The Islanders

Christopher Priest

Gollancz 2011, hb, 339pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780575070042

Bricks

Leon Jenner

Coronet 2011, hb, 136pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781444706284

Wither

Lauren DeStefano

HarperVoyager 2011, pb, 358pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780007425471

Manhattan in Reverse

Peter F Hamilton

Macmillan 2011, hb, 260pp, £17.99, ISBN 9780230750302

Blackout

Connie Willis

Gollancz 2011, pb, 610pp, £14.99, 9780099272

The Islanders Christopher Priest is probably best known as the author of The Prestige, on which the 2006 film was based. But for SF readers he has been one of the most consistently reliable, thoughtful and thought-provoking British writers of the last 40 years, right from his earliest novels Indoctrinaire, Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World and A Dream of Wessex (1970-77). He specialises in uncertainty, both in what actually happens (or not) in his stories and in the unreliability of his narrators. His latest, The Islanders, is a return to a world he first created in the late-70s in a series of short stories collected as The Dream Archipelago and in his 1981 novel The Affirmation.

The Islanders is not a conventional novel or short story collection; reminiscent of Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars it’s a gazetteer of a fictional world, a series of entries on the geography, history and significant events and people of around fifty of its islands. Because of “distortion caused by the temporal gradients” the islands in the archipelago can never be reliably mapped, even from the air – which makes the production of a gazetteer problematic. Not only is their geography uncertain, but so is their history, even of recent events; stories told about an artist, a poet, a philosopher, the death of a mime artist in a theatre, are markedly different depending on where and when and why they are told. The Introductory to the book is by a novelist, Chaster Kammeston, who crops up in several contradictory passages within the book, including his own funeral; his Introductory is as factually unreliable as the rest of the book. One entry is a series of fan letters to Kammeston by someone who eventually writes a novel called The Affirmation; she is a character in Priest’s 1978 short story “The Negation”.

The whole book is a study of the uncertainty and mutability of narrative – a fortean theme if ever there was one! It takes some getting into, but once you start building up a picture of the interleaving, overlaying strands running through it, it’s a thoroughly rewarding read.

In the introduction to his collection An Infinite Summer (1979) Priest gave a warning: “[E]ach story in the Dream Archipelago cycle is entirely self-contained. There is very little in common between each one, except perhaps the words ‘Dream Archipelago’ themselves. Do not, please, make assumptions about one story from reading another; there are very few ‘links’.” Perhaps The Islanders provides those links at last; or perhaps the same warning should apply...

Bricks Another work of deliberate ambiguity is Leon Jenner’s spiritual allegory Bricks. This type of book can be deeply rewarding and sometimes hugely successful: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Alchemist, even The Celestine Prophecy. But that depends on it both being well written and having something to say. Bricks falls down on both. The author tells us openly “I am no great writer”, and the book slews between vast numbers of verbless sentences, lumps of purple prose (“The belligerent belittling of sex belies its beatitude”) and dreadfully awkward poetry. Jenner is a builder by trade, hence the title; he appears to be channelling a Druid who, if I read it correctly, tells how, after initially confusing the Romans with magic, they allowed themselves to be slaughtered, condemning Britain to follow a different path from its wonderfully spiritual past: “darkness deepened at a quickening rate over man”. All well and good, but any message of the book is lost between the author’s clumsy verbiage and his rants against the world: “I am filled with anger and rage, lusting to expel my fury,” he says, after telling us it’s okay to “hit and hit and hit” thugs. Spiritually edifying it’s not, but mercifully it’s short.

Wither Wither is an impressive YA near-future dystopian first novel by Lauren DeStefano. An unexpected side-effect of genetic tinkering means that the current young generation now die young: men by 25 and women by 20. Wealthy young men (for reasons not really explained) kidnap teenage girls and set up harems so that they can father several children before they die. Rhine is 16 when she and two others are kidnapped to become sister-wives to Linden, whose current wife is about to die. Slowly they adapt to life in what is effectively a luxurious prison presided over by Linden’s creepy scientist father, though Rhine is forever looking for ways to escape and find the adored twin brother she was ripped from.

There are numerous holes in the plot, such as why certain families are so wealthy, why Linden doesn’t sleep with all his wives, why Rhine and others are taken along as trophy wives to classy champagne evenings and so on. The whole society (and how we got there from here) creaks a bit if you look at it too closely. But oddly, this doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of what is, at heart, a very unusual and beautifully written love story. It’s the first in a trilogy – and it has the most gorgeous cover art I’ve seen in years.

Manhattan in Reverse It’s a pleasure to see a collection of short stories by Peter F Hamilton. It’s years since I read one of his novels – massive space operas – but on the strength of Manhattan in Reverse I’m tempted to try one again. The seven stories here range from 3½ to 85 pages and every one is a winner. The shortest, “The Forever Kitten”, is about genetic engineering; its ending sends a shiver down the spine. Several are future detective stories; the first and longest spans centuries with the same long-lived characters, from the murder of a student in an alternate Oxford in 1832 through to its eventual solving in 2038. The last two, including the title story, feature Paula Myo, the utterly dedicated investigator in the Intersolar Commonwealth’s Serious Crimes Directorate. Fans of Hamilton’s work will love these stories; for newcomers they’re a great introduction to an excellent writer.

Blackout It’s a salutary lesson for a reviewer to realise he’s out of step with at least some other readers. I was initially delighted to see a new book by Connie Willis set in the same world as her classic Doomsday Book (1992). In Blackout history scholars from Oxford University travel back in time from 2060 to World War II to study how people cope with the privations of war and the ever-present fear of bombs hitting their street. One works in a country house given over to evacuated children; another gets a job in a department store on Oxford Street during the Blitz; a third is involved in the Dunkirk evacuation. Things go wrong for all three, and they’re unable to get back to their own time.

So far so good. The initial premise is fine, and Willis is a good writer; she captures the tensions, fears and sheer bloodymindedness of wartime Britain. As an American she’s not always successful in capturing British conversational idiom; it also wouldn’t surprise me if she used a present-day Tube map to navigate her characters around 1940 London. But my main problem with the book is that it’s a good 200 pages longer than it needed to be. By halfway through it was already getting repetitive; there are only so many times a character can spend the night companiably in an air-raid shelter then walk through the rubble of a street the next morning. In fact not a great deal happens with any of the characters at great length (one spends endless chapters in hospital recovering from his injuries), and it’s made even worse by their not being particularly interesting people to start with.

The three finally manage to meet up by the end of the book – but then the story stops dead, with no resolution. It’s continued in part two, All Clear, which I wasn’t sent for review. That means that Blackout isn’t the first in a duology; it isn’t even a novel; it’s a far-too-long half novel with no reader satisfaction at the end of it. It also means that the book is badly structured; a bunch of apparently significant characters in the first 90 pages simply don’t appear again. Presumably they turn up in the second book, but frankly I won’t be bothering to find out.

Why am I out of step? Because the two books together, counted as one novel, won the Hugo Award this year – I have absolutely no idea how. But a quick glance at other online reviews shows I’m actually not alone in my reaction to this book.