Sharp Words

9 out of 10
I’ve been waiting for this book since meeting Stuart Neville at one of the NaNoWriMo sessions at QUB last year. Stuart came in to talk to us about how he’d written his first novel, and how he’d got published, and I know I left the room feeling intensely jealous of the way the publishing part at least had seemed to come so easily for him!

I missed the novel’s launch in the No Alibis bookshop in Belfast, but I trotted down there the first day I could (back in July) and bought a copy – which turned out to be signed, so that was a nice plus and a damn good reason for supporting small independent bookshops! I started reading that evening, but didn’t tear through it in the way I usually do with new books. I wanted to savour it… and I really wanted to like it.

And thankfully, I really really did. It’s a well-paced, thoughtful, intelligent thriller that drew me in from the very first page. However, I like to read novels at least twice before I review them. So although I originally read it at the beginning of July, it has taken me until the end of August to feel brave enough to pick it up again – for me, brilliant as I thought it, it’s not the kind of book I can read over and over. It’s not the kind of book to read as an escape from reality – which is precisely why my husband gave up after the first couple of chapters (his loss).

Anyway, a synopsis. The novel is called The Ghosts of Belfast in the US rather than The Twelve, but both titles refer to the twelve ghosts which haunt protagonist Gerry Fegan. They are the ghosts of the people he killed while a republican hitman: a selection of soldiers, police, loyalist terrorists and civilian innocents. But although Fegan was the one who pulled the trigger or planted the bomb – and did twelve years in the Maze prison – ultimately others carry responsibility too for those deaths. And now his ghosts want vengeance.

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7 out of 10

Fate, not for the first time, has taken a hand in my choice of reading material – and hence, my choice of what I review. Susan mentioned The Gargoyle in a post a couple of weeks ago, and piqued my interest. I saw it in the airport bookshop last Wednesday, dithered about buying it, but didn’t; and then when I got to my parents’, my mum had taken it out of the library on the librarian’s recommendation, and it was a brand new copy that NOBODY had read yet.

Which meant that I was the first person to break open the pages, which are dyed black on the edges and tended to a) stick together and b) shed little black bits everywhere. Looks nice, but not the best of ideas.

Anyway, The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson’s first novel, although as some of the blurbs say, it’s rather hard to believe. It opens with the unnamed narrator describing a car crash in which he suffers horrendous burns. Everything that’s done to heal his broken body is described in sometimes grotesque detail during the first third of the book, and it’s not hard to understand why the protagonist starts to contemplate suicide as the alternative to living as a damaged monster.

However, Marianne Engel – a beautiful, mysterious, probably mentally ill sculptor – comes into his life. And slowly, through her attentions and her stories, she helps the narrator want to live again.

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Catherine’s rating: 9 out of 10
Ken’s rating: 10 out of 10

This is a very timely review, because The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s latest novel for children of all ages, won the Newbery Medal on Monday. (Neil’s reaction by Twitter was very funny, though his blog post about it thankfully has less swearing).

The Graveyard Book is the tale of Nobody (Bod) Owens. When he’s 18 months old, the rest of his family is assassinated by the mysterious Jack, but the little boy hides in the old graveyard nearby. The ghosts who live there decide to look after him, with the help of Silas – a personage who is not-dead but not-alive, and wears a lot of black. (It’s not hard to guess what he actually is; there are plenty of clues.) Given the Freedom of the Graveyard, Bod grows up able to see in the dark, to touch the ghosts, to Fade and to send the Fear. But he has very little contact with living persons, and that which he has often ends in trouble. Naturally enough, Bod wants to find out who kills his family, and in the best story-telling traditions, he does so – with consequences.

Catherine: So that’s the brief synopsis; now onto our review. And I’ll let Ken have the first proper words.

Ken: I had such fun with our Book Thief joint-review, it’s great to have a go at a second one. It’s got the word book in the title too, which proves we don’t just throw this stuff together.

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7 out of 10

Just like the last author I reviewed (T A Moore), I first heard of C E Murphy through National Novel Writing Month. Although she’s originally from Alaska, she now lives in Ireland, and so cropped up on my list of ‘local’ participants. It took me a few years to get round to reading any of her novels though, and I have to sheepishly admit that I actually bought them for a friend and then borrowed them! Still, it’s the thought that counts, right?

There are three novels so far in The Walker Papers series, and C E Murphy is contracted for at least another two that I know of. She’s a prolific writer, with two other novel series on the go, as well as a new series of graphic novels and several short stories out there in anthology-land. Check her website for more details – she also writes a regularly updated blog covering her personal and professional life.

