 | Scythe by Neal Shusterman {Reviewed by STELLA} Living in a world where immortality is a reality may seem utopian to some. In Neal Shusterman’s latest teen novel, human society has advanced to this state thanks to great advances in medicine and technology. It’s an ideal society where threat is obsolete, where everyone has everything they need (and more), conflict and competition for resources are redundant issues, and life carries on interrupted only by ‘turning the corner’ (rejuvenation - yes, you can become younger again - as young as 21 if you wish). There are no longer governments or state-controlled organisations - the mainframe is now something called the Thunderhead - an all-knowing data-based system that has consciousness: artificial intelligence at its zenith. Yet despite the utopian dream, population growth is still an issue and the Thunderhead’s analysis decrees the human/resource ratio, and this must be adhered to. Enter the Scythedom - a group of officials whose role is to determine who should die. Arbitrary death bringers! The Scythes act outside the jurisdiction of Thunderhead and have their own rules and charter. Quotas are expected to be reached, yet not exceeded, but the means of killing, called gleaning (merciful or otherwise), are at the behest of the individual scythe - and who they choose is completely their choice. The novel opens with a Scythe knocking on the door of teen Citra Terranova’s home. Thinking that he is there to glean a family member, the family try to protect the youngest, Ben, and offer the Scythe food. However, Scythe Faraday is there to glean the neighbour who hasn’t got home from work yet, but he is hungry so a meal is gratefully accepted. This is our first introduction to the Scythedom, and to the fear and wariness that the rest of humanity feel towards these cloaked and elite individuals who hold the power of life (they can grant immunity - a year’s grace from gleaning) and death in their hands. When Citra gets an invitation to a show at the opera house she heads along and meets the Rowan Damisch, a fellow teen, who has also received an anonymous invite. They have been invited by Scythe Faraday, who offers them apprenticeships to the Scythedom. Tempted by the offer (family members of Scythes have complete immunity) but also repulsed by it, both Rowan and Citra rise to the challenge and begin their training in weapons, poisons, philosophy and compassion. Yet not all is honourable and well with the Scythedom, and soon both Citra and Damisch are placed in impossible situations and become pawns in a sinister game of corruption, ego and the conflict of ideas. Shusterman’s novel is brimming with ideas, action and dark intrigue. There’s the necessary romance to add spice, the depth of long-lasting loyalties as well as the bristling of enemies to feed the narrative, the good/evil duality and all the questions that come with that, as well as plenty of challenges to keep our teens on their toes. Add to this some great wordplay, humorous interludes, compelling central characters, and some tight, pacey writing, and you have an appealing and thought-provoking young adult's novel. The ending is made for a sequel, with its dramatic encounter between our two heroes and enough threads left hanging to pull you to the next instalment, Thunderhead. The 'Arc of a Scythe' series is perfect for dystopia fans and readers of the 'Hunger Games' and 'Chaos Walking' series. |
 | Limbo by Dan Fox {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Being in limbo is involuntary," writes Dan Fox in this discursive book on the importance of writer’s block to the creative process (so to call it). "It’s a state slipped into accidentally, or a condition into which you’ve been forced.” Joan Acocella, in her essay 'Blocked', points out that "the term 'writer's block' is so grandiose, with its implication that writers contain within them great wells of creativity to which their access is merely impeded.” (This fixation on liquidity and flow, this representation of the creative process as a form of plumbing, quips Geoff Dyer, is tellingly “lavatorial.”) To be in limbo, demonstrates Fox with many examples, whether it be creative, social, political or religious limbo, is to be in a holding place, or, rather, a holding state, for those to whom categories do not apply, or, rather, for those for whom categorisation has been suspended. Development is stopped, edges, borders and identities cannot be reached, agency is removed, exit cannot be achieved. Limbo is a temporal (rather than an atemporal) state: it will come to an end but that end is indefinitely postponed (plausibly beyond the lifespan of the subject in some cases). Limbo is a liminal state of indefinite duration, a place of transformation that seems like non-existence. But, says Fox, “there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.” Writer’s block “generates energy through obstruction, just as a hydroelectric dam blocks water to create power.” Fixity leads to suppression, which leads to sublimation, which leads, eventually, to creative resurgence. By this model, though, creativity is entirely a pathological state, a symptom of suppression or repression, of the disjunction between inner life and external reality that it tries and necessarily fails to bridge. Would there be literature in a happy world? Creative production is not necessarily desirable anyway: Kafka wrote of the torment of writing and “seeing pages being endlessly covered with things one hates, that fill one with loathing, or at any rate with dull indifference.” No redemption either way. |
