Category: Opinion

A guess (not a prediction) at the Clarke Award shortlist: 2012 edition

28th February 2012 / / 2 Comments

So, this year’s list of Clarke Award submissions is out, and a number of things immediately strike me about it. One is the number of eligible books that aren’t there. Last year’s pool of submissions felt fairly comprehensive to me; this year’s, despite being a longer list, feels less so. Admittedly I’ve paid more attention to what’s eligible for this year’s Clarke: I compiled a list of mainstream-published science fiction last year; if you add on the additional titles mentioned in the comments (and disregard the one I got wrong!), only two were submitted for the Clarke. That leaves at least a dozen mainstream-published sf novels that weren’t even submitted (my list was by no means exhaustive), and no doubt a fair number of genre-published titles weren’t either (Niall Harrison suggests a few in his post).

Of course, the Clarke submissions pool was never going to be entirely comprehensive, and sixty books is plenty enough for the judges to read and construct a decent shortlist. There would also have been no small amount of discussion over eligibility this year: there seems to be an unusually high number of submissions that fall outside the science fiction box (even by my own inclusive standards). Some of these (like Grimwood’s The Fallen Blade, or Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox) are clearly fantasy; but others are more ambiguous: Nicholas Royle’s Regicide (for example) doesn’t sound like sf – and I wouldn’t expect a book by hm to be sf – but I can’t be sure of that. The same goes for plenty more on the submissions list.

This makes trying to predict the shortlist all the more difficult, because there’s every chance that one of these borderline titles may be good enough – and sf-nal enough – to make the cut (it’s worth remembering that two of last year’s shortlisted titles – including the eventual winner – were just such borderline novels). And then, as Niall pointed out to me on Twitter this morning, there are the core science fiction titles which have so far garnered relatively little attention. With so many unknown quantities, how do I begin to guess what might be shortlisted for the Clarke?

Well, I’ll start where I always do: with the high-profile genre releases that feel like sure-fire Clarke material. This year, that’s China Miéville’s Embassytown (the closest thing to science fiction he’s yet written), and Christopher Priest’s The Islanders (a major return by a very significant author). I don’t think these books are their authors’ best work, but neither can I conceive that they’d be omitted from the Clarke shortlist.

Priest and Miéville are previous Clarke winners, and two others have had works submitted, so I need to consider whether they might be shortlisted. What I know of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde suggests that it falls far enough towards the thriller end of the thriller-sf continuum that I have my doubts. Ian R. MacLeod’s Wake Up and Dream is almost certainly a very fine book, but MacLeod doesn’t feel like a shoo-in for the shortlist in the way that Miéville and Priest do.

There are a number of sequels among the submissions and, whilst it’s not unheard-of for such titles to make it (Monsters of Men did last year, of course), I don’t think that will happen this time. Sophia McDougall’s Savage City is my guess at the most likely such candidate, but I’m going to leave sequels out of my guess.

Adam Roberts is a genre author I’d usually turn to as a Clarke contender, and here I can actually consider a book from a position of knowledge. I think By Light Alone is good, but not quite up there with Roberts’s previous two novels (and I haven’t been able to put my thoughts on it in order, hence no review from me as yet), so I’m inclined to discount it.

So far, I’ve mainly been ruling books out; which can I nominate in the affirmative? There’s one more genre sf title which has really stood out for me in terms of its positive coverage, and that is Osama by Lavie Tidhar. It sounds to me like a Clarke contender, so I’m going to put it on my list.

Turning to mainstream-published works, I must include The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood in my selection, because I think it’s a great book, and I want the Clarke to recognise it, and for it to be read more widely among the sf community. It’s the novel that, overall, I most want to be shortlisted for this year’s Clarke Award.

Staying with non-genre titles, I’d agree with Niall that Colson Whitehead’s Zone One sounds like the sort of book that might get shortlisted for the Clarke, and it has had enough positive reviews that I’m of a mind to include it.

Which leaves me with one vacant slot, and I’m not sure where to go with it. I don’t want to take a wild guess at a book, so I’ll play it relatively safe, and suggest Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which of course gained its attention from being longlisted for the Booker.