Urban Shaman introduces Joanne Walker, a mid-twenties Seattle police mechanic with Irish and Cherokee heritage (her real name – Siobhán Walkingstick – is accordingly mixed). The story starts with her on a plane flying back from her mother’s funeral in Ireland;  out of the window as they come into land in Seattle, she sees a man with a knife and a woman running from a pack of dogs. Something compels her to find these people, and she’s straight into a taxi and off into the unknown… With the help of the taxi driver, she finds the woman, but soon after they are attacked by Cernunnos (the Celtic Lord of the Hunt) and Joanne ends up with a sword through her chest.

Plunged into a near-death experience, she’s met by her spirit guide, Coyote, who tells her that she needs to heal her body. She does, tapping into the dormant shamanic powers she didn’t know she had, and comes back to life and straight into trouble. The trouble comes in lots of forms: her police precinct boss, ‘aging superhero’ Captain Morrison, busts her to beat cop in the hope that she’ll quit the force, but more importantly, Joanne finds herself tangled up in a new world of gods and spirits, of Cernunnos and Herne the Hunter, of powers over life and death, and of things she had always previously refused to believe in.

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8 out of 10

This is a novel I felt a bit odd about reading, because it’s written by someone I have actually met – and I mean on a personal level, not the sort of ‘meeting’ that I’ve managed when getting Neil Gaiman to sign books, for example. No, T A Moore and I hung out at NaNoWriMo meetings in Belfast a few years ago (in fact, she was instrumental in getting us a location that year), and I was both hideously jealous and insanely pleased when I found out this year that she’d actually been published. Plus, she knows I’m doing this review, which always adds extra spice, sort of, to reading a novel.

Anyway, The Even is her first published novel, and though it’s pretty short, it could never be called sweet. It’s a tale of mystery and treachery and timeless feuds between gods and demons and fantastic creatures, set in the eponymous city of the Even. This is a place with very dark undercurrents indeed, ruled (more or less) by the demon Yekum. He has a countless number of offspring, all cursed never to touch the ground.

The protagonist is Faceless Lenith, an Etruscan death goddess who got bored of hanging around in the world of the dead. (Really. She has no face, just blank skin. It’s creepy.) She’s willing to visit her old home though, to pay off a (very large) gambling debt by ‘rescuing’ one of the Yekumi who was condemned as a traitor and stripped of his name and his wings.

The identity of who has hired Lenith is a mystery, and she is initially more interested in getting her debt paid off than finding out who wants the Yekumi rescued. However, after Lenith has overcome various obstacles to find the Yekumi and bring him back to the Even, her troubles are definitely not over as she finds herself embroiled in a plot that could destroy the city.

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9 out of 10

Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, published in 2006, is the intriguing story of high school student Blue, and of the events surrounding her discovery of her teacher’s apparent suicide. The blurb on the cover gave nods to Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and although I’m always fairly skeptical of this kind of praise in cover-blurbs, I found myself able to recognise the similarities – and to see the way in which this novel surpasses both in story and complexity.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics initially seems the story of a high-school loner – Blue Van Meer, marked out by her intelligence and the fact that she has spent most of her life on the move. Following the death of Blue’s butterfly-collecting mother in a car accident when Blue was in kindergarten, her father Gareth – a professor of political science – has moved them relentlessly around the United States, each semester spent teaching at a different university. For Blue’s final year in high school, however, they take root in North Carolina, and Blue starts (for the umpteenth time) at a new school, St Gallway.

They are welcomed to the town by one of the teachers at Blue’s school, Hannah Schneider (a name that Blue feels fits the beautiful and enigmatic woman not at all). Blue is drawn by her into a clique of students, each with their own quirks and ambitions, and the way Blue slowly becomes part of the group is very reminiscent of A Secret History. Tragedy strikes in the spring of Blue’s senior year though, when Hannah is found dead. And as Blue tries to find out more about Hannah’s death, her own life slowly unravels in completely unexpected ways as she discovers secrets about her own family.

I suspect Marisha Pessl’s writing style isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but I really enjoyed the way she gave Blue a very distinctive voice. By turns pedantic, whimsical, literary, imaginative and matter-of-fact, Blue tells her story from the vantage point of a year later, but cleverly in such a way that the story’s main twists aren’t given away in the slightest (as can often happen with this style of writing). I can imagine a lot of people getting annoyed with the way Blue gives author and publishing references for books mentioned, but I found it very much in keeping with her character – as was the way ‘visual aids’ (line drawings) are included throughout the text.

Blue and her writer use lots of metaphors and similes and lush descriptions, and employ a lot of nouns as verbs (and possibly vice versa), and again, this style isn’t for everyone. But combined with a very intriguing story that just kept developing in complexity and mystery, it really worked for me.

There are lots of things in this novel to keep the reader guessing – not least the title, which isn’t an obvious one. Nor are the chapter headings of famous literary works, and figuring out how they relate to the content of each chapter is a definite challenge. In some ways, Marisha Pessl could be called over-ambitious with the style and characterisation in this novel. But I really enjoyed it, and I look forward to reading it again with foreknowledge of its twists and turns.

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