book review thread

Topic: The Matrix...It's like it's from another millennium

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[D.B.]

We’ve not had anything overly cultural in a while. And seeing as how I’ve spent most of my way working through an interesting book this week I thought I’d start a thread. Feel free to add your own reviews of books/manga/general stuff you loved, hated, or have just read recently and feel like talking about.



Vellum: The Book Of All Hours, by Hal Duncan.

First book in a trilogy, this story kicks off with an individual named Carter breaking into a hidden vault in the bottom of a university library to retrieve a book. Legend tells that this book is the Macronomicaon, the Book Of All Hours, written by Metatron to document the creation of the world, stolen from heaven by fleeing angels. Upon looking inside, he discovers that rather than containing words, it contains an extremely detailed map centred on his present location – albeit with a number of errors that he knows cannot be correct. So begins a story flicking across many alternate versions of reality and a cast of characters, back and forth through time, involving hi tech angels battling against demons’ blood magic…

So far, so generic. The idea of parallel worlds, whose technology is in places significantly more advanced than ours but in others extremely primitive, has been done very many times before.

Where this gets interesting is the way the author deals with time travel. Most books which deal with the subject involve people making ‘skips’ back and forth through a linear timeline, and between these being subject to the normal rules of time. Here time is three dimensional – back and forth (past and present), side to side (parallel worlds) and up and down (dead worlds under your feet and emptiness above). The narrative and characters skip quite freely between them – adjacent chapters are almost never in the same time period, adjacent paragraphs rarely so, and on occasion it even changes unnanounced within a paragraph (sometimes between more than two points in time!). 

Moreover, it’s ambiguous as to when any event is set. The story follows three or four main characterisations. I say characterisations as quite often they’re alternate versions of the same person – at least two versions of Jack die, another joins the Sovereigns, another imprisons Finnegan in world war one, another imprisons him in 2017, one is a monkey/human hybrid, another washes up on a beach and is immune to the bitmites that kill most everything else…or maybe some of these are the same person. I really don’t know . Similarly, Phreedom later takes the name Anna while looking for her brother Thomas… yet Finnegan’s sweetheart from a hundred years ago was also named Anna and had a brother called Thomas, and in both cases he arguably betrays them. Are they the same people? Beats me - the author goes out of his way to avoid pinning down exactly who someone is and/or what order events happen to them.

The end result should be a godawful mess. It somehow isn’t. It hangs together, and one is rarely left questioning what a character’s motivation is despite the fact he even fits in some character development – which is quite an achievement. One might liken it to writing a whole set of allegories of a story, then substituting segments of them for the actual chapters. The details are importantly different, but you can understand the general thrust pretty easily.

It’s far from perfect though. Jack Flash, for example, is one of the various versions of jack, and he seems like a character a far less accomplished writer would create. He spends most of his time jumping from building top to building top, firing a chi gun with incredible accuracy, chopping up hoards of people with his katana or being far more psychic than anyone else – all for no discernable reason.

Similarly Phreedom (and don’t you hate that name?) spends a lot of the first half of the book as a spunky!rebel who swears a lot, drives a motorbike and listens to punk rock. Perhaps it was a devastatingly successful attempt to write someone going through a wananbe rebel stage only to grow up later, but it’s still grating.

And the ending… or rather the lack of an ending. Perhaps the authors doing something clever and symbolic, but to me it just seems to fizzle – as if there was meant to be another part to the book, but they decided it was getting too long and thus held it back for the sequel. An entirely new character is introduced, yet more alternate versions of the main characters defeat him, and that’s it.

On balance though I found it a fairly good read, and worth a shot just to see how ambitious the attempt at the timeline is. There’s also a nice little sub-plot about finding the dead city of Kur and what happens when you read the manuscripts out loud – it’s a little like something lovecraft would write but involves email

Right, I’ve waxed lyrical enough. Your turn!

[Lisabella]

*applauds idea*

I haven't read anything substanial lately, but I'll add on to here when I do.

