The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
I saw mention of this book in, I think, The New Yorker, and immediately put a library hold on it. I suspected it would be my kind of story, and it was … apart from a re-read of all nine novels of The Expanse, this has been, so far, my most exciting and fascinating read of the year.
Some describe it as steampunk science fiction, but I disagree. Oh, sure … a great machine of an alternate world at the dawn of the 20th century, the locomotive of the Trans-Siberian Express is necessarily steam-powered, but otherwise the story and its setting is far more reminiscent of Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy, and no one would ever call that steampunk.
The Train Girl got her hooks in me right off and pulled me in, as did Marya, and later Elena, the Not Quite Girl of the Wastelands … and this, in turn, reminded me of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Every page, train-like, pulled me on to the next. The suspense is of course built in, given the scenario … a 15-day crossing of Siberia, a terra incognita in which mysterious changes are constantly occurring, sealed at its borders with Russia on the west and China on the east (readers will likely think of the Wall separating Westeros from the North, and Winter). Life and society outside the Wastelands is very much the way it was in our world in Victorian times (although one gets the impression the seats of civilization are Beijing and Moscow, with London a close third).
Mysterious, suspenseful, and enthralling. I loved it.
Somebody’s Fool (North Bath #3)
Richard Russo
At our June book club meeting, another member and I had a side conversation. She was about to read Somebody’s Fool, thought I might be interested, and showed me her copy. We may have spoken more loudly than we intended. Everyone else got quiet, and five minutes later our club had selected it as our August read. Only after we’d voted did someone look it up and discover it was the third novel in a series. “I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” I assured everyone.
And it isn’t. A problem, that it, even though it quickly becomes obvious the dead man present in every character’s thoughts, Sully, remembered in one way or another on virtually every page, was the subject of the two previous novels, Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool. No doubt some of us will read those as well.
The decomposing body of an unidentified man is discovered hanging from the second-story balcony of a long-shuttered hotel’s ballroom on the outskirts of North Bath, an obvious suicide. Doug Raymer, the town’s recently-retired police chief (the town itself recently-retired, having just incorporated with larger and more prosperous Schuyler Springs), is pulled in on the initial investigation. Peter Sullivan, Sully’s son, has returned to North Bath with several trunks of mental baggage and finds himself looking after the network of Sully’s former friends, wives, lovers, and more or less adopted children. The former police chief is in love with Charice, the new police chief of Schuyler Springs, who used to work for him. Oh hell … there are five or six other characters, men and women, who figure in one another’s lives, sometimes directly and sometimes at a distance.
Is it important that we see, alongside Raymer and Charice, the decomposing body hanging in the old hotel, or is it okay instead to take a chapter-long detour into Raymer’s inner torment and self-doubt, only getting a peripheral glance at the body in a later chapter, even then not directly but in snippets of conversation between Raymer and Charice? Is it important we get to the resolution of other suspenseful plot elements, like the ominous appearance of one of Peter’s estranged sons or the hostility of Schuyler Springs’ police officers toward Charice, their new Black female boss? Or should we instead spend even more time inside Raymer’s head? And Peter’s? And Rub’s? And Janey’s? And Ruth’s? And Birdie’s?
Plot, in this and I suspect the previous two novels of the series, serves as a backdrop to Richard Russo’s character’s doubt, instrospection, rehashing of failures, and attempts to change. Happily, Russo eventually does get around to tying up loose plot ends, and even finishes on a high note with the stirrings of positive change his characters’ lives.
Yeah. I liked it. A lot. Not certain I want to read the first two novels, but I will pay Amazon $3.95 to watch Paul Newman play Sully in Nobody’s Fool, the 1994 movie based on the first novel.
Joe Country (Slough House #6)
Mick Herron
Mick Herron’s Slough House novels are consistently excellent and engaging. I’ve now read the first six in order, and watched the three streaming TV seasons released to date on Apple TV (which, unlike the also-excellent Bosch series on Amazon, follow the parent novels in the order they were written).
As always, the novel starts with an elevated third-person overview of Slough House itself (or maybe that should be third-structure). These are always beautifully crafted, and I sometimes read them out loud to my patient wife. However will Mick Herron start another novel in the series if Lady Di Taverner ever succeeds in dismantling Slough House, not just its denizens but the physical building itself?
After six novels, I’ve become slightly irritated by Herron’s teasing misdirection, his habit of keeping you guessing who exactly has been killed. A Slow Horse? One of the bad guys? And which one? He does it far too often. Even so, when Herron does kill off a character, it always comes as a shock. When a character you were sure had died — because Herron all but told you he had — turns out to be still alive, well, that’s a shock too. But a cheap and manipulative one.
There you have it. My one criticism of Mick Herron’s writing. Sans spoilers (don’t think I wasn’t tempted).
If you’ve become invested in individual Slow Horses or those who orbit around them, be prepared for some rough moments in Joe Country. And a cliff-hanger ending, all but ensuring you’ll snatch up a copy of the seventh novel, Slough House. Which I for one most definitely will.
