on the ever-haunting fear of inability to cope with this situation as well as the certainty of social exposure in case he did not which caused him, instead of struggling all the more desperately, to defer further immediate action.

It is worth noting that this occurs on page 423-4, and the earlier quotation on page 483. After sixty pages, Dresier is still hammering home his point with a manic obssession that betrays either contempt for his readers, or a lack of confidence in his ability to create characters. Okay, Theo, Clyde's a procrastinator. We get it.

Dreiser is no one-trick pony, however. He can do all kinds of incompetence. He specialises in sentences that wander all over the place, from stale metaphors to bland insights to pointless comment, insufficient punctuation and absolutely no point. He can also be a useless writer in very few words at all:

Clyde's hair-roots tingled anticipatorily.

Is it possible to imagine a five word sentence that combines more literary gaucheness and pretention? Not for Dreiser the common place 'in anticipation.' He must demonstrate his mastery of language with the clumsy, pretentious 'anticipatorily.' And the almost creepy precision of 'hair-roots.' What's that all about?

Dreiser also indulges his penchant for metaphors of the stalest and most trite type. Example has already been made, but, in the manner of Dreiser, I won't stop with one instance. Rarely has an author demonstrated such an enthusiasm for figurative language, with so little originality, or discernment:

But just the same, shameful as it was, here were the stark, bald headlands of fact, and at their base the thrashing, destroying waves of necessity.

There are some metaphors that really, really don't deserve to be extended. And sometimes he just stops making sense altogether:

And so he was about to repeat his customary formula in such cases that all could be told to him without fear or hesitation, whatever it might be, when a secondary thought, based on Robert's charm and vigor, as well as her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers, caused him to think again.

"Her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers"? What are we to make of this pseudo-scientific balderdash? The whole book is a sustained exercise in bathos - Dreiser's attemtpts to wring us, move us, puzzle us, inflame us, suceed only in boring us, or providing us with occasional unintended amusement.

Well, beyond the writing itself, what else have we? A story that should have been idiot-proof. The sumary I gave above may have struck some as interesting. it is. But Dreiser is such an inadequate writer that whatever intrinic tension, pathos or interest in the tale is crushed by his ponderous style and his insistence on telling us everything at least three times, in progressively more awkward sentences. The characters are hopelessly two dimensional. Clyde is bland and unlikeable, and - as he is rapidly tracked down by the forces of the law - shown to be stupid as well. We find it hard to care for him because his passion for the superficial and silly Sondra Finchley is so unconvincing. Note, not misplaced - part of Dreiser's Big Idea is that Clyde sacrifices Roberta's true love for Fickle Sonra's fancy - but unconvincing. Similarly, we don't care overly much for the feeble Roberta. It might seem mean, but rarely has a damsel been so distressed without inspiring any pity in the reader, who can only long for the chilly waters of the fatal lake to close over her.

Now, in fairness, there is one bit - just one - where An American Tragedy generates a modicum of interest. This is during Clyde's trial. The trial is a gift to Dreiser, who can't resist his urge to reiterate what we've already read, and has various witnesses tell us things we already know. But the cross examination of Clyde by the bitter, angry district attorney, Mason, does generate some power. For once Dreiser's compulsion to leave nothing out is some sort of a virtue. Reproduced virtually verbatim, the cross examination runs to thirty two pages, and it is grueling read as Clyde is slowly broken down. It lacks tension, because Dreiser is such an idiot he tells us precisely about the fatal trap Mason sets, well before it is sprung, but the relentlessness of the cross examination stands at odds with the rest of the book. Just two men, one questioning, one answering, almost word for word, without the continual flat footed authorial showing off that ruin the other 824 pages.

Dreiser is a mediocre writer who attempted to tackle a big idea in a big way and came hopelessly undone. Unwittingly, he provided his own epitaph, describing the luckless Clyde as an "inadequate Atlas," trying to endure the weight of his troubles. Dreiser is a similar figure in a similar predicament - like Clyde, he is incapable of carrying off his project successfully, and to foolish to abandon it.

NO STARS

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

I read The Cold Six Thousand hoping to answer a question, which was whether James Ellroy was developing from the writer of breakneck but clunkily plotted pulp crime novels to something bigger. As often happens when you look to literature for answers to a question, I only got more questions. I still don't know if Ellroy is developing from something good to something great. He has developed a style of writing immediately recognisable and unintimable. He has secured himself a place in American crime writing that is unassailable. Whether he's going to move beyond that into the world of really great writing, is unclear.