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Ooh. I've been thinking of starting a thread like this now and then, but I've always been too tired. Thanks, Pat!

I must add "Vellum" to my mountainous To Read list now. The concept sounds fairly unique (rather like the original "Garden of Forking Paths", and that book doesn't even exist, unfortunately), and, well, just general niftiness. Though I do hate the name Phreedom.

Well, time for me to add my own colon-in-the-title review.

The Sandman: Book of Dreams, by Neil Gaiman (editor)

First, while I've enjoyed what I've read of Gaiman's writing, I only know his Sandman comic books second-hand. However, the foreword to this anthology of short stories tells me as much as I need to know. There are the Endless, who are anthropomorphic personifications (sorry, I like Pratchett even more): Destiny, Death, Destruction, Dream, Desire, Despair and Delirium. The short stories in this anthology (none of them by Gaiman himself, though he provides short forewords to each) tell of the interactions of one or more of them with the world of mankind, focusing particularly, as the title hints, on Dream himself, Morpheus. While my ignorance of the comic may have blunted my enjoyment of a few of the stories, the overwhelming majority stand up on their own merits.

As in all anthologies, you'll have to take the good with the bad. What is good here is very good. "Each Damp Thing" by Barbara Hambly, set in Morpheus' world of the Dreaming, is a truly visceral horror story. Will Shetterly's "Splatter" is a twist on serial killer horror. George Alec Effinger's "Seven Nights in Slumberland" is impressive fanfic for Winsor McCay's turn-of-the-century Little Nemo comic  strip. Robert Rodi's "An Extra Smidgen of Eternity" manages to be very funny as well as poignant, adding a note of humour in an otherwise fairly dark collection. Tad Williams' "The Writer's Child", an unsettling horror story of threatened incest and writing. Nancy A. Collins' "The Mender of Broken Dreams", fantastic and uplifting without being feel-good. Finally, Susanna Clarke's "Stopp't-Clock Yard", a picaresque story from Restoration times about a quack using the dream world to resurrect the dead, is, in spite of some half-hearted attempts at 17th century spelling, probably the most interesting story in the collection.

Most of the other stories I enjoyed, if not as much as those above. However, there are some lowlights. Karen Haber's "A Bone Dry Place", while frightening, ends up as a curiously bland story of the Endless working together to save the world from terrorism. "Ain't You 'Most Done", in spite of being by one of my favourite authors, namely Gene Wolfe, seems to just take the dream convention as a springboard for a fairly unfeasible dystopia. Finally, Lawrence Schimel's "Endless Sestina": an OK poem, but not a proper sestina. Blatant false advertising.

Finally, Clive Barker is mentioned on the cover: more false advertising. He did in fact draw the frontispiece; he's not one of the authors. The frontispiece is fairly nice, but it's a picture of Death, which seems a bit out of place in an anthology focused on Dream. (And I don't really like Barker much after reading his bland children's book "Abarat", so it's probably a good thing that he didn't write a story.)

To sum up: recommended for anyone who enjoys a short story with a horror or (usually dark) fantasy theme. You don't have to be a Sandman fan. There is a little bit of overlap across stories, and even with the occasional lighter piece, the mood can get very gothy after a while. Perhaps best to read in manageable doses.

There will be more from me in this thread. Much, much more.

[aoifestorm]

Chris, your review makes me miss horror, and dark fantasy shortstories.....I may get that book.

[Archonix]

I's worth it, even I liked that book and I'm not normally much of a fan of horror and the like.

[D.B.]

Neil Gaiman? The name rings a bell. I’m currently working my way through the sequel to Vellum, but I may put it on my (somewhat shorter) to-read list .

Anyway, one I’ve read a while back and harped on about before – I don’t care, it kicks ass


The lovely bones by Alice Seybold.

Concept: A fourteen year old girl is raped and killed by a neighbour, and spends the rest of the book haunting her family.

