Richard (K) Morgan

The Arrival – Shaun Tan

Moving in comic-book circles, you often hear readers complaining bitterly about how the sequential art form just doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Fair comment, I’ve always thought, but at the same time I can’t help noticing that very often those whose voices are raised the loudest are also those whose preferred reading material seems to consist almost entirely of mindless, repetitive superhero shlock. So you have to wonder what on Earth they’re complaining about, what respect exactly they think this warmed over, recycled pulp they like is entitled to. You also have to wonder how many of them know of, or more importantly, will buy work by Shaun Tan. Because they really should — they’d then be able to make their case without sounding like idiots. Tan’s The Arrival demonstrates exactly why you should take sequential art seriously; not because it explores a (yawn) dark side to >insert threadbare superhero figure here<, not because it, ahem, revitalises some staggeringly weary comic-book franchise or other. No. The Arrival makes the case simply because it is a work of genius that does things with story-telling no other medium could. It’s a one hundred and twenty page novel about refugees without a single word in it. It doesn’t need words, it’s better for their absence; it communicates at a direct level the prose novel can’t compete with. It’s an object lesson in the power of sequential art, the perfect worked example of what the form can do. Oh, and it’s also apparently for children. Well, there you could have fooled me. Tan’s themes and concerns are certainly simple enough for children to grasp, but his execution should strike a chord with anyone, of any age, whose basic humanity is still functional. I finished The Arrival and went right out and bought everything else by Shaun Tan I could find. So should you.

Che; A Revolutionary Life – Jon Lee Anderson

Massive, exhaustively detailed tome documenting the life of the twentieth century’s most iconic hero, from Argentinian cradle to Bolivian grave. Anderson presents an admirably balanced view of the man behind the mythology, as well as chapter and verse on the political events of the period, without which it would, at times, be hard to get a handle on what motivated the major players in this drama. It’s only a little over forty years since Guevara died, but the changes in that time have been so overwhelming that at times the beliefs of the major players seem as alien as anything you could dream up for a fantasy or far-future SF novel. Seen with the benefit of hindsight, the whole myopic wish-fulfilment circus of “global” Marxist socialism stands out as a project doomed to fail, and its soldiers as hopelessly misguided where they are not actively corrupt. And in this company, Guevara is very far from a stellar exception — bluntly speaking, he comes across most of the time as a complete wanker, redeemed only occasionally by his immense physical and mental self-discipline and an enduring determination to get himself killed in a good cause. The marked contrast between this and the eminently pragmatic political manoeuvring of Fidel Castro, and the way in which the two men still managed to maintain a friendship, is just one of the book’s more fascinating narrative threads. What’s even more striking — at least for me — is the way in which Anderson’s book provides a delicate and understated portrait of misdirected male energy, and the way it dooms itself through its own implacable imperatives; Guevara is the perfect template for every deluded crusader from Richard Coeur de Lion to this week’s latest suicide bomber. The times this book talks about may be long gone, but the inherent human lessons of the story Anderson tells are as iconic as the face of the man who lived them. Highly recommended — but a bit depressing if you still harbour any illusions about old school leftism.

Breath – Tim Winton

Oddly enough, I first read Winton something like twenty years ago, and then forgot all about him. The book in question was Shallows, and while I could see at the time that it was well-written, it was neither weird enough nor compellingly plotted enough to really hook me. I could have forgiven the lack of weird stuff if the story had rattled along at thriller pace, and equally I would have been happy with something as languid and rambling as it was, if said rambling had contained elements of mind-blowing strangeness or alien context. But it didn’t, and it didn’t, so back I went to my addictions of the time, stuff like Haruki Murakami and Andrew Vachss and Sara Paretsky. Fast forward to summer 2009, and here I am, fresh back from an extended stay in Australia and all listed up with antipodean authors of note that I should try — a list that Winton dominates the way someone like Pynchon or Roth does contemporary American literature. Thus impelled, I picked up Winton’s latest and wasn’t disappointed. Breath is far tighter, and moves far faster than Shallows, but is still blessed with Winton’s trademark lyrical prose, and carries the same passionate love of the ocean that drove the former book. From a curiously understated and elliptically referenced emergency paramedic call-out in present day western Australia, we are pitched sharply back into the past of the protagonist and the notional bindings of events and images that have made him the man he is. This is, above all, a novel about deeply felt obsessions — adolescent friendships and jealousies, sexual rites of passage, the endless summers of youth and the raw salt challenge of the ocean itself. It’s not a perfect novel, some of the secondary characters feel a bit stock, and the final return to contemporary reality feels very rushed, as if Winton just got fed up with what he was writing and decided to wrap it up fast. That said, it’s probably an ideal point of entry for anyone who hasn’t tried the author before, and if you like this, there’s a lot more where that came from. I’m working my way through the Booker-nominated Dirt Music right now.