So, my guess at the Clarke shortlist is:

ChinaMiéville, Embassytown

Christopher Priest, The Islanders

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Lavie Tidhar, Osama

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

I’m not calling this a prediction, because I don’t really think I’ll be right – and, indeed, in a way I hope I’m wrong, because I would like to be surprised by one (or more) of those borderline books. As to whether I will be, that will have to wait until the Clarke shortlist is announced at the end of March.

Being analytical

3rd November 2011 / / 4 Comments

Literary Blog Hop

This month’s question from The Blue Bookcase’s Literary Blog Hop:

To what extent do you analyse literature? Are you more analytical in your reading if you know you’re going to review the book? Is analysis useful in helping you understand and appreciate literature, or does it detract from your readerly experience?

I think taking an analytical approach to literature does come naturally to me. My academic background is not actually in English Literature but History, itself a very analytical subject; and, in my degree (and in my English Language A Level before it), I spent a fair amount of time engaging with literature (my dissertation was about 19th century children’s fantasy literature as a source for the history of childhood; my A Level coursework project was a comparative study of the humour in books by Pratchett, Rankin, and Holt). So, although I don’t have all the technical vocabulary and frameworks that a literature scholar would, I am still interested in how books work and what they do.

It was shortly after I finished university that I began reviewing books, something I have continued to do ever since; I’ve also written elsewhere about how central The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has been to my reading life. Analytical approaches to books were always there as I developed into a more serious reader.

Does that mean I’m always analytical now? It depends. If I’m reviewing a book for somewhere other than my blog, that venue will influence my approach; so, for example, I’m reading a book for Strange Horizons at the moment, and taking more detailed notes that I generally would, because they prefer longer reviews as standard, and I need to make sure I have enough material to draw on.

If I’m reading for my own blog, my response to the book tends to guide how analytically I read – the more engaged I am, the more analytical I tend to be. This doesn’t necessarily reflect on a book’s quality: there are some works which I’ve really enjoyed, yet found that I didn’t want to say much about them in detail (I started writing ‘book notes’ posts this year so I could respond to books in 250-or-so words, if that was all it took for what I wanted to say). Analysis doesn’t detract from my reading experience; quite the opposite – if I’m reading analytically, I take it as a sign that the book is worth my time.

Thoughts on the Literature Prize

12th October 2011 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been following with interest – and some bemusement – the kerfuffle surrounding the shortlist (and the longlist before it) of this year’s Man Booker Prize. There was a fair amount of commentary (not necessarily by people who had read the books) to the effect that the judges had somehow failed in their task to select the titles they considered the best from the pool of submissions (in some quarters, opinion seemed to be that the judges had failed in their task to shortlist The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst). These arguments struck me as unconvincing because they sought to dismiss the shortlist (or longlist) out of hand, rather than engage with the books selected.

One of the key points of contention has concerned comments made by the judges on the ‘readability’ of their choices; this issue surfaced again today in the announcement of the Literature Prize, a new award being positioned as an alternative to the Booker. In the words of the Prize’s board, as reported by The Bookseller:

[The Literature Prize] will offer readers a selection of novels that, in the view of…expert judges, are unsurpassed in their quality and ambition…For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize’s administrator and this year’s judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of ‘readability’ over artistic achievement…

I think there’s something of a false opposition being made, there, between the concepts of ‘readability’ and ‘artistic achievement’ (isn’t a novel of any stripe a failure if it doesn’t make its readers want to turn the page?); but, more than this, the Literature Prize feels – from its name downwards – like a kneejerk reaction to this year’s Booker shortlist. One shortlist – one jury’s definition of ‘best’ – with which you disagree does not make the entire enterprise flawed.

I wish the Literature Prize well, and hope it brings to light some excellent and interesting books; but I also hope it can come to a more positive and robust sense of what it wants to achieve.

Twenty Bookish Questions

26th August 2011 / / 1 Comment

I came across this questionnaire on Curiosity Killed The Bookworm; it looked fun, and it’s been a while since I did something like it, so here are my answers…

1. Which book has been on your shelf the longest?

Oh, I don’t know — I bought books fifteen years ago that I still haven’t read. Can I name one that’s been there a long time and I keep meaning to read? The Viriconium omnibus by M. John Harrison.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Current read is Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harsted, whcih I’ll be reviewing for We Love This Book. My last read was Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine, and the next one will probably be How to Forget by Marius Brill (though there’s always the possibility that I’ll change my mind).