Fairly heavy stuff then. And while a portion of the book is dedicated towards the police search to find her killed, it’s only in so far as it affects her family, who are the real stars of the story.

It’s not something I would usually expect to like. A little too melodramatic, too much like a soap opera. I was expecting a ghost story, to be honest, and while there are snippets of this it again is really not the main focus.

It’s gritty too. Not in a hardboiled or deliberately confrontational way – it just generally avoids all the clichés or easy answers authors can trot out. Authentic or honest are perhaps better words. Not perfect, it does on occasion slip into events that feel a little too convenient and stretch suspension of disbelief early on in the murder case, but these are far from terminal. More problematic is the later introduction of a slightly psychic girl who plays out as a subplot that never quite feels like it fits in with the rest of the story. However it comes together a little at the end and helps provide a hint of closure and symmetry to the story, so I guess it’s forgivable.

Characterisation is superb throughout, and second only to glue and paper in holding the book together in a cohesive entity (even if it arguably conforms a little too closely to the nuclear 2 1/2 kids family model). I’ve very rarely empathised as much with fictional characters, and it really demonstrates the value of less-is-more when tweaking on the heartstrings (both in using such scenes sparingly, and being confident enough not to overdo them and make them sappy or saccharin).

It’s hard to describe much further without introducing sever spoilers, so I won’t. What I will say is read this before reading the author’s first book, Lucky, as you’ll get a far better appreciation of both that way (at least I think so).

Thus far it's been an almost completely glowing review. Arguably though, there isn't much lurking below the surface - it's all there on a first read, nice and accessible, but fundamentally not very taxing. You're unlikely to have anything to ponder once you're finished, or find new bits you hadn't fully appreciated second time round. The author does everything but turn the pages. A cynic might call it shallow - I think it depends really on what you're looking for in a book. Let's say it suffers from a bit of 'airport reading syndrom' and leave it at that.

Overall: simple concept executed with real emotional investment, and still enjoyable when being re-read.

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Digging up this thread again...

Beasts, by Joyce Carol Oates

This is the story of introverted twenty-year-old Gillian, a student at all-female Catamount College in 1970s USA, who falls helplessly in love with her creative writing teacher, Andre Harrow. He is twice her age and married to vaguely European sculptress Dorcas, whose tribal-type, highly sexualised statues seem to divest men and women of everything except the animal. Occasionally, lucky girls from Catamount get to work as interns in their villa. There are rumours. There are other problems at Catamount: pill-popping, false fire alarms, then an attempt at arson.

I'll gladly admit that it was the title that grabbed me at first. At ca 150 pages in a small book format, this is really more of a novella than a novel, and incidentally the first book I've read by the great Oates. It certainly made me want to check out more of her work. It's a good read, which isn't to say a *pleasant* read, obviously. (I'll address some of the unpleasantnesses below.)

It's quite hard not to compare this to "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt: a close-knit yet fractious group of college students, a charismatic teacher (of Greek in Tartt's novel), violence (more in "The Secret History"), sex (more in "Beasts"), alcohol and drugs (a draw). Trying to decide their relative merits may be futile. "The Secret History" is a more rich and varied story, but "Beasts" at its smaller scope succeeds in being what it tries to be: a nasty erotic thriller (I assume it could be called: no detailed sex scenes, but it's an undertow like that of the river in Greek myth that passed under the ocean without diluting) in a claustrophobic college environment.

The writing is excellent, of course: no verbal fireworks, but clear and suggestive description, which is how I like it. There are no self-important opaque "literary" bits. The characters may feel a bit sketchy due to the shortness of the work, but they're believable for that. (Gillian as the main character could perhaps have needed more background.)

The plot works well from foreboding, to nastiness, towards a suitably cathartic climax. I personally thought it was a bit of an anti-climax when, at a pivotal moment in the plot, Gillian found certain plot-related items in Andre's and Dorcas' bedroom, but within hindsight it feels good: shows the pettiness and ugliness of their much-vaunted decadence.

