Shadow Clarke: Occupy Me

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Ali Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Emma Geen, Joanna Kavenna, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Naomi Alderman, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Steph Swainston, Tricia Sullivan, Victoria Hoyle

Discussions of the Shadow Clarke choices continue apace. Since my last piece here, several more reviews have appeared.

Jonathan McCalmont on A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Nina Allan on Fair Rebel by Steph Swainston

David Hebblethwaite on The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen

Megan AM on Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua

Victoria Hoyle on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Nick Hubble on The Power by Naomi Alderman

Maureen Kincaid Speller on The Trees by Ali Shaw

and me on Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

I’ve included my review below the fold, but you really should go and take part in the discussions.

Shadow Clarke: The Underground Railroad

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Aliya Whiteley, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Colson Whitehead, Joanna Kavenna, Johanna Sinisalo, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, N.K. Jemisin, nina allan, Victoria Hoyle

The work of the Clarke Award Shadow Jury continues apace. The jurors are now taking turns to review the books they chose for their personal shortlists. So far you can find:

Nina Allan on The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua and A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Jonathan McCalmont on The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley

Victoria Hoyle on The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Megan AM on The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Maureen Kincaid Speller on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

And now there’s my review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

I’m reproducing my review under the fold, but you really should head over to read the other reviews, and keep up with the Shadow Clarke hub, because that’s where the conversation is taking place.

Equivalence for the Landscape

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Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Giorgio de Chirico, Henry Moore, Keith Roberts, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Paul Nash, Tristram Hillier

He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolling their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies.
Keith Roberts, The Chalk Giants, Hutchinson, 1974, p21

Coming across that passage in the mid-1970s would have been the first time I came across the name Nash. Much later, I added a forename, Paul (later still I discovered there was another Nash, John, his brother and also a painter, though I am embarrassingly unfamiliar with his work). But even with a name, I wasn’t sure which Paul Nash I knew about. There were two that seemed to appear, work occasionally glimpsed in magazines or on the television: the weird, surreal artist, and the one who did all those pictures from the First World War. It would be some time before I realised they were the same; it would be even longer before I saw that they were the same.

Post Haste

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Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Somerset Maugham

Patrick Leigh Fermor is rapidly turning into the sort of writer who is more prolific in death than in life. Between his first book, The Traveller’s Tree in 1950 and his death in 2011 he produced ten books, four of them in the first decade. But after Roumeli in the mid-60s the gaps between books grew ever longer, and there are numerous reports of publishers and commissioning editors tearing their hair out trying to extract something, anything from him. It is notable that the last three books published in his lifetime were all at least partly the work of someone else. Three Letters from the Andes (1991) was precisely that, three long letters that he had written during a visit to South America some years before and that someone else shaped into a book. Words of Mercury (2003) was a collection of previously published pieces edited by Artemis Cooper. And In Tearing Haste (2008) is a collection of the letters PLF and Deborah Devonshire exchanged throughout their long friendship, again put together by someone else.

We’ll always have Paris

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Aleksandr Sokurov, Alice Rahon, Anton Chekov, China Mieville, Franz Wolff-Metternich, Grace Pailthorpe, Jacques Jaujard, James Joyce, Jindrich Styrsky, Jo Baker, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil

Sometimes, connections come at you in completely unexpected ways. By chance, you read something that sticks in the memory; months later, you see something more or less unrelated; then a little after that you read something else and an unlikely (if frail) bridge seems to be formed tying all three together.

Time of Arrival

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Amy Adams, Denis Villeneuve, Jeremy Renner, Ted Chiang, Tzi Ma

On Saturday evening we finally got to see Arrival (insert usual and deserved superlatives here). On Saturday afternoon, I came across a review of the film; I haven’t sought it out again, I haven’t linked to it, because something so wrongheaded doesn’t deserve the link. At one point the reviewer said, in so many words, the subplot about the daughter is unnecessary but at least it’s not sentimental.

Well, he’s right about it not being sentimental. Otherwise …

The Moving Toyshop

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Alfred Hitchcock, Edmund Crispin, Patricia Highsmith

‘Let’s go left,’ Cadogan suggested. ‘After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.’

I knew about this novel long before I read it, or indeed anything by Edmund Crispin. Maureen kept quoting the line about turning left at a junction because Gollancz was publishing the book. It was a knowingness that amused me. But not enough to make me pick up any of his novels and read them.

Then Maureen re-read this book, and said it might amuse me. So I read it, and there was the famous scene. But by then the self-referentiality of the book was well established. Not long before, when Fen and Cadogan had been locked inside a cupboard, Fen spends the time loudly proposing titles that Crispin might use for his next novel. Indeed, before the story even starts, there’s a note:

None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious.

The Hothouse by the East River

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Muriel Spark

It’s been a long time since I read any Muriel Spark, so I had forgotten just how weird she can be. But even if I’d remembered, I doubt I would have been prepared for the sheer outrageous weirdness of The Hothouse by the East River.

The Fashion in Shrouds

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham

It was pure chance that made me pick The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham off the shelf so soon after reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. But that chance led me to read Allingham’s 1938 novel as in some way a response to Sayers’s 1935 novel.

Reprint: (Mis)Representing Wells

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Alexander Korda, Arnold Bennett, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Lang, George Bernard Shaw, George Griffiths, H.G. Wells, Jean-Pierre Vernier, Joseph Conrad, Leon Stover, Oswald Mosley, Paul Johnson, Saint-Simon, Thomas Carlyle, William Morris

A few years ago, McFarland republished, in a uniform edition, The Annotated H.G. Wells, nine of Wells’s novels with extensive annotations by Wells expert Leon Stover, books that had crept out piecemeal over the preceding several years. I was asked to review the set for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. The review appeared in Volume 24, Issue 1, 2013. As you can see, I wasn’t overly impressed.