My previous form: the Dudley Smith Trio (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz). American Tabloid. And now The Cold Six Thousand. Each one of these novels follows a very similar trajectory. They start brilliantly, sweep you through first half of the novel at a breakneck pace that may even leave fainthearted souls with heightened pulse rates, before reaching a conclusion that is somehow unsatisfying and questionable. Of them all, American Tabloid is the best, in that it sustains it's berserk pace to the end and its plot lacks the sense of doubt that weakened the Dudley Smith novels.

The Cold Six Thousand is a sequel to it, literally picking up just a few staggering minutes after Tabloid left off. The opening chapters are Ellroy at his brutal, electric best. Here's a sample:

1:50 p.m.
They touched down. Wayne got off first. Wayne stamped blood back into his legs.
He walked to the terminal. Schoolgirls blocked the gate. One girl cried. One girl fucked with prayer beads.
He stepped around them. He followed baggage signs. People walked past him. They looked sucker-punched.
Red eyes. Boo-hoo. Women with Kleenex.
Wayne stopped at baggage claim. Kids whizzed by. They shot cap pistols. They laughed.
A man walked up - Joe Redneck - tall and fat. He wore a Stetson. He wore big boots. he wore a mother-of-pearl .45.
"If you're sargeant Tedrow, I'm officer Maynard D. Moore of the Dalalas Police Department."
They shook hands. Moore chewed tobacco. More wore cheap cologne. A woman walked by - boo-hoo-hoo - one big red nose.
Wayne said, "What's wrong?"
Moore smiled. "Some kook shot the President."

Ellroy's style is immediately identifiable, like a (bloody) fingerprint. No-one else writes like this. It turns some people off. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you then don't read James Ellroy. The Cold Six Thousand is seven hundred pages long, and - apart from a few 'document inserts' (letters and telephone conversation transcripts) - it is all like that.

The novel picks up the story of American Tabloid immediately after that novel's culmination - the assasination of JFK. Wayne Tedrow arrives in Dallas to do a hit. At the same time, JFK is assasinated. The first part of the novel deals with the aftermath of the killing - the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, the subsequent killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, various unpleasant actons taken by various characters to disguise The Truth - for this is conspiracy theory heaven, kids - while Tedrow botches the job he was sent to Dallas to carry out. Scene shift to Las Vagas. Howard Hughes wants to own it. The mob want to bilk Hughes. Pete Bondurant and Ward Littel - characters from American Tabloid - are involved in various dealings and operations. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of people get dead, rarely from natural causes. The first half is brilliant. Vicious, cruel, blood soaked, racist, misogynist, preposterous, but brilliant.

There are, however, problems. The first is one of scale. Ellroy decided to bookend his novel with the murders of the Kennedy brothers - JFK at one end, RFK at the other, with Martin Luther King thrown in as a 'Whack two, get one free' bonus. This means the novel is covering a period of about five years, with a long hiatus in the middle. Ellroy's compulsion to have three main characters - every book of his that I've read features three major characters - exacerbates the problem, as it means there are a lot of character hours to be filled. So he thinks about what else is going on in the 1960s, and packs his characters off to Vietnam in the novel's major mis-step. Yeah, it fills up a couple of hundred pages and a few inconvenient years in the middle. And yeah, it lets Ellroy tick off a few boxes on his list of Things That Need To Be Included In The Definitive Novel Of The 1960s - Vietnam, tick, CIA, tick, Heroin trafficking, tick - but it doesn't add to the story proper, it just kills time.

And then at the end, it is Kill Time again - MLK and RFK get bumped mighty quickly, plus a couple of other bonus deaths. It should be a stormer of an ending, but it feels a bit disappointing. The victims don't mean much within the confines of the novel - none of the main characters are emotionally invested in them, and Ellroy's attempts to convince us that Ward Littell cares, don't convince - so in the end it is just another couple of high profile tap jobs, and the main characters aren't directly involved. It leaves the conclusion feeling curiously underpowered, like you've started a race in a Ferrari, and ended it on a bicycle.

Another problem is that the novel relies heavily on coincidence at key moments. Some of this is just lazy on Ellroy's part - it is coincidence that Littel fails to spot a crucial tail, it is coincidence he sees a revealing photograph - and the feverish police work that made parts of The Big Nowhere exhilerating is replaced by vague freferences to various minions doing the hard work of actually finding and doing, for the main. The much sought Wendell Dufree isn't tracked down by vengance-ridden Wayne's detective work, but by a tip from some off-stage characters.