Downsides? Well, as I may have pointed out, it's not a cheerful story, so don't read it if that's what you want. A bigger problem is Gillian's sometimes extremely passive character. It's motivated in her life, and it makes her eventual actions the more prominent, but... a passive main character is a curious beast. I had the same problem with Offred in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", but Offred is constrained to an extremely degrading situation because the alternatives are pretty much either death or deportation to a work camp, and I suspect many readers (myself included) would have niggles about choosing those alternatives. Gillian in "Beasts", however, acts under no duress other than that of her own obsession and, later, shame.

Well, that nitpick aside, I liked this novel a lot. If you're looking for an incisive look into the manipulation and grime behind the "free love" ethos of the 1960s and 70s, read it. If you're looking for an academic environment thriller that's really *creepy*, read it too.

But don't fall for your manipulative creative writing teacher. Seriously.

[Archonix]

El-tiddly-bump!

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

I'm really not sure I can do this book justice. The cover blurb doesn't do it justice. No description can do it justice... nevertheless, I shall try.

The book concerns a youngish SO-27 agent named Thursday Next. SO27 is one of a number of SpecOps agencies (32 in total) that were set up to monitor and prosecute several categories of crime, from SO32, the "Horticultural Enforcement Agency", to SO17, "Werewolf and Vampire Disposal Operations". Most SpecOps agencies above SO13 are classified, except SO5, which deals with internal affairs, and SO1, which manages everything else.

Thursday is, as mentioned, a SpecOps 27 agent deal with Literary crimes. She spends most of her time assessing whether books are genuine, solving arguments between Baconites and Shakespeareans and generally tootling around in the world of books. The world she inhabits is, of course, insane. She has a pet dodo (a type 2, with some serious flaws in its germline, but very friendly and really cute) and her father is an ex-chronoguard (SO12) who has gone rogue, trying to battle the frenc revisionists who are trying to re-write history to be more favourable to their own country. At one point he invents the banana. Thursday herself fought in the Crimean War, which has been going on for over a century (though the majority of that time involves nothing more violent than the occasional shouting match), losing her brother in the charge of the light armoured brigade during the last major battle of the war.

The book is first person, which I don't normally like, but I've found that it works in this instance. Thursday has a fairly deadpan delivery that shows how completely normal this fantastic world is for her. In some senses it's obvious that, deep down, Thursday knows she's a character in a book and toward the end this becomes something of a plot point, after a fashion. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We join Thursday as she is approached by an SO5 agent (that's search and containment, or something) who wants to temporarily sign her up because of her relationship to a character named Acheron Hades. Acheron used to be Thursday's tutor at university. He's also a right bastard by all accounts, able to talk people in to doing anything (including shooting themselves) and invisible on cameras. His associates are varied and, in one case, unintentionally hillarious (or intentionally unintentionally, perhaps), having rather mundane reasons to rebel against society or, in one case, no reasons at all.

Thursday piques his interest, as she's the only woman who ever resisted his charms, and a multi-way pursuit begins when Acheron steals the original manuscript of Jayne Eyre for reasons unknown. On top of this Thursday has to deal with a representative of the over-arching Goliath Corporation, which single-handedly rebuilt the country after the war; a man named Jack Schitt. Schitt has several reasons for monitoring Hades, who's existence is a threat to the Goliath Corporation and the country, and as many reasons for monitoring Next, who will not only lead him to Hades but also to the inventions of Next's Uncle, Mycroft, who is something of a mad inventor type. His greatest invention is the Prose Portal, which allows anyone to enter books and potentially change the plot.

And if you enter an original manuscript, you can change every copy in the world...

Frankly this book made me feel a little insane. I want that portal! But so did everyone else, so I think I'd have to get in to a long queue.