Finch – Jeff VanderMeer

Mushroom noir, anybody? Want to know what The Third Man might have looked like if Graham Greene had taken peyote before he wrote the screenplay, and then they’d hired the artists from Fantasia to design the sets? Inconceivable as that might seem, VanderMeer here delivers exactly such a blend of outlandish fantasy imagining and downbeat Len Deightonesque urban grit. The city of Ambergris is staggering from the multiple blows of extended civil war, failed imperial expansion and now, finally, an invasion from nightmarish subterranean depths. Amidst the chaos, John Finch is a detective, a policeman for the new fungal masters of the city, and a man in hiding from his own identity. VanderMeer takes the fantasy dreamscape he laid out in City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword, and gives it a brutal noir twist quite at odds with the previous, somewhat languid and literary treatment that defines the other two novels. As Finch tries to balance a basic human decency against the need to survive and to solve a murder that might hold the key to the future of the whole of Ambergris, the author pours on the horror and human cost like never before. Obscenely frightening mushroom men, spore pharmacology and fungal science, mysterious flooded labyrinths of books, decadent underground parties and old spies, torture and revenge, desperate loves and losses — this is undoubtedly Vandermeer’s finest work since Veniss Underground, and proof if you ever needed it that he remains the most unpredictable and fearless of contemporary fantasy’s pioneers. Get it while it’s hot (and damp, and emitting strange fungal odours you probably shouldn’t breathe in…)

Generation Loss – Elizabeth Hand

I saw Liz Hand speak about this book at Eastercon a couple of years back, but for some reason didn’t get round to buying it for, well, a couple of years. My mistake. I’m not familiar with Hand’s other work, but I understand it’s fairly clearly definable as fantasy. Generation Loss is neither — clearly definable, that is, or fantasy. Quite what it is, you could spend a long time arguing about. Nominally, it tells the story of Cass Neary, a washed-up, failed photographer and general refugee from the punk party of seventies New York, who gets a dubious assignment to go and interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a reclusive, retired but very famous photographer now hiding out in the wilds of Maine. When Cass gets there — not an easy journey in itself — it becomes rapidly apparent that some weird shit is going on in the vicinity of Aphrodite, and a kind of slow-building, creepy mayhem results. That’s the story, but what the book is about is far harder to pin down. Loss, maybe, as the title suggests. Failure. Artistic genius, or failed artistic genius, or both of those and the links between them. Coming to terms with your past and the mistakes you made there. Madness. Redemption. Growing up, growing old, and the links and differences between these two as well. All of those elements are in there, but they flicker about like the winter sun on waves, and often you’ll only realise they’re being handled after the fact. What is very clear is that Elizabeth Hand mined herself at painful depths to dredge up the material for this novel, and the resulting work is deeply moving and honest. It’s also beautifully written, and despite its lack of anything as obvious as actual fantasy, it is every bit as dark and haunting as the most terrifying supernatural stories you have ever read. Generation Loss deserves to be made into an equally terrifying film, and if there’s any justice, at some point it will be — meantime, don’t miss the chance to have Ms Hand walk as tight a series of chills up your spine as you’re ever likely to get from a piece of prose.

Homicide – David Simon

Anyone who’s seen The Wire probably knows all about this book already. Back in the early nineties, David Simon was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and somehow persuaded that city’s police department to give him unrestricted access to their homicide division. He hung out with the murder police for a year, answered calls and went to crime scenes with them, lived in their offices and drank with them after work. Along the way he created a unique document of what urban law enforcement in the modern United States is really like. The result is a massive 1000+ page book which reads so fast and compellingly you’d think it was a graphic novel. The curious thing is that despite the grit and realism of Simon’s unrelenting close-focus view, the book is as often laugh-out-loud funny as it is brutal or grim. This is not just a trawl through the worst excesses of America’s underbelly — it’s also a testament to the — for better or for worse — humanity of the men employed to police that underbelly, and of those they are policing as well. Most important of all, what Homicide does is lay bare the harsh truth about crime. There are no master criminals in this book, no genius serial killers, no tech-smart heist gangs or apocalyptic terrorists — just poverty and its social fallout, socially brutal environments and marginalised people and their stupid mistakes and the mess they make. In an environment saturated with crime fiction constructs that panders to our need for simple solutions, easily slain monsters and CSI-tech heroes to do it, Homicide is a welcome breath of fresh air and ground-level sanity.