Even then, there is a power in Ellroy's crazy vision of America in the 1960s that's hard to resist. At the risk of sounding repetitive, Ellroy writes like no-one else, and no-one else writes like Ellroy. Every page contains almost random moments of technical brilliance. Randomly, from page 488:

Truce.
They split the Stardust. They moved into the Cavern. They bought a new TV. Barb sulked and judged. He ran the biz. He ran dope. He ran guns.
Barb worked the Cavern. Barb wore go-go gowns. Barb showed off skin-plus. Dig it: No pinholes/no bruises/no tracks.
Truce.
They lived. They made love. He travelled. Barb flew then. He knew it. Barb flew white powder air.
They lived the truce. He nailed the Shit Clause:
Barb was right - the war was fucked - we couln't win. Barb was right - they had big love - they'd stick and win. Barb was wrong - white horse had teeth- white horse bit to win.
White flag/ceasefire/truce.
He conceded points. He owed Barb. He brought her to Dallas. The truce held. The clause held. The ink ran.

There aren't many current authors who could write a passage like that. Technical experimentation is considered to be dead, rejected by readers and writers alike as Too Hard. Too Hard to write, Too Hard to read. Instead, we get anti-literary sludge about ideas and feelings, identity fiction written in comfort zone prose. But Ellroy's managed to make a lot of people read his technically demanding, anti-comfort zone, Too Hard prose - which shows that failure isn't on the part of the readers as much as the writers. There are people out there who will read stuff that stretches their ability to understand, that doesn't make it easy. For proving this, if nothing else, Ellroy's a significant writer.

Perhaps Ellroy tries to hard. Perhaps 800 pages is 300 too many. Perhaps Vietnam was too big to be worked into The Cold Six Thousand as a diversion. Perhaps it deserves its own distinct treatment by Ellroy. He isn't perfect. He might not even be great. But he is important.

Iain Banks / Iain M Banks

Iain Banks and Iain M Bans are one and the same. The presence of the 'M' indicates the work in question is science-fiction, its absence contemporary fiction set in the real world, more-or-less. Both names belong to a hirsute Scottish author who at one time seemed to promise great things but who now barely barely registers with me any more.

I've read a lot of Banks's work over the years - I'm shocked at how much. He might be lazy, but he's certainly busy, producing work of little notice, while resting on the laurels he earned in the 80s and early 90s. A shame to see how he seems to have settled for prolific mediocrity

Here are potted reviews of what I've read of what he wrote. As noted above, I've pretty much stopped reading Banks and I'm scared to re-read his older stuff in case it spoils it, so I might be a bit vague on detail. I've respected Banks's decision to distinguish his sci-fi from his mainstream work, and the order within these categories is, I think, chronological.

As Iain M Banks:

• Consider Phlebas - Good. A shameless space opera set in the Culture universe. This was Banks in his grand phase, his titanic imagination working over time. Good characters, human and machine, cunning plot and grand settings. **
• The Player of Games - Another very good thing, though I discern a totalitarian streak in the Culture novels that I find a bit uncomfortable. Okay, maybe the Culture is run by super-intelligent computers, but aren't they just behaving like a bunch of neo-cons intent on 'regime change'? Still, put aside the philosophical navel-gazing and it's terrific story. **
• Use of Weapons - Probably his best work as either Iain Banks or Iain M Banks. A mammoth space adventure, following one man's quest for redemption. Nicely structured forwards-backwards narrative, a terrific main character, a stonker of a twist and then (because when Banks was good he was really, really good) an second stonker just to leave you seeing a galaxy load of stars. ***
• The State of the Art - So-so short stories. Some good, some mediocre. No stars
• Against a Dark Background - Interesting sci-fi, set in a non-Culture environment. Much more restrained than previous sci-fi outings, and bleak on a galactic rather than an individual scale. I think I remember that the conclusion is weak, but it is still a good effort and worth reading. *
• Feersum Endjinn - Banks's attempt to be Anthony Burgess is interesting more than successful, but still just about hangs together. *
• Excession - A worthy Culture novel, with interesting and well realized machine characters. Banks was still trying at this stage, still challenging himself. *
• Look to Windward - Not bad in itself, but a definte diminishing of scope and ambition. Returning to The Wasteland for his title signals the triumph of the repetitive and lazy over the original and exciting. No star
• The Algebraist - Tediously long and convoluted tale that leads nowhere. Stale space opera with a long, drawn out quest segment. No star

As Iain Banks:

• The Wasp Factory - Strange little gothic tale. Yes, we all loved it when we read it when we were too young to know better. Take my advice and preserve it as a cherished memory, don't re-read it. Oh, and don't make the mistake I made of looking at the last page to see how many pages there are. Rather spoils it. *
• Walking On Glass - Deeply odd multi-narrative tale that doesn't really work for me on any level. I suspect he was trying to imitate Alan Garner's fabulous Red Shift, and failed absolutely. Yes, 'tis very strange, but strangeness in itself doesn't make for a worthwhile read. No star
• The Bridge - Like The Wasp Factory, on first encounter this many-stranded tale is strangely fascinating and I loved it at first. From a more mature standpoint, it strikes me as contrived, pretentious, show-offy and silly. Very studenty, which is probably why it is so beloved by students, but now it seems arid and smug. Just like Walking On Glass seemed suspiciously like Red Shift, The Bridge reminds me too much of Alastair Gray's mad and brilliant 1982, Janine. *
• Espedaire Street - The big disappointment of my re-reading of Banks. I enjoyed this maudalin tale of prog-rock excess when I read it the first time. I recall re-reading it with pleasure, but another visit proved one too many. It no longer seemed convincing, either as a chronicle of rock'n'roll excess, or as a tale of Davey Weir's personal salvation. And the idea of a sort of Scottish Pink Floyd taking the world by storm is less credible than Banks' more esoteric sci-fi imaginings. No star
• The Crow Road - The start of Banks' strange fixation on family sagas. Nothing much of interest here. That is to say, nothing overtly bad, but nothing that makes me want to jump up and down and say "You've got to read this!" No star
• Whit - In effect, another family saga and very undistinguished. Very high 'Why bother?' quotient. You could perhaps justify reading this or The Crow Road, but I wouldn't recommend both. No star
• Complicity - I hoped this signaled Banks turning the tide in his battle against mediocrity, but it turned out to his last stand. I enjoyed Complicity. Clunky, obvious and flawed, but the sustained rage and disgust - at pretty much everything from Bon Jovi to Margaret Thatcher - made it terrific fun. Helps if you were fascinated by the Civilisation computer games in the 1990s. **
• Dead Air - Banks sinks into utter irrelevance. Writing about something as shocking and relevant as the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, he botches it, settling for an tiresome and indulgent story about a banal prat mouthing off and getting himself into petty trouble. Unsuccessful on every level. No star

Dead Air by Iain Banks

Dead Air was published in 2003 (1). I got excited about it, even though I had detected a falling off in Bank's output prior to that. Whit, The Crow Road and (as Iain M. Banks) the increasingly vapid sci-fi of Against A Dark Background, Look To Windward and Feersum Endjinn.

So Dead Air might not mark the exact point where Banks went bad (doesn't that trip nicely off the tongue?) but it is so remarkably bad that it deserves special mention - though it is hard to know where to start.

With that in mind, it makes sense to start at the beginning - right at the beginning, I mean, with the blurb:

A couple of ice cubes, first, then the apple that really started it all. A loft apartment in London's East End; cool but doomed, demolition and redevelopment slated for the following week. Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week weddng lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below. Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are following the fruit towards the pitted tarmac ... just as mobiles start to ring, and the apartments remaining TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre ...

Sounds good, doesn't it? It sounds pretty intriguing, in fact - decadence and disaster, the high of petty wilful destruction supplanted by horror in the face of wilful destruction on a grand scale. Well folks, this is about as good as it gets, and to be frank I already have problems. Yes, with the blurb.

The apple, for example. Is it mere coincidence, or is the apple (which ends up splattered) ment to symbolise, in some cool and metaphorical way, the splattering of New York, the BIG APPLE. Maybe I'm trying too hard here?

But there's more - what about our characters name: Ken Nott. In Scotland, 'ken' is slang for 'know.' 'Nott' = 'naught' = 'nothing.' So we have a character called 'Knows Nothing.' Banks, it seems, has decided to yoke 11th of September, 2001 up with that stalest of literary conceits, The Voyage Of Self Discovery. Next week: Nick Hornby uses the genocide in Rwanada to illustrate how one man comes to terms with his divorce.

I don't have a problem with his use of 11th of September, 2001, as the starting point of a novel. I don't expect that day to be pondered and discussed on sit-coms, but if you are writing a serious novel then it is okay to approach the big and terrible subjects. In fact, it is an obligation, especially if you're one of Britain's most ferocious novelists, intent on laying into the orthodoxy that it is okay to annihilate people as long as they are Arabs, and that Dubya is the defender of civilisation, then you might as well start at Ground Zero.

This isn't what Banks does, however. I was expecting something dark and terrible, exposing the hypocrisy of our leaders and our casual disregard for human lives other than our own - something akin to Complicity (an earlier novel by Banks that I still maintain is good), maybe featuring rightwing conspiracy, anthrax, asylum seekers and the realisation why all these civil rights curtailed after the 11th of September 2001 were important in the first place. I had hoped for RAGE – if the horror 11th of September, 2001, and all that has followed it, can't jolt Banks out of his lethargy, what can?

But we don't get any of this.

What we get is the uninteresting life (social and sexual) of Ken Nott. He hangs around with black people (who have comedy accents) so we ken Ken is cool. He has sex with many people, far more than his apparent charms would merit. Must be that irresistible Scottish accent ... Banks can't be arsed with a proper plot, so instead he throws together three different strands, hoping this will generate some sort of narrative suspense, so that when bad things start happening we are meant to be on tenterhooks, waiting to find out who is behind it all.