 | Milkman by Anna Burns {Reviewed by THOMAS} The reason this book has a sunset on the cover - a cover that postponed my considering reading it until I was challenged to pick a winner from this year’s Booker short list* (intolerant as I am of pictorial schmaltz) - becomes apparent in the third chapter, when the narrator’s French language evening class collectively denies that the sky can be any colour other than blue (or, at night, black), despite the evidence presented to them through the window by their teacher. It is the second time in a week that the narrator has been astonished at a coloured sky: her maybe-boyfriend had taken her to ‘watch the sunset’, an unheard-of and somewhat suspect activity for someone raised in a community in which every behaviour and opinion has been determined by convention, and in which, consequently, all behaviours and opinions immediately classify a person within the strict codes of those conventions. Although no particulars are given names, the book is apparently set in Belfast in the late 1970s, in the hopeless depths of the Troubles. The eighteen-year-old narrator has learned, as have all in her community except for those ‘beyond the pale’, to present only her “topmost mental level to those who were reading it,” to hide herself within the conventions of a divided society in which norms are structured, reinforced and policed by gossip, in which “not mentioning was my way to keep safe.” In her community, in which the ‘renouncers of the state’ [IRA] are both the instigators and the manifestation of the shared political and religious position, life, and to an even greater extent, death, only makes sense in terms of the conflict. From all families, active participants in the violence, innocent victims of the state’s responses and suicides (sufferers of what the narrator’s mother calls ‘the psychologicals are everywhere) all end up in ‘the usual place’ - the cemetery. Shame is a mechanism by which partisan orthodoxy is maintained. “Given that shame was such a complex, involved, very advanced feeling, most people here did all kinds of permutations in order not to have it: killing people, doing verbal damage to people and, not least, also not infrequently, doing those things to oneself.” The narrator is not as successful at hiding herself beneath convention as she would like, her habit of reading ‘great novels’ when walking, for instance, draws the attention of, and comment from, various quarters, most significantly from the character referred to as the milkman, seemingly a renouncer specialist in “shadowing and trailing and profiling” who has been responsible for numerous killings and has high standing in the community. “I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him.” He does, however, have a white van (though he is opposite in every way from the 'real milkman'). No amount of not responding by the narrator can prevent him from ‘taking an interest’ in her, oppressing her and grooming her as a future mistress. “I’m going to curtail you and isolate you so that soon you’ll do nothing,” he says, persuading her to stop visiting her maybe-boyfriend by intimating that he, as a mechanic, would be vulnerable to a car-bomb. The ‘relationship’ between the narrator and her stalker proceeds faster in the gossip of the community than in reality, gossip that pre-forms and iterates the story and gives it a sort of inevitability. The milkman could be read as a manifestation of the community’s inherent sexism and gendered power imbalance (the personally political and the collectively political can never be entirely disentangled), but also as a manifestation of the narrator’s own psyche, deformed by the society in which she lives: the milkman seems to know everything about her, “picking up on my secret desires and dreams”. The fact that the end-point of a memory is known before the memory is recounted intimates the inevitability of any account in the past tense. Everything that happens in this novel is revealed in its first sentence, and both the awful tension of the book and its considerable enjoyability and humour (it is by no means a difficult book to read) arise from the fact that, although the novel is tightly plotted, the narrative works always against the plot, resisting it, incapable of averting the inevitable crises but attempting at least to postpone them, to ‘buy time’, by inserting more and more thoughts, speculations, and recollections into moments of urgency. The more urgent the moment - the closer the milkman - the more extensive or the more complex or the more pedantic the loops of narrative the narrator inserts, as if narrative could slow or postpone the plot’s inevitable slide towards crisis. It is the control of the speed of experience that is the narrator’s (and the author’s) primary mode of contention with ‘the facts’. Burns, in her wonderfully looping riffs of ever-increasing pedantry, uses precision to cumulatively humorous effect (if precision in itself is not a humorous effect). The pursuit of logic to the point of illogic mocks a community operating on spurious rationality, and the mix of high and low registers underscores the narrator’s ambiguous conformity with that community, a community in which the ‘logic’ of resistance to oppression creates a ‘logic’ of oppression, in which personal ends are only achieved through political means, subjecting the personal to the political rather than making the political a means by which the personal may find expression. As the novel ends, though, it is intimated that it is power’s derogation of women (and its other victims) that shows power’s vulnerability, and that provides opportunities to assert the personal in its political mode.
