Annecdotal - annethology

Scaling gritstone and concrete: Black Car Burning & The Wall

28/5/2019

Two novels set in Britain that feature climbing. In the first, it’s the hobby verging on obsession of three of the four main characters, in a homage to Sheffield and the nearby Peak District National Park; in the second, a cli-fi thriller, surmounting the wall is what the narrator and his peers are conscripted to prevent. Thanks to publishers Chatto and Windus and to Faber for my review copies.

Quirky: From the Wreck, Asylum & The Pine Islands

25/4/2019

Three short reviews of quirky novels published in the UK this month that have taken me around the world without having to leave my armchair. The first, set in Australia, marries historical fact with a lonely alien visitor. The second, set in South Africa, posits an alternative near future where the sick are quarantined. The third, a German translation set in Japan, pairs a suicidal student with an expert on beards for a journey in the footsteps of a revered haiku poet.

Evolution and Devolution: The Book of Joan & Children of the Cave

8/2/2019

Two novels with a fantasy element: the first set in the near future; the second a century in the past. Both feature humans with transmuted bodies: the first through an accelerated process of devolution; the second as a congenital condition, although the explorers who come upon them believe they represent an intermediate stage in human evolution.

Bridging: Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants & Connect

13/11/2018

Excuse me for bridging such different novels, although both are about the challenge of connection, one looking to the future and the other to the past. In the first, translated from the French, a famous artist juggles the contradictions of Christian and Muslim cultures when he’s commissioned to design a bridge between two shores of a capital city. In the second, a teenage boy more comfortable in the virtual world than the human, ends up fighting for his life when he forges stronger connections between the hemispheres of his brain.

Women on the edge of the ocean: All Rivers Run Free & Rainsongs

17/4/2018

Martha might be twice the age of Ia in All Rivers Run Free, and could well have more than twice her education and wealth, but she shares her grief at lost loved-ones, and expectations, in a simple dwelling where the land meets the sea. Both are in parts of the British Isles that have suffered financial and cultural erosion as a result of English domination, although the Ireland where Martha’s deceased husband had a cottage is experiencing an economic revival, while Ia’s Cornwall is even more desolate for the rural poor than it is today. The authors of both these novels are female poets; read on to see whether either takes your fancy.

In the not-too-distant future: The Unit & Anna

21/3/2018

Setting a novel in the near future requires two extra decisions. To what extent will this imagined world differ from what’s familiar today? What defines that difference? Although the social, environmental and technological developments or regressions in this fictional landscape are inevitably interlinked, one factor tends to dominate (and perhaps determines the readership to which it most appeals). At least that’s what I’ve been thinking since reading The Unit and Anna back-to-back (as well as recent dabbling in one of the subgenres myself). In the first, a democratic society has agreed (over time) that the lives of economically and socially unproductive citizens can be sacrificed for the common good. In the second, feral children roam a post-apocalyptic world in which adults have been wiped out by a virus and most of the infrastructure by a fire. Tempted? Read on!

Either side of the Velvet Revolution: Soviet Milk & Spaceman of Bohemia

1/2/2018

1989 brought a transition from communism to democracy across Eastern Europe, with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, a 600 kilometre joining of hands across Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. These two novels feature a part of that story, one ending, and the other beginning, in 1989 and both, as a bonus, featuring narrators brought up by grandparents partly as a result of political events. Set in Latvia before regime change, Soviet Milk is about the difficulty of living a moral life under totalitarianism. Set in the Czech Republic in the very near future, Spaceman of Bohemia is about how a father’s collaboration impacts on the career and choices of his son.

Three single-author short story collections

20/12/2017

With my own short story collection scheduled for November next year, I thought I should give more blog space to the short story. But although I managed to pick the winner of the BBC short story award, the first two of these collections knocked my confidence in my ability to review the short form. Listed in the order I read them, the third has me fizzing with excitement about what the short story can achieve. See what you think!

A pilgrim’s progress through the dark side of digital: Broadcast by Liam Brown

18/9/2017

Take our deepest fears about our dependence on digital and stretch them. Likewise our suspicions of the social media and tech companies for which we work as willing slaves. Add a taste of accessible philosophy (what’s reality anyway?) and neuropsychology (how can we trust our memories when they are subject to distortion?). Now send a naive and narcissistic vacuous life-style vlogger on a pilgrim’s progress through the landscape and you’ve got a sense of Liam Brown’s highly entertaining third novel.