So, plotless. Poorly written as well. When he can be bothered, Banks can write prose that seems to have a physical impact. Complicity, a similarly badly plotted, clunky thriller, was partially redeemed by the sheer fury that Banks vented through its pages. In Dead Air, the prose is just flabby and dull. There are two big scenes towards the end that are meant to thrill, but it is very hard to feel bothered. Banks rambles, he ambles. He can't resist making chortlesome asides and wry comments that drain any tension that describing someone in mortal danger might have had. He even has the cheek to steal from his own earlier books: he takes time out from his narrative to explain that the process of holding onto the edge of a wall and lowering yourself to the full extent of your arms before letting go is called 'dreeping' in colloquial Scots - very informative, but he had imparted the same information in Espedair Street. Likewise, he describes the 'Not Proven' verdict, unique to Scottish Law, in almost exactly the same manner as in Whit.

Credit where credit's due, however. Once, just once, Banks shows us a bit of the old magic. To save anyone else the chore of sifting through the whole book for it dross, I reproduce the offending material here. I expect it to be excised from future editions, leaving us with absolutely unmitigated crap:

... there was a reliable-sources statistic that Phil discovered the other day; that every twenty-four hours about thirty-four thousand children die in the world from the effects of poverty; from malnutrition and disease, basically. Thirty-four thousand, from a world, from a world-society, that could feed and clothe and treat them all, with a workably different allocation of resources. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that two thousand eight hundred people died in the twin towers, so its like that image, that ghastly grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every single fucking day; twenty-four towers, one per hour, throughout each day and night. Full of children.

And that's it. That really is it.

All of which has lead me to speculate: is Banks up to something? At times the book is so awful that I think it has to be deliberate. In some mad, incomprehensible way, is Banks actually trying to insult his readers, and the sentimentality and veneration already built up around 11th of September, 2001. Is he teach a lesson to those how bought the book because of the shiver of horror that date inspires, trying to punish them for their unseemly interest in the catastrophe?

Or following the logic of his diatribe, above, is 11th of September, 2001 only worth a crap book, whereas the 34,000 children might be worth something better? Is Banks really that spectacularly bonkers? It is tasteless to use the 11th of September, 2001 to give you shitty book an air of gravitas and urgency. How much more so how much more so to make your book deliberately shitty and irrelevant, to confound the reader's ghoulish interest in the tragedy?

If Banks is trying some sort of moral conjuring here, then he fails, managing to do a disservice to both the victims of 11th of September, 2001 and the thousands upon thousands who die everyday through our indifference. But surely, he isn't trying to do that. I must be mad to even think it. Please someone, tell me I am mad.

NO STAR

1 - I wrote this a while back, 2005, I think. I get a bit pretentious towards the end, but, oh well, there's plenty of ire in there and I can't be bothered editing out the guff to make myself look better than I really am.

On Reading Old Goriot

DURING

Initial thoughts - the key to being a great lover is taking your time. The French are renowned as great lovers. Hence, they take their time. Balzac takes his time, at least a writing. So far I have had descriptions of the miserable quarter where the boarding house is. Of the outside of the boarding house, even down to the fact that the windows on theground floor have metal grilles over them. I have been on a tour of the garden, and spent some timein the shade of the lime trees that grow at the far end. I have loitered in the sitting room, and then moved through to the dining room, where I meet my first living character - the cat, who seems friendly enough. Then I am subjected to brief biographies of the denizens of the boarding house, before the redoubtable Widow What's-her-name shuffles in.

By this point, I am becoming aware of two things. First, I am finding this already dreary. Perhaps this is down to the baleful influence of Samuel Beckett. I am reading OG concurrently with a mammoth bio of Beckett, and I remember he had a low opinion of Balzac ("But still I keep reading" he grumbled). I'll dig up the appropriate quotes. But Balzac takes so long. At least five pages in, and nothing has blown up, no-one has died, hit another character, slept with another character or even said a word.

Second, Balzac keeps popping into his own narrative to make arch comments, e.g.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may perhaps be shed intra et extra muros before it is over.

That was paragraph two. Then, in paragraph three:

And you, too, will do the like; you who with this book in your white hand will sink back among the cushions of your armchair, and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may amuse me.” You will read the story of Old Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances. Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance! All is true,—so true, that everyone can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.

Which just rankles, frankly. I know we should be impressed by this post-modern ironic wah wah wah bollocks but I find it annoying. Can't he just settle down and tell his story. It was still going on when I gave up reading for the night. For some reason, I have developed a dislike of books that are self-concious in this manner. It gives the whole affair a very studied atmosphere, like our characters are little mannequins that Blazac has set up for our entertainment - inspite of the disclaimer just quoted.

