Tag: Ian R. MacLeod

One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four… and Five (again!)

Simon from Stuck in a Book has posted another edition of the reading-snapshot meme he created in May. I enjoyed answering it the first time, so I thought I’d do it again; as you’ll see, it is a full house of 2011 titles for me.

1) The book I’m currently reading

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Company Man

Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers, was one of my favourite reads of 2010, so naturally I have high hopes for this sophomore effort. I’m a little too early on in The Company Man to say firmly what it’s like, but so far it is an intriguing noir-ish novel set in an alternate 1919 with more advanced technology.

2) The last book I finished

The Guardian Review Book of Short Stories

Free with yesterday’s Guardian, this is an anthology of eleven original shorts from writers including Margaret Atwood, William Trevor, and Audrey Niffenegger. It’s a very diverse selection that almost certainly does have something for everyone. I particularly liked the stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mohsin Hamid.

3) The next book I want to read

Helen Gordon, Landfall

It was way back in March when I saw Gordon read from her debut novel at the Penguin General bloggers’ evening. Between that and the blurb of Landfall, which promises “one of the most surprising and destabilizing endings you’ll have ever read, I’m keen to read the book as soon as possible.

4) The last book I bought

Ian R. MacLeod, Wake Up and Dream

I haven’t bought any books since FantasyCon at the start of the month, so I had to think back to work out which was the last. MacLeod’s follow-up to the Clarke-winning Song of Time imagines Clark Gable as a private eye in a ’40s Hollywood where the movies can be transmitted directly into your brain. That makes two books out of five on my list which are noir fantastications — quite an odd coincidence.

5) The last book I was given

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

A big thank-you to Bianca Winter for very kindly sending me her copy of this year’s Booker winner, which was also the subject of my latest review.

Clarke Award Winner

Well, I only got through two-and-a-bit of the Clarke Award shortlist, which is far from what I intended, but life intervened. Anyway, the winner has been announced, and (gleaned from Torque Control), the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award goes to… Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod.

As it happens, this was one of the books I did blog about; you can read what I thought about it over here. I liked it, though I felt it had enough flaws that it didn’t really strike me as ‘award-winning’. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see it win — particularly because a small press book (in this case, one from PS Publishing) has won such a high-profile award (though I must admit, I don’t really follow awards, and this may happen more often than I think it does).

Anyway, the night belongs to Ian MacLeod, so congratulations to him and all concerned!

Clarke Award: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (2008)

Hmm.

Ian MacLeod‘s Song of Time begins as Roushana Maitland, an aged concert violinist, finds an angelically beautiful young man washed up on the shore near her Cornish home. He has no memory of himself or his past, so Roushana calls him Adam, which becomes, in effect, his real name. She tells the young man stories from her life — memories of her childhood in Birmingham, of travelling to India with her mother to aid the victims of nuclear fallout, of her musical career in Paris. But there’s another point to these recollections (which alternate with present-tense passages depicting Roushana and Adam in Cornwall): Roushana is dying, but has a chance to preserve herself by ‘uploading’ her memories to a crystal implanted in her brain, which will enable her to enter a virtual ‘afterlife’ (wherein she will still be able to interact with the world, albeit non-corporeally). And, of course, Adam has a secret — but so does Roushana.

My journey through Song of Time was a strange one. For the first third, I found the book very moving; I was feeling the emotions while bypassing the words, which doesn’t happen very often. But the remainder of the novel was much less affecting — apart, that is, from the final pages. Much of that opening third details Roushana’s early life, when she was merely a good musician, overshadowed by her brilliant brother Leo. But Leo had contracted ‘white plague’, an engineered virus that caused multiple food intolerances, and did not have long to live. It’s this early part, laced with tragedy, where I found MacLeod’s writing to be particularly evocative and poignant. For example:

‘All I remember is being summoned from lessons at school just before lunch, and finding Mum sitting waitinf for me on the sofa in the head teacher’s office, her face white and entirely blank. The head seemed embarrassed, and mumbled that it was probably better if she left us both alone.’

So what happens to the emotional impact later on? What changes? In a way, nothing — what happens is that, as the story moves on, something comes to the foreground that had been niggling me from early on. It gives rise to my main problem with Song of Time: that I don’t buy into the future presented by the book. Throughout, the prose style is quiet and reflective; this is appropriate, given the nature of the story, but has the effect of ‘muffling’ the futuristic changes. So, when Roushana describes the more extreme weather of her childhood, we don’t feel that weather — it feels as though life carries on pretty much as it does now, however much the author suggests that it does not. And the Paris of her adult years does not feel as turbulent as the text says it is. Even Roushana’s Cornwall, in the closing years of the current century. has a timeless quality about it; only the sequences set in India don’t feel so distant.

But my credulity was most tested with the eruption in the novel of the Yellowstone supervolcano. I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that such an event would be disastrous for human civilisations the world over. Yet even the impact of this eruption, as depicted in the novel, did not feel as great to me as I thought it should. I had a hard time believing that the world of Roushana’s old age could emerge from that cataclysm, because in many ways it doesn’t feel all that different from our present.

The title Song of Time refers to part of a generative symphony that Roushana performs; music is one of the novel’s key themes, though I can’t really say much more about it — I don’t know enough about music to be able to judge what MacLeod does with the subject. But the book has another important theme, and that’s memory. ‘Memories are what you are,’ says the book, near the beginning. In the case of the dead, with their newly virtual existence, that’s literally true; in the case of Adam — well, he has no memories, so who is he?

And Roushana? Although the connection is never made explicitly in the novel, a life composed of memories could be seen as a ‘song of time’, one that can be changed and re-interpreted each time it’s rehearsed. Perhaps, in the end, Roushana is whatever she wants to remember — or be remembered as.

I may have given the impression here that I dislike Song of Time more than I actually do. It’s flawed, no doubt — but at its best, it is beautifully written and moving  (and, though I haven’t touched on this, the characters never rang false even though the world didn’t entirely convince me). In short, the good parts are very good indeed; I just wish there were more of them.

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