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.

Should sci-fi die?

The blogger Mark Wallace reckons so:

It’s time to abolish a whole literary genre – science fiction must be destroyed. The signs should be taken down from Waterstones, the specialist shops should pull down the shutters and the conventions should be disbanded.

I say this as a fan, rather than an enemy. Science fiction as a genre should be abolished – so it can take its rightful place in the genre where it belongs: literature.

He then goes on to list some works usually classified as science fiction that he thinks are good enough to be go toe-to-toe with general fiction. His Top Five are:

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

I have a couple of reservations here. First, if he is forced to nominate two works by Philip K Dick, doesn't this rather undermine his contention that the sci-fi genre contains a wealth of writing as good as anything in mainstream fiction. By name-checking Dick twice, he's really saying either Dick (and a few others) are great writers who opted to write in a genre that is otherwise pretty weak; or his own knowledge of sci-fi is rather limited, in which case who is he to be pontificating on it's value?

Further, if you're going to cite an example of Banks's fiction, why plump for the inferior Player of Games and overlook the monumentally great Use of Weapons?

Use of Weapons IS the most obvious example of Banks's sci-fi that could be described as something more than 'just' science fiction, with its forwards-backwards structure, it's unreliable narrator and its still-impressive-even-after-you-know-about it double whammy twist ending. It's every bit as challenging and inventive as mainstream fiction, whereas Player of Games is just a bit of a space opera romp.

(As an aside, I used to think Banks - in either form - was brilliant, but now I can't be bothered. Most of his straight fiction seems pretty facile. The Bridge is so far up its own arse it might as well be renamed The Bert. Espedair Street is a rather silly bit of wishful fulfillment (Banks kinda wanted to be a rock star, he even wrote the songs referred to in the book), Crow Road and Whit are just a bit rubbish, Dead Air should have been great but wasn't (I suspect it was another bit of wishfulfillment, the wannabe rockstar re-casting himself as a DJ). The only one I still entertain any fondness for is complicity, largely because it was so deliberately nasty, and so very, very angry. And the description of the main character trying to wedge his bobbing erection under his computer desk while he plays a God game on his computer is amusing.

That said, I'm tempted by some of his recent efforts, because he seems to have become stridently political again, and that always gave his writing a bit more of an edge.)

However, Wallace, may have some sort of point. We need to get over the weird snobbishness that seems to exclude a novel like Use Of Weapons from consideration. I think the Whitbread put Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone on the short list, but that was probably more about making the prize seem relevant to general book readers, rather than a heroic blow against book-snoots. Otherwise, novels like Use Of Weapons would surely also feature - technically ingenious, imaginatively superb, character driven, full of ideas ... but since Use of Weapons was categorised as sci-fi, and generally ignored by readers (who for some reason didn't think there was anything odd about reading a kids book about a boy wizard at boarding school) it was also safe for prize panels to ignore it.