AFTER

With a bit of reflection, I am pleased to report that I have hated Balzac all my life.

Previously, I hated him because I spent many years under the impression that he was really a she, and when I discovered the truth I had the distinct feeling that I had been tricked. I hadn't read any of the trickster's books until now, but now I can say I hate Balzac with authority.

I found the book very annoying. I have grumbled about the prolonged opening sequence, and a couple of replies ago I reported that I thought things were finally starting to move. This was when Rastignac goes to visit his cousin and starts to untangle the story of Goriot and his daughters.

After that, however, things rapidly fall to pieces. Rastignac is a bore, and his lady friends are more unlikable when they are being nice than when they are being vile. Goriot seems a fool and (shame on me) as I waded through his dying monologue I only wanted Rastignac to throttle him.

The only character that seems intermittently interesting is Vautrin/Collin, but his sudden exposure seems preposterous. The book has the sentimentality, absurdity and melodrama of Dickens boiled down into concentrated form, with the great bits of Dickens sorely missing. I know the book is meant to fit into a sequence and I should already be intimately aquainted with all these characters and goings on, but, since reading this book has been so miserable, why should I spend more time finding out about them?

(An aside - the only thing that makes me at all inclined to try and like this book is the fact that I share a surname with one of the baddies. Nice to learn what a cad my Frenchie cousin was!)

Also in need of throttling was M. Balzac himslef, as he can't write a straightforward sentence with out making some (meant to be funny, I suppose) reference to Greek mythology, or passing some sanctinonious judgement on a character. I hate that sort of authorial intrusion - how can there be meaningful suspense if the author is butting-in every five lines to tell you what a stinker so-and-so is?

The blurb of my edition claimed that Balzac laid the foundations for Zola and Flaubert. This may be true, but we should remember that foundations are usually buried, for good reason.

The Sea by John Banville

The Sea is a curious little book.

This might seem a peculiar statement to anyone who has read it, for on the surface, it is very simple. An elderly man, one Max Morden (morbid, moribund - geddit?), revisits the dingy little town where he grew up, recalling his relationship with an odd family that holidayed there, and the recent death of his wife.

On my first reading, I found the novel disappointing. I am a Banville fan. I've read several of his books, and this has given me a sense for what he is about. Compared to his past work The Sea seemed weak at first encounter. I imagine that readers drawn to him for the first time, perhaps seduced by the MAN Booker prize award, will be deeply perplexed as to what is going on.

Banville's books seem to be connected in a loose sequence, and this is the latest installment. Though the main characters all have different names, they are all very similar, progressively aging males. They share an interest in art criticism, though not as creators themselves. This is significant, I feel. These people are all fascinated by the creation of artifice. They are not to be taken at face value. Also, there is always something dark and terrible lurking int he past, usually not identified or explained. In Banville's novels, the gaps and silences are often more important than the words.

And while we're talking about the words, all these protagonists speak with very similar voices. Some people find Banville's dense language off-putting. I've read enough of his work to say - I THINK - that this stuffy, affected tone is a deliberate ploy on his part, not merely him being monotonous. His characters use language as a shield or a disguise - often shielding themselves as much from themselves as from the outside. But when Max faces up to his grief in The Sea, he expresses it in short and brutally obscene spurts of grief. It is shocking and effective, and a few short sentences leave the preceeding pages of finally wrought words hollow and artifical, just as - again, I THINK - banville intended.

So, what of the book itself? On my first reading, I fell for Max's - or Banville's - trick. The whole novel is an exercise in misdirection, as Max tries to focus our attention, and his, on the long dead past. Don't be fooled by him. His grief is raw and deeply felt, but hidden under a miasma of postures and fine words.

Overall, a very effective, subtle novel. It may not be rewarding on a first reading, or to those unfamiliar with Banville's work, but it is worth getting to know.

**

The Daughters of Cain by Colin Dexter

The Daughters of Cain, by Colin Dexter, is one of the Inspector Morse series. Now, I've always had a liking for Morse, without actually having read any of the books. This was, I suspect, because the much-missed John Thaw played Morse in the TV adaptations, and John Thaw was fantastic.

Stretching that logic a bit too far for my own good, I reasoned that because Thaw played Morse, and Thaw was fantastic, there must be something inherently worthy about the books. After all, on the TV screen, Morse seemed interesting. Surely the books would prove, if not as good, at least not bad?

Not so. The Daughters of Cain is a dull, unconvincing book. It doesn't really count as a murder mystery as there is very little mystery around the murder - the title is a bit of a give away for a start. It is rather stupid, I think, to indicate the identity of the killers in the title. If Conan Doyle had named The Hound of the Baskervilles something like Stapleton's Murderous Scheme Involving a Phosperescent Hound, a similar effect would have been achieved.