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 | The Long Take by Robin Robertson {Reviewed by STELLA} A beautifully crafted novel, The Long Take is an epic narrative poem by renowned Scottish poet Robin Robertson. Kicking off in New York, 1946, it follows the life of Walker, a recently returned soldier. A survivor of D-Day, Walker is displaced by trauma, unable to return to his family, his life, his love in Nova Scotia. His life, like that of many others he encounters, has been turned inside out, and he carries a burden, a guilt he can not discharge. Unemployed, a friend suggests fronting up to a local newspaper,The Press, who are looking for reporters. Walker joins the city news desk, reporting on crime and street politics. Walker’s affinity with the streets, living on the edge, and contact with skid row leads to an assignment to document the lives of the poor and homeless: an investigative piece of work that takes him to LA and San Francisco. As we travel across America with Walker and along these cities’ streets over a decade, we are given an insight into the lives of the disenfranchised and into the impact of war trauma on a nation and an individual. Add to this the politics of the 40s and 50s - the era of cronyism, McCarthyism and mob rule, organised crime and state corruption - the novel is a cutting indictment of the ‘American Dream’, the rise of the automobile and the impact this had on communities (highways and parking lots that killed communities), the falsity of war as a democratic tool, and the injustice to those who fight for freedom yet become victims of power. It’s also a hymn to the film industry of this period - to film noir; the images and language of these films cleverly interweave with the tone of the streetscape and the atmosphere of the novel. Walker is a compelling man, a man who carries a history that he feels can only be understood by his comrades in arms, by those who have experienced similar trauma. He dulls his building emotional disintegration with liquor and by keeping his distance - never becoming entangled in relationships. His work colleagues find him unreadable, and those he has the most affinity live on skid row, particularly Billy Idaho - a well-read street philosopher who helps those he can survive the streets. Walker, like Idaho, is kind and has a compassion for his fellow humans: he is an anti-hero that we empathise with - an outsider who will get under your skin. Through the keenly observant Walker, we experience the city, its people and its neighbourhoods. We see desperation, violence and the strength of community. For Walker, burying his trauma is never going to be a solution. Violence simmers at his edges and guilt plays on his conscience, and as the decade progresses his past haunts him. Robertson’s writing is wonderful: evocative, enchanting, raw and affecting. From narrative verse -descriptions of the cityscape and dialogue between characters - to hard, almost unbearable, staccato-like images of war, to lyrical memories of Walker’s childhood and life in Nova Scotia, the poetry has clarity and visibility yet never removes the reader from the story. The Long Take is a novel about us now just as much as it is a filmic exposé of post-war America, exploring issues of poverty, racism, fascism and freedom. Powerful, inventive and uncompromising. |
 | The Rift by Rachael Craw {Reviewed by STELLA} If you're going to read one new young adults' novel this year, make it this one! You will be saying “aha” and “yes... hmm…. sure...” - i.e. not really listening or taking notice of the world around you at all as you fall into the setting of Black Water Island, the Rift, and the lives of Cal and Meg. Rachael Craw, the author of the award-winning 'Spark' series, brings us a new intriguing and captivating novel, The Rift. Like her earlier series, The Rift has elements of science and fantasy, richly spiced with action, mystery and romance. Add to this a mythological element and you have unputdownable teen read. Black Water Island, remote and isolated, is a mysterious place - affected by ley lines and electromagnetic interference. Digital and mechanical devices are things for the mainland. It is the homeland of an ancient deer herd that holds a precious and wanted commodity - a medicinal property, Actaeon's Bane, marketed as a cure for all ills. The company who owns the rights and access to the deer’s special property is Nutris Pharmaceuticals - a corporation who don’t always 'play nice'. The Old Herd is protected by the Rangers, a group of talented trackers - one could say eco-warriors - who preserve the herd and keep it safe. Rangers are special - their talents handed down through hereditary lines. They have close relationships with birds, and each ranger usually has their own bird scout. Cal, an apprentice Ranger, is different - a fisherman’s son, he received his position via experience rather than inheritance. Meg, the daughter of the Head Ranger Sargent, left the island when she was nine after a horrific accident. Living on the mainland with her mother Dora, they decide it is time to return so that Meg can claim her inheritance. Planning to stay for only a few days, things go awry when the unexpected happens. It’s the time for the cull and the full moon is due - fortune hunters are beginning to descend on the island, and crossing the water with Meg and Dora