Angels Flight (Harry Bosch #6)
Michael Connelly
I started reading Bosch books out of order, but am now reading the unread ones in order, mainly to keep details and developments in Bosch’s personal life straight. I should add that I’ve also watched Amazon’s streaming Bosch series twice through, plus the two (to date) seasons of Bosch Legacy.
I’ve mentioned in previous Bosch reviews how details from the books change significantly in televised seasons based on them … sometimes not just details but main plot points. Often, a televised season will include main and secondary plotlines from more than one novel. Which is fine … it’s like getting multiple doses of Bosch for the price of one, and I must say the differences enhance one’s pleasure in both the novels and the televised seasons. I guess I’m saying one doesn’t have to worry that reading the book after seeing the TV show, or the other way around, will be boring because you already know what happens. No, you don’t, and you’re going to enjoy both experiences.
My wife is a great fan of ABC’s Will Trent series, based on a series of novels by Karin Slaughter, so I sought out the first Will Trent novel and gave it to her as a gift. She hated it. Not only was the writing and character development poor compared to the TV version, the differences between the novels’ Will Trent and the actor hired to play him on TV were so stark she could not reconcile them. She’s giving up on the books but staying with the TV show.
That’s not the case with Bosch. No matter the differences, the televised novels reflect the same world as that of the books. No matter the differences, Titus Welliver is perfectly cast. He has become the Harry Bosch I see in my mind when I read the books.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
I should disclose that I did not read the author’s afterword. I assume that in it, she thanks several veteran ISS astronauts and cosmonauts, men and women of varying nationalities, for sharing impressions and memories of station duty: the feelings, the smells, the wonders, the petty day-to-day realities, the bonding with other crewmembers, the thoughts of home, etc. Because the story she tells sure feels truthful and authentic. Is it?
Other readers complain Orbital’s a story without a plot. There are suspenseful sub-plots, though. If this were a proper science fiction novel, those would grow into stories of their own. There’s the Pacific super-typhoon to provide an ongoing thread of concern. There’s the launch of a separate mission, a crew of NASA astronauts headed for the Moon (though we never learn how that goes). One cosmonaut is trying to hide a medical issue. A crack on the exterior of the Russian segment is slowly growing. Some readers, like me, may find themselves skimming pages of third-person narrative about the orbital track of the ISS and life aboard it, hoping to get to the next development in one of the aforementioned suspenseful sub-plots … but except for the enormous devastation the super-typhoon visits upon the Philippines, nothing happens with the other sub-plots. We never even learn, as I mentioned, whether the other NASA crew reaches the Moon.
So … not a space opera. Rather, a fictionalized narrative of 24 hours living and working aboard the ISS. Which feels authentic. Again, though … is it?
The Secret (Jack Reacher #28)
Lee & Andrew Child
I thought I’d given up on Jack Reacher novels. As most who will read this know, Lee Child retired four installments back, passing the torch to his younger brother Andrew. Andrew is not Lee, and some of the oomph went out of the stories, which at their worst (Better Off Dead, No Plan B) could have passed for something generated by ChatGPT. But I couldn’t resist picking up the 28th and most recent Reacher novel, The Secret, at the local library, and whaddya know, the oomph is creeping back. Maybe Lee’s doing more than looking over Andrew’s shoulder, or maybe Andrew’s just getting better … either way, I’m glad Jack’s back.
Of course I’m also watching the streaming TV adaptation of Reacher on Amazon Prime, where Reacher’s past life as an Army MP gets considerable play. I wonder if this novel was written with TV in mind, because it’s entirely a flashback to Jack’s active duty days. Missing from this story, however, are his 110th Special Investigation Unit sidekicks, so maybe not … in The Secret, Reacher, like his older self, is a loner.
A satisfying story that scratches the itch for more Reacher.
Songs of Distant Earth
Arthur C. Clarke
A friend picked this up at a library excess inventory sale and gave it to me. Clarke was one of the big-idea hard science fiction authors I loved in my teens, and it was pleasant to read him again, although this particular novel is a bit meh.
Meh in that the far-future humans of this tale, one group inhabiting Thalassa, a planet several light years from Earth, and a second group (the last humans to flee the home planet before its demise) who swing by to borrow some ice, are curiously bland … with few exceptions evolved beyond religion, racism, sexism, criminality, pettiness, irrational thinking and impulses, jealously and covetness, even much in the way of individual personality. As with so many Clarke novels, it’s less about daily conflict and squalor than Big Ideas.
One of which is a prime directive (though it isn’t called that here) not to interfere or even touch a planet with intelligent or potentially-intelligent life. Which both groups blithely ignore or rationalize away when intelligent life is discovered on Thalassa. So much for that directive. Maybe we haven’t evolved much after all!
Still fun, though, and revisiting Clarke brings back some of the wonder I experienced reading science fiction in my youth.