Random bits of information are thrown about - one character alludes to a rape or attempted rape, but nothing more is made of it. It looks like Dexter forgot about it. There is a somewhat clever bit of 'how it was done'-ery, but as the 'who done it' and the 'why done it' had ceased to be mysterious long before that, this isn't enough to save the book. And it was only somewhat clever, as I said.

The biggest disappointment, however, was the handling of Morse. Morse, without John Thaw's brooding avuncularity, is simply an old fart. He lacks charm or charisma. Worse, Dexter seems convinced he has created a fascinating character, and makes another character fall wildly in love with Morse - even though she is a twenty something whore and he is a rather pathetic old sod. Yes, she falls in love with him, not the other way around. Sad, and unconvincing, and it blows away whatever final scraps of credibilty the story might have had.

NO STARS

The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith

Unless I do something really stupid, like read another book by Patricia Cornwell , then Wilbur Smith's The Seventh Scroll is going to be my worst read of the year (1). In fact, I can only think of two books I have disliked to the same degree - Melvyn Bragg's Credo and Iris Murdoch's The Bell. Wilbur Smith being compared to Iris Murdoch? Truly, strange bedfellows.

Where to start with The Seventh Scroll? First things: its length. Size isn't everything, but when we're talking about truly, reprehensibly bad writing, dull plotting and cardboard characters, then size suddenly becomes very important. The Seventh Scroll has a lot of size, a harrowing 486 pages. Bricks are smaller, and more readable.

You know when you read a book, and you bounce down the first page, all Bambi enthusiasm, waiting to get hooked in, to become fascinated by the characters or the sweep of the story or the intracy of the plot or the way that the writer batters new stuff out of the English language? That is what I was like with this book. I thought I should read something by Wilbur Smith, as I've been snottily turning up my nose at his books for years. Fair play compelled me to see if my high brow derision was merited - Hell's bells, I am alimp wristed liberal and believe in all hose fine principles like innocent until proven guilty. I was doing this man wrong by prejudging him. I also have a lemming-like streak, which I mentioned before in relation to Patricia Cornwell, that makes me make intermittently misguided reading choices in an attempt to bond with the common folk. Never, ever again. Until I read The Da Vinci Code, at least.

But, anyway, about the bloody book. All right, so it is big. The plot and the characters are hopeless. Rider Haggard did this sort of thing 10,000 times better, long, long ago. Save yourself the ordeal and re-read King Solomon's Mines. It is shorter and better.

Briefly: Royan, half English, half Egyptian and very hot, survives a savage assault that leaves her elderly Arabic husband dead. they were working on an archaelogical project relating to the mysterious seventh scroll, which might locate the lost tomb of Pharaoh Momose. She seeks help from a dashing English adventurer type, and together they locate the tomb in the face of opposition from the nefarious types - the ringleader is of course German - Hell bent on their destruction.

None of this would be terribly bad if it wasn't so drabbly written. I think it was about page 6 or 7 that warning bells started ringing, when the elderly Duraid is murdered. It was just horribly flat, badly paced, lacking tension. I was suddenly struck by a longing to read an Haggardian adventure story writen by Ian MacEwan. Think how much fun that would be. Or pretty much anything else. But not, never, another word by Wilbur Smith.

Never the less, I ploughed on. Royan flees Egypt and enlists the help of the aforementioned adventurer. He is - get this - an authentic English aristocrat, complete with double barrelled name (Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper. Not Quentin, you understand, but Quenton) who delights in shooting game birds and rare antelope but still styles himself a 'conservationist' - which means that he winces at the thought of cutting down ancient trees but doesn't actually not cut them down. Sir Nick is a gentleman, which means he doesn't shag Royan, though she does allow him to get to to fool around a little bit more than is ladylike, which is probably down to her hot Arab blood. Everyone else is at it, of course, especially the black characters, who are portrayed various as foolish, lazy, stupid, drunk or horny. And there is an evil Russian as well, who we know is evil because he debases his woman. And the aforementioned evil German mastermind, who is also, naturally, sexually deviant.

Crude, offensive stereotypes aside (did I forget the sleazy, untrustworthy Arab?), the novel is very badly written. Characters talk - and think - in fully, uncontracted, non-colloquial language, no matter how grim the circumstances. Since Smith has already got plenty of words he should have been merciful and spared us a few by allowing his characters to say "Don't" instead of "Do not." I am sure Roayn and Nick were very well raised, but surely even they would have used the odd contraction especially when fleeing for their lives for the umpteenth time?

There is one almost-good joke in the book. Wilbur Smith puts himself in it as a character, referred to as a writer of books redolent with sex and violence. As a passing wink this might have worked, but he decides to hammer home the point by repeating it several times, perhaps feeling his readers are too thick to get it. More likely, they are simply comatose.