The premise itself is surprisingly simple but at the same time complex: the ability to enter other worlds through a literary device (literally literary perhaps?) creates a world where the writer can indulge in the most inane and yet exciting fantasies. The alternative universe in which the book takes place is as believable as our own, and incredibly well constructed. The constant asides and observations made by Next are witty and entertaining, not to mention revealing in many cases, and they flesh out the world in a way that a third-person novel might not. Her character tends to be a little humourless, which sets her up as the straightman in any number of little jokes that are stretched throughout the book. As I said, at points she almost seems conscious of her status as a character in a story but, at the same time, if she does realise this she doesn't let it show.

Fast-paced and thrilling in places and so well written I would give my eye-teeth to have even an ounce of Jasper Fforde's talent. If you haven't read it yet then I suggest you go and buy a copy as soon as you're able.

[D.B.]

A number of you will be able to guess what's coming here...

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

A thousand pages on the topics of railway, metallurgy and political monologues? I can tell you all think it sounds riviting already! Actually it kind of was. I've a very low tolerance for dull books, yet I found this hard to put down.

Premise: The majority of the world has become communal people's states, and America is slowly slipping that way. We mostly follow Dagny Taggert and Hank Reardent (Vice president of Taggart Transcontinental railways, and the owner of Rearden Steel respectively) as they try to maintain their businesses under ever increasing amounts of destructive government intereference. Meanwhile, the other best industrialists, academics, etc of the world are one by one retiring without warning, then disappearing entirely from public life. And what does the question "Who is John Galt" really mean?

Firstly, the bad. This book is entirely geared towards promoting Ayn's philosophy of Objectivism, which essentially boils down to capitalism with little or no government regulations (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist). As such, every industrialist is an almost textbook mary sue. Check out this description.

It was his eyes and hair she saw first - the ruthlessly perceptive eyes, the streaks of hair shaded from gold to copper that seemed to reflect the glow of sunlight in the murk of the underground...

Yeah. They're almost all like this (except mulligan, the token fat banker). Meanwhile, here's the description of another railway owner (Dagny's brother, in fact).

James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age fromo adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkishness of a lout...

That's actuall only half of it, but you can imagine the rest. This particular chap inherited his position in the company, and is in favour of more government oversight of the economy. Hmm, do you think Ayn is trying to colour our initial impression of him a little by way? I guess I should just be thankful that he doesn't have a black cape and laugh manaically at his own evil plots.

Anyway, as well as being good looking, all the people we're meant to empathise with are fantastically talented. Francisco opens his own copper mine while still at university, is a crack shot, and as a child independatly derived the laws of calculus. Reardent shrugs off being shot in the shoulder as a flesh wound. Dagny voluntarily entered her father's company at the bottom of the ladder and worked her way all the way up by aptitude alone. And we haven't even gotten onto the perpetual motion machine yet...

However, it must be said that while the initial premise is clearly biased, Ayn does a moderately good job of ensuring there is verisimilitude (hey guyz I can haz learned new word!!). Certainly, the main characters are disporortionally successful and talented, but generally any achievements they make are a product of hard work and long hours in the laboratory/ office/ etc. As such they're easier to to sympathise with than one might expect.

The story arc is fairly rambling, though not in an especially bad way. We go from creating the Rio Norte line, to searching for the inventor of the perpetual motion machine, to various court cases, project X, then the grains hortages, all without too much linking them together save the characters involved. Character development for the industrialists consists of their growing empathy with Ayn's philosophy (though I did give a little cheer when Rearden finally stood up to his manipulative and unpleasant wife). The other common thread is watching society slowly wind down, as all the talented people leave and things begin to regress. That element of it is actually quite fascinating, in a car crash kind of way; civilisation is destroyed not by an asteroid or overnight plague, but by entropy, and feels all the mroe chilling for it.

The political points interesting as well (except maybe that 50 page speech towards the end, one of very few sections that truely dragged) which is a good job, as it takes up so much of the book. I'd be vey far from saying I agree with it, but there's some interesting food for thought. The idea that most of what we do is motiviated by self interest is one I've heard independatly from lots of sources. Ayn though goes a step further and states that it is immoral to behave in any other way, and that alturism is objectively wrong and damaging to soceity. I'd quite happily write her off as a crank on this one, if it weren't for the way lots of the problems she predicts as a consequence feel just a little too familiar for comfort.