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

‘Hate’ is too strong a word, but I remember feeling lukewarm towards The Book Thief when pretty much everyone else in my reading group loved it. (I could also mention here The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which made it on to the World Book Night list, but which I didn’t much rate.)

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison (600-page high fantasy from 1922, written in an Elizabethan/Jacobean style). It’s a book I mean to read out of historical interest in fantasy literature, but I can’t actually envisage a time when I’ll be in the mood to stick with it.

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

That’s too far away for me to think about, and I don’t think I would save particular books in the way anyhow. Perhaps that’ll be when I finally read The Worm Ouroboros…

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

Eh? I wouldn’t even contemplate looking at the end of a book before I start. The last page is the last for a reason.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

I don’t always read them, but certainly wouldn’t consider them a waste. What- or whomever an author wishes to acknowledge is up to them, and fine by me.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

On the proviso that I woudn’t be limited by the plotlines of the books in question, I will say Thursday Next; being able to travel into any book would be pretty cool.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

Oh, plenty: reading Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile during my A Levels; the second summer vacation at university when I raed Mary Gentle’s Ash and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, amongst many other books; working my way through the Discworld novels as a teenager…

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

I studied A Level English Language, and chose for coursework project to do a comparative analysis of the humour in books by Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt, and Robert Rankin. I was on holiday in Herefordshire that summer, and popped into a second-hand book sale in Ledbury, to see what there was. Amongst several (knowing me, a large ‘several’!) other books, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (which had not long bee n published), being sold cheaply because it had apparently been damaged in transit (though it was a perfectly good reading copy). I bought it in case it would help with my project — and it was so much fun to browse, and I learnt so much from it, that it has become one of my most treasured books.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I’ve given plenty of books away, but can’t think of a specific instance where there was a special reason.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

I don’t think there is one’; I’m a fairly fast reader.

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later? 

I never got along with A Kestrel for a Knave when I studied it in high school, but appreciated it more when I re-read it a few years ago. I wrote a blog post on this very subject back in January.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

I’m sure I must have found an item in a book at some point, but nothing that I can recall.

15. Used or brand new?

My preference would be new, but I’ve no problem with used books, as long as they’re in decent condition.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

To be honest, I haven’t read much by him; I tried a couple of his books earlier this year — the first time I’d read King in ages — but they didn’t grab me.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

I liked the Lord of the Rings movies better than the book (though it’s a long time since I’ve seen and read them, so I don’t know whether I’d feel the same now).

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

‘Never’ is another strong word. I don’t think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has ever had the film adaptation it deserves (certainly not the Tim Burton version). And I’m not sure that The Chronicles of Narnia really work as Hollywood blockbusters.

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Hmm… no, I don’t think I have.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

‘Always’ is yet another strong word, but I’ve picked up plenty of recommendations from The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and from one of its editors, John Grant (who wrote excellent reviews for Infinity Plus back in the day. These days, if Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, Scott Pack, or Abigail Nussbaum (to name four) say something’s good, I’ll most likely take a look.

Fiction Uncovered: the list

20th May 2011 / / 6 Comments

The Fiction Uncovered list has been announced. The idea behind this initiative was to highlight books from the past year by eight established UK writers whose work may not have had all the exposure it deserves. You’ll be seeing displays of these titles in bookshops; let’s look at what the judges have chosen…

Lindsay Clarke, The Water Theatre (Alma Books)

Clarke is the only author of the eight whose name was completely unknown to me, though I understand now that he has written seven novels. I’m not sure that the synopsis of The Water Theatre (a war-reporter searches for two old friends, without knowing that they harbour a secret) instinctively appeals to me, but I am pleased to have been alerted to an unfamiliar writer.

Robert Edric, The London Satyr (Doubleday)

Edric is one of two writers on the list whom I’ve already read, albeit a different book in this case. I had mixed feelings about Salvage, but would certainly read the author again. The London Satyr sounds rather different in setting and subject matter, as it examines the dark underbelly of Victorian society in the 1890s.