Beneath the smug author photograph inside the dust jacket, I am told that Smith dedicated his last 20 novels to his wife Danielle. If they are all of this quality, then she should be insulted.

NO STARS

1 - The year in question was actually 2005. This review was posted on an MSN book review group, that has since been deleted. It is reproduced here because I'm very fond of the gleeful viciousness of it. God, I hate that book.

The horror! The horror! A review of The Secret Life Lazlo, Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe

I’ve always had a guilty fondness of horror stories – the tendency of these stories to be full of heaving bodices and ravishments and sexual license appealed to me in my teenage years, and any honest man will admit (and any woman confirm) no man stops being a teenager, ever.

I can’t even begin to list all the horror stories that I have read, from the respectable (Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe, Lovecraft et cetera), through the somewhat respectable (Stephen King) to the utterly unmentionable – where titles and writers blur into an endless montage of bared and rended flesh, cliché and nonsense. Ah! The joy of it all.

“Re-invention” is a dirty word to my mind. It usually entails some smart arse grabbing someone else’s laurels and trying to make off with them. Which brings us to The Secret Life Of Lazlo, Count Dracula, by Roderick Anscombe.

This is a re-invention of the Dracula story. It is, in a trivial way, emblematic of the problem with modern literature – which, as I see it, is that writers are too damn knowledgable to be able to write. Shakespeare wasn’t familiar with Freud or Neitchze, but that didn’t stop him writing a psychologically perfect illustration of the Oedipus complex (Hamlet) and brilliant examinations of power, its mis-uses and its consequences there-of (MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Ceasar). He just wrote it, damn it. In these postmodern times, however, people are too well versed in too much to do anything as simple as write it, damn it. They have to cram all sorts of stuff into the story, without thinking about what is already there. Dracula is perfect as it is. You could talk for days about the imagery and subtext, the fear of contamination, the allure of the other, Dracula as a supreme Oedipal figure who can only be killed by driving a phallus, sorry, stake through his heart. What we don’t need is a psychiatrist turned writer to do it for us.

In a nutshell: Drac isn’t a vampire, he’s an ordinary aristocrat with a fondness for rough sex, so rough that his dates don’t often survive. He dabbles in the infant science of psychiatry which allows him to ponder on his condition in a tedious manner. It isn’t the psychological brooding that annoys me, but the poor quality of the writing makes it very heavy going. Anscombe might be a qualified psychiatrist, but if this is anything to go by, his case studies make poor reading, and leave the reader feeling skeptical.

I’m not one to rush to judge too quickly. It wasn’t until page 178 that I became infuriated, when the good Count asks a friend ‘and that’s where we come in?’ – an odd phrase for a 19th century Hungarian aristocrat to utter. Of course, once I decided I was not ‘bored’ but ‘infuriated’ by the book, I showed it no mercy. I started folding pages over (after a conversation with my wife as to the practicality of using her lipstick as a highlighter) to mark things that annoyed me particularly – and I count a further 19 folded up corners. 20 blunders might not sound a lot, but remember this is from halfway through the book, and they are only the outstandingly bad examples. Add on top of that a poor quality of writing, staging (the characters seem to spend most of their time at breakfast) and plotting (not content with the violation and murder of four women, Anscombe throws in a plague, a treasonous conspiracy and a murder investigation).

The book is full of sloppy writing. We are told that one woman wants to ‘Show that she wears the pants.’ Again, an unusal ambition in 19th Cnetury Europe and an even more anachronistic styling. A few pages later, this woman and Mrs Drac have ‘Hit it off.’ Talking to the dogged Inspector Krause, probably the only convincing character in the book, Drac declares ‘if you look here and here you will see the small flaws which are the mark of manufacture – which however, superior, can never match the careful application of the craftsman to his art.’ Try saying it – people just don’t talk like that, particularly people who use phrases like ‘And that’s where we come in?’

I’m not going to list all of the top 19 Bad Things. I will, however, ask if you, knowing that your husband had killed two young women, would invite a third to stay at your home and watch indulgently while she flirts with the monster? Mrs Drac does just that. And, because I can’t resist it, the topper. As I have said, this is a book that has been written badly. Worse, it seems never to have been re-read either by the writer or by anyone else – perhaps I am the first person to have read it. If it had been read by an editor, and that editor had not been rendered unconscious by the overwhelming monotony of the prose, surely the phrase ‘Grief does not come naturally to her nature’ would have been struck out? 'Naturally to her nature'? There is so much of this sort of thing.

Vampires are so on-the-money, with spooky castles, dark capes, wolves, bats, oodles of sex, how is it possible for it to go so horribly wrong?

NO STAR