Anyway, in summary, odd but I enjoyed it more than I was expecting, if only because it's so so different. Read it alongside The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to get both sides of the story.


Or perhaps just wait for the film.

[Don Cobra]

Sorry for the dumb reply, but there's just one thing that comes to my mind when I read about Ayn Rand:

IS A MAN NOT ENTITLED TO THE SWEAT OF HIS OWN BROW?

 - from BioShock.

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Nice, Pat! A balanced and fair review of a book that is usually referred to as either gospel or the anti-gospel of the Antichrist. I probably still won't read it, but I enjoyed your review.

[Lord Kingsley]

In comic books, the exact polar opposite of this is V for Vendetta.  Which was almost as heavy-handed, which is a big reason why I didn't like it.

This book is actually on my Must Read Before I Die list! 

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Agreed about "V for Vendetta", that was heavy-handed as heck.

This book is actually on my Must Read Before I Die list! 

Better start in advance. This book is a brick.

[D.B.]

read over the course of an afternoon, waiting for an algorithm to finish iterating.

How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff

Daisy, a fifteen year old from new york, is sent to live with her cousins in england for a while. Unfortunately, through the culmunation of political tensions, world war three breaks out, and england is invaded...

A book billed for the young adult market but with excellent prose, and one which I've seen the political aspect mentioned a few times by people in connection to the current war on terror, I was somewhat looking forward to this. However it left me a little flat. 

Firstly, the prose is indeed excellent. It's written in the form of a retrospective account by a teenage girl, and goodness does't it read like some of the stuff we find on ff.net. Not in a bad way, just ina way that feels authentic. There's some lovely, almost pratchett-ish little rye observations by the author too.

Here's the sort of thing we'd hear, all in low hushed tones especially when us Children were around, and if it doesn't sound so bad to you try playing it on an endless loop while you listen and smile politely until your cheeks go into spasms and you develope a twitch:

• My brother in law says it's the French bastards
• My friend in chelsea says the looting is terrible and she got the most amazing widescreen tv.
• My neighbour in The Lords says it's the chinese
• Have you noticed that no jews have been killed?
• There'a a nuclear bunker under Marks & Spencer that's only open to shareholders
• People are eating their pets
• The Queen is Bearing Up
• The Queen is Breaking Down
• The Queen is one of Them

That quote's pretty typical, there are better bits too. No, I think the prose is really good.

The plot though...hmm.

My issue with the plot is that it feels like something aimed at "young adults". Now there are books out there labelled as being for this age category which transcend it, and effectively become stories people of just about all ages will appreciate. This doesn't quite manage that for me. My overall impression was that it felt like the sort of thing that I was made to read in school when I was thirteen-fourteen ish, and even back then could tell it wasn't what I thought of as being a 'proper' book. Think Goodnight Mr Tom. No, I've read this about 15 years too late I think.

So, a book with good prose but firmly aimed at one age bracket - review finished then? Well, not quite...

Now, let's try to understand that falling in love with an under-age blood relative hadn't been exactly on my list of Things To Do While Visiting England...

Yeah, she falls in love with one of her cousins, and "Things Happened in spades". No, wait, important detail - one of her psychic cousins. Mind reading underage incest sex goes on. I'm not one for shielding kids from stuff in stories especially (I always remember teating such things with scorn when I was little, as I knew damn well what they were trying to hide, and even the correct words to use), but in what is otherwise a kids-split-up-in-the-middle-of-a-war-and-having-to-find-one-another-again it's just such a bizarre element to introduce. Doubly so as once the war finally reaches them, daisy and the cousin she's in love with have almost no further interaction; it's a motivation for them to find one another again, but ultimately plays little direct role in the way events unfurl. I guess it just puzzles me, and feels out of place. Which is a sign something's going wrong, as in some ways this relationship is the main focus of the book.