Starfish – Peter Watts

My SF discovery of last year was Peter Watts’ stunning first contact novel Blindsight, which I waxed lyrical about in my previous Read and Rec’d post. I said at the time that, having read Blindsight as a free Creative Commons download, the very least I could do was go out and buy it in hardcopy. This — after a lazy-assed six month gap, which leads me to wonder about the advisability of the whole Creative Commons endeavour — I duly did, and for good measure I also bought Watts’ first two novels, Starfish and Maelstrom (his third, Behemoth, being through some incomprehensible vagary of the publishing trade, currently out of print). I tempered my expectations when I opened Starfish with the knowledge that this book pre-dated Blindsight by seven years, and was therefore probably no-where near as accomplished or compelling. >Insert jarring buzzer noise here< Wrong. Starfish is in fact so close to as accomplished as Blindsight that you’d never know which came first. And it is, if anything, an even more compelling narrative. Swapping — retrospectively — the outer margins of the solar system for the bottom of the Pacific ocean, Watts gives you characters even more fucked up than those you met in Blindsight. His conceit is simple — existing in environments of great pressure creates massive stress in the human organism; thus the only humans suited to work in such an environment are those already conditioned to live with similarly incredible levels of said stress. And it turns out that a ready supply can be had of such people if you simply harvest victims of childhood sexual and other physical abuse (which includes of course those who have gone on to become abusers in their own right). Of course, you’d need both a pressing reason and an unscrupulous operator to do something like that and on both counts, Watts delivers in spades. In the future Starfish depicts, the global energy crisis has made geothermal pumping stations on the ocean bed not just economically viable, but a vital requirement for the north American power grid. And the corporate body in charge of this undertaking has, of course, in common with most large corporate bodies, the mores and manners of some urbane psychopath. Which is not to say that this is a novel of black and white — in fact, Watts’ corporate villain here is among the most sympathetic characters in the novel. Starfish is a genuine tragedy of circumstance in which everyone is guilty by complicity, and for the protagonist, one Leni Clarke, deep sea engineer and emotional basket case, the only moral imperative is to survive. Fortunately, she is as well equipped for that solitary — and not especially rewarding — pursuit as any hard-boiled hero you’ve ever read, and her dogged determination is as chilling as it is exhilarating. Starfish, like Blindsight, is the paper proof that hard SF can deliver as powerful a human drama as any other sub-section of the genre, and Peter Watts is rapidly becoming my vote for finest SF writer of this new century.

The Unwritten – Mike Carey & Peter Gross

Sneak preview time again, and some more graphic novel genius — Mike Carey got in touch a few months back and asked if I’d like to blurb his new comic-book series for Vertigo. And since I’m of the opinion that Carey’s Lucifer sequence is the finest long running comic-book in existence, I jumped at the chance, and wasn’t disappointed. The Unwritten is a little different from Lucifer in its angle of attack — it’s more ground-level human and meta-textual, to name but two of the shifts in emphasis, and while Lucifer had a timeless mythic quality hanging over much of it, The Unwritten is modern and immediate in its concerns. But the stellar story-telling and unnerving dark fantasy dynamics remain; Tom Taylor is the hollowed out shell of a man, consumed by his status as the model for boy wizard Tommy Taylor (eh?!) in the million-selling novels written by his now-deceased father. Tom’s life is a tedious round of TommyCon appearances and endless hassle from hysterical fans whose sense of ownership makes no concessions to the difference between reality and fiction. Which is bad enough — but gets rapidly worse when Tom discovers that said difference may be entirely as illusory as his nuttiest fans believe. Carey has paired back up here with his long-time collaborator from Lucifer artist Peter Gross, and the combination is electric; from page one we get the old staples — Gross’s economical but subtly disturbing graphics set against laconic vintage Carey dialogue; but this time the dynamics stoke swiftly to a far wider deployment of visual narrative options, and are studded with some of the finest examples of wit, critique and parody I’ve ever seen in graphic novel form. This is comic-book writing for our times, par excellence. I can only hope Carey and Gross find an audience sophisticated enough to appreciate what’s being done here, and that this one runs and runs.