cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
[personal profile] cyphomandra
I read eleven books on my recent holiday and four volumes of manga, but due to the harsh strictures of baggage restrictions on domestic flights I was forced to leave some of these behind, which makes logging them a bit more difficult. Actually, the main problem with my luggage allowance was manga – I took 20kg up with me, of which probably two-thirds was reading material, and most of that manga to lend to people. Unfortunately I’d forgotten just how much I’d already posted up/left behind that was now waiting for me to take back, and then of course I bought more… Anyway. Banana Fish (v1-14) is making its way around the first city I visited, while there’s a box of Oldboy, Ikigami, various Yoshinaga titles and A Drifting Life, plus three books, in the second city, thus enabling me to board with 24kg of suitcase and 6kg of carry-on (limits of 25 and 7kg, respectively). I left A Drifting Life behind on a previous trip because I was very close to the weight limit, but at least it’s now a few hundred kilometres closer.

Anyway. Brief recaps of titles I no longer have with me:

David Peace, Tokyo Year Zero. A review on Amazon noted approvingly that this was his “most accessible work”, which is not the sort of thing designed to make me rush out and read all his others, given that I was looking for reviews in an attempt to find out what was going on with the ending. Anyway. The atmosphere is the strength of this book – immediately post-WWII, Inspector Minami investigates the deaths of young women, while his world is in ruins around him – and it feels grimy and real, as well as having that kind of brooding noir sensibility. It also has a lot of sound effects recognisable from manga (onomatopoeia like doki doki for a heart beat, although I think most of this book was scratching and other sounds of misery).

It is apparently based on a real case and, possibly because of this, the fictional ending did not work at all for me, largely because it felt as if the author suddenly stopped bothering to keep track of what had actually happened. Possibly this is just me. I was also distracted by the fact that the main character’s name can mean “south”, and in the first chapter characters with names meaning “north” and “west” also show up – at least some of these names are assumed, but I was unsure whether that was all this was meant to code for or whether having a missing “east” was more significant. It made me want to read more about the time period, but not necessarily from this author.


David Baldacci, Simple Genius. US thriller, obviously part of a series, male/female team up with that elite military/police feel, investigating a mysterious death in an American modern version of Bletchley Park. A child genius, an understanding psychiatrist, at least two drug-smuggling under cover of legal activity subplots and sorting out the psyche of the female half of the team take up most of the available time, plus not terribly convincing sexual tension between the leads. I liked that there is, in here, a psychiatric institution into which the main character (female) is committed voluntarily and can (and does) leave at any time, which is rare, and I thought the bad military using torture techniques along the lines of those used in Guantanamo etc on the main character (male) successfully felt like something with potential for a deeper theme that didn’t quite come off. Did not leave me with the desire to read any of the others, but not actively offensive.


Jaclyn Dolamore, Magic under glass. I was familiar with this book from the on-line discussion of the cover – the main character is brown-skinned and from Tassim, an “exotic” country to the inhabitants of Lorinar where she currently lives (Lorinar reads like an AU vaguely Victorian England), but the original US cover showed a white woman in a corset and smock. It’s subsequently been changed, but while I’m glad of this, and the increasing awareness of issues of representation (accurate and otherwise) in fiction, unfortunately I didn’t really like the book.

Nimira, the lead, is of noble birth, but when her family lost status she headed to Lorinar to make her fortunes as a “trouser girl”, singing and dancing in the music halls in their native costumes for the titillation of the locals. When Hollin, a wealthy magician shows up and wants to hire her to sing accompaniment to his piano-playing automaton (all local girls having fled due to the belief that the machine is haunted), she jumps at the chance to leave her miserable digs and employment, and within seconds is happily being pampered by servants and discovering the truth of the automaton – an enchanted fairy prince! – with whom she falls in love, while discovering a rather vague plot involving Hollin's not-dead-after-all wife, and various political conflicts over fairies.

There are some nice moments in this – I like Erris, the enchanted prince – but the plotting is atrocious. The storyline is propelled forward by the interjection of various characters Nim needs to meet to get to the next plot point, with no overall flow, and none of it particularly makes sense when looked at from a distance. The book jacket says it's for fans of Libba Bray (who I've avoided) and Charlotte Bronte (whom I love as an author), but the Jane Eyre nods in this just left me wanting a heroine with a tenth of Jane’s capability for self-analysis, or her knowledge of her own (and others) limitations.


Jo Walton, Half a Crown. The conclusion to the Small Change trilogy, this time in the sixties - however, the first person narrator this time, who alternates with Carmichael's third, is Elvira Royston, fresh from a Swiss finishing school and preparing for presentation to the queen, and although there's some discussion about the relevance of all this the timeline does not appear to have moved on as much as might be expected (this is probably deliberate, but I was interested in how a persisting Nazi presence in Europe might affect popular culture). Meanwhile, Carmichael is now the Watch commander, but his position is precarious – he runs the Inner Watch, an organisation that smuggles out Jews to Ireland, and he is still living with his male partner, Jack.

I like the second one best in this series because the crime plot works best, where the reader knowing both sides only increases tension and conflict. The country house detective plot of the first didn't work well for me as a mystery, and this one has various overlapping conspiracies and counterplots that make it hard to really engage with the characters. There are bits that work really well – Elvira's brief journey through the smuggling route really stood out, and its being paired with Carmichael's similar attempts to lose himself in London- but the sudden arrival of a character from book 2 very close to the denoument felt less like tying up loose ends and more like shoe horning in plot conveniences. And the final resolution -it's telegraphed, and I think it's fair, but in a way it feels like the start of a less predictable and more interesting story.
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