The psychic thing I have no clue about. It has little effect on the plot except to add drama at a couple of places.

The war itself is only hinted at. This is probably accurate, given the point of view it's written from. I personally found it a little frustrating. It had that strange sense of the author writing things vaguely, instead of getting everything sorted out and then removing details to make it vague on purpose. The invaders are just generic foreigners, who managed ot invade by getting british forces commited everywhere else then launcing a surprise invasion somehow. Hmm...

In summary, if you're a teacher who needs to give a class of 12 year olds a book to read which will raise issues to discuss in class (and probably annoy some parents), buy thirty or so copies. If you've got an intelligent kid of about the same age, who will realise it when the author is talking about stuff that's not quite aceptable in soceity, buy them a copy. If you want to read something that captures well the style a fifteen year old american will write in, or if you're stuck in an airport and want something quick to read that isn't by Dan Brown, consider buying yourself a copy.

Otherwise, it can probably be safely skipped.

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Something slightly more highbrow than my previous reviews. That means that it's sex and violence, just 100 years old and in French. (And I haven't read this book in a while, so I hope I'm not making any mistakes.)

The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau

Clara always cares.

Allow me to start with a digression. I came across this book in the local small-town library, in the Graphic Novels section for the reason that it was a large-format issue with photographic illustrations. Don't ask me to identify the translator or the photographer. I read the blurb and felt vaguely uninterested, then went home and googled it.

"The Torture Garden". It's French and from 1899. Further research revealed that it was about that old staple of decadent literature, an innocent bourgeois youth seduced by an Evil Sexual Woman. Oh, and there is sadism, orientalism -they go to a Chinese prison with the Torture Garden of the title- and the connection between death and fertility. Yeah, yeah, at this point you're already quoting Baudelaire in your heads (I know about two lines, but I sure did quote them). I made some nasty jokes about it, then picked up the book next time I went to the library. Guardedly.

OK, this is far from the best book I've read, but it is interesting. More interesting than my initial cavils would have led me to believe, for sure.

The story is disjointed (Wikipedia affirms that it was made up of bits written at very different times). The prologue is the story of a fashionable dinner party, where the guests end up discussing the various good sides of murder. At the end of the chapter, this leads a tormented young man -the nameless protagonist- to tell his story, which forms the rest of the novel.

The social satire of the prologue continues in the opening chapters. At the start of his story, the narrator is the aide of a politician, ends up in a scandal, and his mentor "helpfully" sends him out of the country under the pretext of a scientific expedition to study marine organisms in the Pacific. On board the ship, the fake marine biologist falls in love with Clara, a beautiful and cultured American tourist who shows no interest for him while she believes him to be of impeccable virtue, but falls for him when he confesses how he is a fraud. He ends up dropping the marine biology facade and instead following Clara.

The next break in the story comes a year later, when the couple is staying in China, and details a day trip they undertake to a Cantonese prison called the Bagnio (no idea why, and as I know nothing of late 19th century China, I have no idea how accurate this book depicts it). It's Clara who wants to go; the narrator is sick from the unusual climate, and sick of Clara without therefore being able to leave her. (The occasional flashback reveals that he has occasionally tried, travelling across Mongolia and yet come crawling back to her.) They travel through the prison and its eponymous Torture Garden, and see its sights, that delight Clara and repulse the narrator. At the end of the day, they return home. Clara is hysterically exhausted to the point of collapse and seems disgusted with everything, including her boyfriend (who has regained his passion for her). He takes her to rest and recuperate in a bordello where she has friends. As he sits by her bed, she goes into delirium and talks about beautiful and innocent things, like white swallows, and heaven. The narrator is certain that she has got over her perversions and become innocent and good again, but the madam tells him this happens every time with her. The story ends with the narrator's fervent wish: "If only she would die!"