is the sinister Jack Spear - an employee of Nutris. The island and the herd have been unsettled for days, and Cal senses that something is amiss. The Rift feels uneasy. And this is where the story really starts to hum. The whole concept of the Rift and the Rift Hounds is fascinating, darkly strange and edgy. Meg and Cal are now almost eighteen and hold a key to something they cannot begin to understand - and will remain mysterious to the reader also (I sense a sequel is on the horizon!) - but, drawn together and attracted to each other, they create a strong and important bond - a bond that helps them to face their fears and pushes them to act courageously when danger and death threaten. There are many layers to this novel: a romance - it will satisfy your desire to champion a love match for these two young people; a fantasy - it will intrigue you with the endlessly complex world of Black Water Island and its mysterious Rift; an action-packed adventure - there’s enough hand-to-hand combat, kick-ass athletics and human prowess for anyone; it is a fantasy which draws on myth and ancient tales will pique your curiosity; and a social commentary on ecological systems, medicine and power - it will kick off ideas and discussion that will give it depth and meaning. Add to that Craw’s adept language, brilliant story arc and great descriptive talent and you’ll be hooked. I’m looking forward to interviewing Rachael on Tuesday at the launch of The Rift. She is a YA superstar and a local author! |
 | House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson {Reviewed by THOMAS} Eight residents and then their 'house mother' each deliver a 21-page interior monologue (with snippets of direct speech) revealing their thoughts during the same evening of activities at their rest home. Johnson has cleverly structured the novel so that the narratives can be compared page-to-page and a sequence of events can be constructed by cross-reference. Each character is introduced with a table rating the degree of incapacity of their various faculties, which is then reflected in the monologues (these become less coherent as the book progresses through decreasingly compos mentis residents). By providing internal access to each person present, Johnson provides a multidimensional concurrent narrative, a sort of compound claustrophobia, in which he explores the relationship between memory and identity, the gradual reduction of mental life to the desperate subjective affirmation of banality that underlies all utterances (he is democratic enough, though, to grant all meaning equivalent status), the persistence or otherwise of personhood through increasing incapacity, and the shaky concept of ‘the normal’ (at one point the house mother says, “I disgust them in order that they may not be disgusted with themselves”). House Mother Normal is a remarkably approachable experiment, in turns excoriating, compassionate and uncomfortably funny. |
 | In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne Girls, football and music are the distractions and saving graces in three young men’s lives in the gritty, violent and tension-filled shadows of the towers of Stones Estate in North London. Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf just want to get together to play football and find a way out. Selvon trains -runs, boxes, presses the bench in a bid to make a university on the sports team. Arden has a secret dream to make his beats a musical career, and Yusuf wants to be invisible to the eyes of his Muslim community. In Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, long-listed for the Man Booker, short-listed for the Goldsmith’s Prize, three voices meld, declaring their friendship against the growing tensions of race riots, poverty, extremism and raw edges. “Our friendships we called our bloods and our homes our Ends….Our combs cut lines in our hair and we scarred our eyebrows with blades….Close without touch…. In our caustic speech we threw out platitudes, in our guts our feisty wit. It was like we lived upon jagged teeth in the dark, in this bone-cold London city.” The language, with its slang and dialect which draws on grime (music) and sassy vibes, hums along, spits and hollers with the voices of the three young men, giving the text authenticity as well as an edgy structure, building to a crescendo over the two days of the book. Alongside the voices of these three compelling young men are two from the generation of their parents: Nelson, father to Selvon, from Montserrat, and Caroline, single alcoholic mother of Ardan, from Belfast. Each has their own story of oppression and resistance - of violence and pain - creating layers of history that parallel contemporary issues as well as digging deep into constructs of prejudice that have never resolved. In this post-9/11 world where the economy bites and prejudice is rife, the melting pot of London is under pressure. When white supremacists fuel race hatred, and the radicalisation of the local Mosque forces out moderate voices, tensions mount and the three friends find themselves in the middle of a dangerous world - a world that was a safe haven, that was their home. This is a provocative novel that doesn’t shy away from the attitudes of young men, their desperate desires and self-absorption, and shows their world as it is - tough and vicious. Yet there is hope in this seemingly dangerous situation: each of the friends care, and care deeply, about each other and about their families. They are determined to survive and be true to themselves, to remain untouched by rhetoric even in the face of extreme pressure and confusion. Gunaratne explores these complex themes with agility and sensitivity. The strength of the novel lies not so much in its telling but in the way in which this author writes - his words riff off the page, with the rhythm of the dialogue and the lively, and at times beautiful, descriptions of a place that represents oppression, fear and desperation, to let us open a window into a world which may be foreign to us - to enable us to understand the choices people make and the repercussions that follow them. |