Catherine Hall, The Proof of Love (Portobello)

A mathematician spends a summer working as a farmhand in the Lake District, and gets tangled up in the lives of the locals. I have The Proof of Love to review next for the Fiction Uncovered site; now I know that it’s on the list, my anticipation has only increased.

Sarah Moss, Night Waking (Granta)

I’ve heard interesting things about Moss’s previous novel, Cold Earth. This new novel, which interweaves the stories of a mother and her young family on a Hebridean island in the present day, and a midwife attempting to address infant mortality on the island in the 19th century, alaso sounds intriguing.

Chris Paling, Nimrod’s Shadow (Portobello)

I experienced an ‘Aha!’ moment when Paling’s name was read out, when I realised I’d seen his work being recommended before, but had forgotten about it. At the time, I was convinced it was Scott Pack I’d read enthusing about Paling’s books, but actually I was thinking of this piece by Stuart Evers. Anyway, Nimrod’s Shadow — the tale of an Edwardian murder and its investigation in the present day by an office assistant who finds clues in paintings from the time — has gone staright on my to-read list.

Tim Pears, Disputed Land (Heinemann)

Pears is one of those writers of whose name I’ve been aware without really knowing anything about his work. Again, Disputed Land is not a novel that grabs me just from its synopsis (a man looks back on the childhood Christmas when his grandparents summoned their family to discuss their inheritance), but I’ll look into Pears’ bibliography.

Ray Robinson, Forgetting Zoë (Heinemann)

The only book on the Fiction Uncovered list that I’ve already read; one of my very favourite reads of last year; and a novel that absolutely deserves its place here. Emma Donoghue’s Room has received plenty of attention, and Forgetting Zoë (which likewise deals with the long-term captivity of a child, though otherwise the two books are quite different) rather less so; but I think Robinson’s novel is the better of the two, and I hope more people will now take the time to discover it.

Jake Wallis Simons, The English German Girl (Polygon/Birlinn)

In the 1930s, a girl is sent from Berlin to England on the Kindertransport, but loses touch with her family when war comes. I’d already heard of this novel, but was undecided about reading it; its appearance on this list might just spur me on to do so.

***

Overall impressions of the list? I’ve no reason to doubt the quality of the books (and if Forgetting Zoë is the standard, then that’s great); but, structurally, it feels something of a missed opportunity. For one thing, Fiction Uncovered was open to prose novels, story collections, and graphic novels; but there are no books from the latter two categories on the final list {*}. 75% of the authors are male, all are white, and all (as far I’m aware) English. There are no books published as genre fiction on the list. Half the titles do come from independent publishers, though, which is good to see.

Whatever the shape of the list, though, I do wish the best to all the authors featured, and hope they gain more attention as a result of Fiction Uncovered.

[*Since posting this originally, I have heard from Fiction Uncovered that relatively few story collections were submitted by publishers, and no graphic novels at all.]

Some notes on diversity

28th February 2011 / / 2 Comments

This Guardian article by John Mullan, published in advance of Saturday’s Culture Show special on debut novelists, has attracted a fair amount of comment in my corner of the bookish internet; I’ll point you in particular towards posts by Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mike Harrison, and Sam Kelly (thanks to Martin Lewis and Paul Smith for highlighting those links). More from me after the programme has been broadcast, but there is one issue I’d like to address here, which is that all twelve of the novelists selected by Mullan’s panel are white. This has been remarked upon in the comments on the Guardian piece, and Mullan has replied that the judging panel were asked to select books solely on merit. Fair enough, but there is still an issue here.

We are talking about a field which can claim Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro as key figures of the last thirty years; by now, we should be at a stage where we could expect the results of a meritocratic process like this to show some ethnic diversity as a matter of course. The Culture Show‘s process has organically produced a selection which is respectably diverse in terms of gender and age; that it has not done the same in terms of ethnicity is a sign that there’s a problem somewhere. Whether the outcome is an artefact of this particular process or an indicator of something more systemic, I don’t know; either way, it is a cause for concern. I suggest that it would not have been considered acceptable if all the selected authors had been of the same gender; it shouldn’t be acceptable that they’re all white, either.

***

I blogged last year about an issue of Black Static in which all the stories were by men; having been critical then, it’s only right and proper that I should acknowledge the good work being done in the latest issue. As well as two of the five stories being written by women, the entire book review section has been given over to works by women, as has Peter Tennant’s Case Notes blog for the month of February. Here’s a fine example of a literary institution noticing an issue with its field, and doing something to address it.