So, the plot is nothing remarkable. I would have enjoyed it a lot more had it been a more continuous story (I wanted to know about the narrator's travels in Mongolia!). Superficially, it did have all the things I make fun of about Decadence: the world-weary angsty protagonist, the evil seductive woman, the sadism, the over-obvious connection between human death and suffering and the beauty and fertility of nature (can you say Fleurs du Mal?)*. So why am I writing a serious review of it, instead of mocking it?

All the interesting stuff in this novel can be encapsulated in pretty much one thing: Clara's character. During my initial looking up this book, I got annoyed at how the reviewers kept pointing out how cool Clara was, merely because she was a woman with a strong sex drive and (hinted at) bisexuality - does anyone think that's unusual in a certain type of late 19th century fiction? I have, honestly, had it up to here with female characters who do nothing but sleep around and have the occasional good line to show how "strong" they are.

Actually, no. Clara comes off as extremely intelligent and cultured, and corrupted. She is undoubtedly a sadist, and I'd say one of the best portraits of a sadistic personality that I've read. Sadism isn't all about wanting to hurt people. The book shows her obsession clearly when contrasting her with a nameless woman among another group of tourists to the Chinese prison, a Russian woman who taunts a starving prisoner by dangling a piece of meat outside the bars. Clara is outraged by that behaviour. She simply *cares* too much about the victims who give her the mental stimulation she so desires. But at the climax of the story, when she and her boyfriend return to the city, she is satiated with cruelty and disgusted with herself. At least for now.

The ending, with Clara raving about innocent things, is certainly what makes this book. It turns it from a sordid love affair into a tragedy, and is, well, beautiful and enigmatic. The madam's words imply that Clara and her boyfriend are doomed to repeat this horrible cycle, but

Spoiler (hover to show)

My own theory: the narrator kills Clara in her delirium to stop her from falling back into the pattern. "If only she would die!" This would tie in with the murder discussion at the start of the novel, and explain why he ends up telling his story. I'm not sure this will ever be more than a theory.

There isn't that much else that stands out. The protagonist is memorable, if not as deep a character as Clara. The writing is good, for what it's worth in a translation: not awe-inspiringly beautiful prose, but good. A lot of images stick with me, as you can tell. Some bits towards the end slip a bit from the first person convention: the narrator seems to know things that you'd think he wouldn't (just what substance is used to irritate a prisoner's wounds, for example). But he could have researched these things, I don't know.

Ironically, there isn't as much gruesomeness as the title implies. There is a fair bit: I'm not saying it's for the squeamish, but the torture isn't the point. Interestingly, the most horrible torture descriptions (in my opinion) occur after the actual climax of the narrative.

There is a bit of the evil, scary Orient trope in this book, but again, not as much as you might expect. The Chinese characters never take the limelight from the Western couple, but they're not all crazy torturers. (Again, I have no idea how accurate a depiction of the China of the times this is.) And Clara's dialogue makes amply clear that atrocities aren't a monopoly of the Chinese: in fact, the cover of the edition I read depicted, not a scene from the Bagnio, but Clara's description of the execution of Algerian prisoners under the French colonial power.

There is even less sex (and if you think the literature of this time never contained sex, you should read more Zola). There are not even any outright sexual descriptions until the very end, and those are brief and hardly pornographic. I'd say that anyone who describes this book as erotica is lying.

The translation reads well, like I said. It's from the 1930s, but feels remarkably non-dated (the only thing that felt dated in it was the word "verge" meaning "penis", which I've never seen in English and *suspect* might have been left untranslated from the French).

A few words on the photographic illustrations: they didn't add anything for me. The best was probably the one of the Algerian prisoners and Clara (also in a colour version on the cover). Most were inoffensive, and a few downright wrong - for example, the narrator and Clara come across an executioner in the garden. The photograph depicts a man in a mediaeval European executioner's hood, which I'm sure is nothing like what 19th century Chinese executioners wore.

Summing up: I think "The Torture Garden" is too problematic for me to say that it was good. It is, however, one of the more interesting books I've read.

*The S is silent.