 | The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I dedicated my time to writing about the cases I had worked on, but I wrote them differently. My new method was to recount a series of events without disregarding insanity or doubt. This form of writing wasn’t about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.” An ‘ex-detective’ takes a commission from a man she meets at a party to follow and bring back the man’s second wife, who danced with a man she met at a party and fled with him deep into the Taiga, leaving a trail of telegrams and other “forms of writing no longer in use” which have given the man the impression that she wants to be found. The ex-detective looks out through a window and sets off. What she embarks on is a literary undertaking rather than an actual one, but one with exactly similar detective work. The journey into the Taiga is a journey into the forest of possible ways a story could be told. “Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.” It is not difficult to find the traces of the woman who left, but the detective’s quest is not so much a search for her as a search for the mechanisms of passion that motivated her to leave and to enter the Taiga: the quest is one of becoming aware of the experiences of the woman, or, rather, of becoming aware of the words that might be used to express or access the experiences of the woman. The detective is seeking not so much to capture what happened or to capture the story that might be written about what happened, as to capture the mechanism by which what happened might give rise to the story about that happened. What is the relationship between the mechanisms of passion that caused a woman to leave her husband and follow another into the Taiga, and the mechanisms of passion that caused another woman to follow and to write about it? The detective seeks to understand “the desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.” She asks, “What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest? What brings together the writing of a forest with the lived experience of a forest?” The Taiga is emotional rather than physical terrain. The detective travels with a translator, a man who is able to provide her with parallel representations of the stories told by the people who live in the Taiga, a man who both both provides access to experience and keeps this experience at a remove and uncertain. The narrative is full of parallels, removes, repetitions, circularities, and circularities-within-circularities. Is the person the detective is tracking in fact herself? Does she seek to know why she herself left and ran off into 'the Taiga', or desired to leave and run off into 'the Taiga'? Is the constant emphasis on fleeing and on one who flees evidence of an unstated situation in which it is impossible or not yet possible to flee? To see through a window is to project oneself through that window into what the window frames: the distance, the Taiga, the place where one is absent from the situation in which one currently exists. In fairy tales one enters a forest both to escape and to confront the cannibalistic desires to which one is exposed in one’s ‘ordinary’ life and situation. In the Taiga the detective discerns terror, especially the terror experienced by the so-called lost woman, but the terror is primarily a terror of consequence, any consequence, a terror of a development towards which we are propelled through the impulse to escape. Where does the trail lead? “To seek something out is to expose it,” but “it is difficult to describe what can’t be imagined.” The quest is a literary rather than a physical endeavour, a struggle for what we might call narrative to overcome what we might call description. The story is frequently overwhelmed and lost by noticing, by the ‘evidence’ of the senses. Noticing is static. “Seeing is just confirmation of a fact.” It is the natural tendency of details to disperse the impulse and obscure meaning, although impulse and meaning have no way in which to come to our attention without details. “When nothing else seemed to make sense, sense was hidden in irrefutable words.” Will the detective ‘find’ the woman (even if that woman is herself)? Will she ask, “Is this the end of falling out of love?” Will she bring the woman back (whatever that means)? “Failures weigh people down,” the detective states, but she also provides a quote from Einstein that likens gravity to fiction: “Said force is an illusion, an effect of the geometry of space-time. The Earth deforms space-time in such a way that space itself pushes us toward the ground.” |