 

Libraries

5th February 2011 / / 1 Comment

Today, there has been a series of protests across the country in response to local authorities’ ill thought-out plans to close 400 libraries. I used my local library today, and will take the opportunity now to set out what libraries mean to me.

So many of my earliest reading memories are connected to libraries, whether the village library or various school libraries. As a young child, I was a precocious reader from a not very bookish household in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside. It may not have been the case that they were my only access to books, but libraries were certainly key in making books feel a part of my everyday life.

Libraries are the first places that many of us encounter books, and are significant as places where books and the learning they represent can be decoupled from the idea of schooling — which encourages us to see those things as valuable in their own right, rather than things we are obliged to study. Browsing the shelves of a library offers the potential for the ultimate in serendipity, because if you see an interesting book, you can take a chance on it with no further investment but a little time.

More practically, libraries give everyone free access to books and information, and expert guidance on navigating that information. They are important because they embody a belief that literacy, knowledge, culture, and learning — things both provided and represented by books — have their own intrinsic value, and should be available to all.

Further links
‘Voices for the Library’ website
Guardian blog about the protests

January wrap-up

31st January 2011 / / 0 Comments

It’s the end of January, and time to look back on the first month’s blogging of 2011. This is what was on my blog:

Book of the Month

Sometimes a book takes you by surprise, and that’s what happened this month. The best book I read in January was one about which I knew nothing and read purely on impulse: Linda Grant’s novel of the baby boomers, We Had It So Good.

Reviews

This month, I published full-length reviews of:

I also blogged shorter write-ups of William Coles’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Simon Lelic’s The Facility, and Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost…

…and began an ongoing project to blog Volume I of The Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories.

Features

On the Clarke Award

13th December 2010 / / 0 Comments

Tom Hunter, Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, has posted an open letter at Torque Control , asking for feedback on questions relating to the Award’s future direction. I’ve  sent in my comments by email, but also wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the discussion here, and to say something about what the Clarke means to me.

The Clarke Award is important to me because it stands for things that I believe in: it champions the best science fiction as a serious literary form; and it looks beyond genre publishing for relevant titles. I think the latter sets a good example for the book world in general:  too often, literary institutions can be unhealthily insular; only yesterday there was yet another article that advocated putting content ahead of quality in judging a book (an article nicely dismantled by Steve Mosby here). The Clarke is refreshing in that it faces outwards, and  brings excellent books to the attention of people who probably wouldn’t otherwise know about them. We should treasure it for that.

Literary Blog Hop

6th November 2010 / / 3 Comments

Literary Blog Hop

The Blue Bookcase blog is hosting a “Literary Blog Hop” this weekend, and I thought I’d take part, as I tend as I tend to think of this blog as covering literary fiction. Participants are asked to answer the following prompt: Please highlight one of your favourite books and why you would consider it “literary.”

Okay, that’s a good opportunity for me to think through what I mean by “literary”. I doubt I could come up with any hard-and-fast definition that wouldn’t have fuzzy edges, but here goes. I don’t think of literary fiction as a category that excludes particular genres; I think of it as a general description of books that I can appreciate as something more than just a way of passing the time.

The novel I’ve chosen to highlight here is my favourite read of last year – The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. I’ve already written on it at some length here, and so don’t want to repeat myself too much, but, to give some context: The Rehearsal is about an alleged scandal between a teacher and pupil at a girls’ school, and a play inspired by the scandal which students from the local drama college decide to stage. Then again, that’s not really what the book is “about”; it’s about different kinds of performance and pretence – in life, not just in theatre.

What makes The Rehearsal “literary” for me is the way that its main theme is played out on so many levels, and that the different aspects reinforce each other. The drama students literally put on a show; the girls at the school do so metaphorically in how they relate to each other. Some scenes read more like a theatrical production (and not necessarily the one being staged at the drama college) than a report of “reality” – even the novel itself is putting on a show. Catton takes risks with structure and dialogue, but it all works, because everything is tied back to the central idea of rehearsing.

So, that’s The Rehearsal. Now to check out some of the other blogs in the hop…

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