Two novel encounters with the wild: Under a Pole Star & Green Lion

21/8/2017

A historical novel about Arctic exploration or a novel set in a near-future South Africa? A romance or an account of a relationship falling apart? A motherless girl or a fatherless boy? Wild animals or ice? Both of these novels explore the conflict and compassion that connects us to the natural world, but it was a bonus for me to read that the protagonist of Green Lion told his friend that his father was killed in a hunting accident in the Arctic, the setting of Under a Pole Star. Read on to see if I was right to pair these reviews.

Two novel views of disillusionment within South African healthcare

27/7/2017

Two authors with their own lived experience of the challenges of working in South African health care. Two fictional healthcare professionals forced to confront their own privilege within the system and the limitations of what they can achieve. One black, one white; one psychologist, one medical doctor; one in contemporary post-apartheid, one in an imagined dystopia in which it never ends. Two political novels; two engaging reads. Let me know which of them takes your fancy.

Migration past and present

8/6/2017

It’s my pleasure to introduce two recently published short novels about westward migration. The historical perspective of the first, driven by the aftermath of the Second World War, and the allegorical style of the second, with a contemporary and/or future orientation, shine a hopeful light on a phenomenon currently depressingly exploited by right-wing politicians. These novels remind us that no society is ever static and, wherever we are positioned on the immigration issue, humans and the communities we build are highly adaptive.

Psychologists Write: Nick Wood

4/4/2017

I recently had an article on The representation of clinical psychologists in contemporary literary fiction published in Clinical Psychology Forum. Needless to say, was delighted when Nick Wood got in touch to tell me about his own fictional psychologist. Here’s what he has to say about combining clinical psychology and fiction.

The Possessions by Sara Flannery Murphy

14/3/2017

Thirty-year-old Edie works for the Elysian Society, serving as a conduit between the bereaved and their late loved ones. It’s not a job for those with big egos; after tuning in to the deceased via eliciting a memory and perusing some of their belongings, she takes a tablet which kills her consciousness while the client communes with the departed in privacy. Overseen by the imposing Mrs Renard who, despite her neat office, functions like the madam in a brothel, her colleagues provide a similar service in other rooms in the building, but none of them have stuck at it as long as Edie’s five years.

Two novels about approaching the end

24/2/2017

I’ve enjoyed these two novels about how we manage the end of life, the first through old age and the second through assisted dying. Mortality gets us all sooner or later; what better way to face it than with a novelist holding our hands?

Satire for our times?

9/2/2017

Is satire redundant when the World’s Most Powerful Narcissist tweets his outrage at the slightest scratch on his orange-tinged carapace, while She Who Should Be Humbled files for divorce from Europe in the full knowledge that this will leave her dependants economically and morally depleted, and literally humbles the Bejewelled Great-Grandmother by committing her to take her New Suitor for a spin in her horse-drawn carriage? Publication proceeding at a slower pace than populist politics, these two novels – the first set in a dystopian near-future and the second in 2013 – were conceived prior to the dystopia that was 2016 but can still evoke a shudder in these early days of 2017.

Speculating into the Future

3/12/2016

I’ve enjoyed these two novels from established female British writers exploring a possible future. The first speculates on the consequences of climate change and a low birthrate, whereas the second subverts gender politics imagining a world in which women have no reason to be afraid of men.

Read on, and see which takes your fancy!

The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

7/7/2016

Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.

Sand: Gold Fame Citrus & My Own Beach Memories

22/3/2016

There’s no rain in California. The swimming pools that graced the homes of the beautiful people are nothing but rubbish tips, no-one can wash and drinking water is rationed. Just beyond Los Angeles, civilisation lies buried under mountains of moving sand. Most people have been evacuated to the camps out East; those who remain take their chances in this lawless environment. It’s not only the sun that is harsh.

Becoming a person: The Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball & The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst

22/2/2016

Let me share with you my reflections on two highly original novels about dissemblance and truth in the process of becoming a person. Although the publishers don’t do so, I’m classing both as slipstream fiction, a place between fantasy, sci-fi and literary fiction I’ve also explored in my own short stories. Read on, and let me know what you think.