The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch

OhMyGod, I love Locke Lamora. The Republic of Thieves is the third and much anticipated outing for this fantastic character and his fellow ‘Gentleman Bastard’, Jean Tannen. Thief, trickster and con man, whatever scheme you can dream of, you can pretty much guarantee that the Gentleman Bastards have already been there, done that. Locke Lamora’s more than your average loveable rogue, and not only because you can’t help loving him a whole lot more than average, but also because he’s the best of the best.

Or is he? Things do seem to have been going poorly for Locke and Jean in recent years, and now he’s being twisted and turned - mostly against his will - and pitted against the one person most likely to beat him in any game: the elusive Sabetha. Anyone who’s read Locke’s earlier adventures, The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies, will be primed for the proper introduction of Sabetha, long lost Gentleman Bastard and long lost love of Locke’s Life. Who is she? What happened between them? All will be revealed in the following pages via Scott Lynch’s typical style of modern mayhem coupled with childhood flashbacks.

Reading The Republic of Thieves has been like getting reacquainted with old friends – friends who you’d kind of forgotten who totally awesome they are because it’s been so long since you last saw them. It was, however, absolutely worth the wait – I was a little worried when I first opened the book that the story would be overshadowed by Lynch’s personal difficulties (the reason, I understand, for the large gap in time between books), but before I knew what was happening he’d transported me straight back there in all it’s grit and glory, just as I remembered it from the past. More of the grit and less of the glory, though, perhaps!

Locke’s world is one of fantasy and yet it’s not entirely fantastical – the lands are a little different, the people are a little different, there is the Eldren legacy and there is magic, but everything else pretty much works just the same as our own world. Gradually, though, book by book, Lynch is revealing a little more of the fantasy element, and The Republic of Thieves is particularly rich with hints of the Eldren and questions about their history. How did they build the magnificent glass structures that have endured for the thousands of years that they have? What happened to the Eldren themselves – were they wiped out or did they simply leave? Why, and how?

And will Locke and Sabetha ever manage to sort themselves out? She is certainly a conundrum – though she features strongly in this volume, she remains rather hard to understand and interpret, changeable and quick to burn as she is, perhaps because as strong as Locke’s love for is, he doesn’t entirely understand her either. Lot’s of food for thought for future volumes – of which I hope there will be many. Witty, fun, and totally engaging, I rather like the idea of spending my lifetime getting to know these wonderful characters and this intriguing world in ever more detail.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is such a wonderful book. It’s a book that makes you question worlds and question reality, and yet everything it makes you question feels innately true and real. It’s simple but intense, magical but scary, dark but hopeful. It’s perfect.

It’s been well publicized that the story of Ocean began to form in Neil Gaiman’s mind when he discovered that a lodger in his childhood home had, one night, stolen their car, driven it down the road, and committed suicide inside it. And, essentially, this is where Ocean begins too. When our narrator’s lodger commits this very same act, it opens up a rift, awakens an old sort of evil, and mistakes compounding mistakes brings it into our world. But is it truly evil? What does it want? Can our narrator avoid its clutches? Can they put the world back to rights? And what will be the price to do so?

“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. 

But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them” 

        – Maurice Sendak, 1993

This choice of introductory inscription to Ocean speaks volumes, somehow encompassing all that is to follow. Our young narrator is about to learn terrible things about the world. It has the same sort of creep factor that Gaiman created in his earlier book, Coraline – you know that something is terribly, terribly wrong with what is happening, but no-one else seems to notice. Only the Hempstock family, who live on the farm down the lane and on whose ground the ocean lies, can help. They are a family who are as equally unknowable as they make perfect sense. It seems entirely normal - and right - that the strange Hempstock family should exist.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautiful and terrifying and touching and utterly, totally, overwhelming good. Everything is up for question and yet it is hard to pinpoint exactly what I should be questioning. Gaiman writes about a world in which the abnormal, the magical, the mysterious, makes perfect sense. Knowing the origins of the story and the way in which the narrator remains unnamed leads us quietly to question how much of this story is based on reality. But it can’t be – can it? In any other circumstances such a thought would be preposterous, and yet Gaiman’s beautiful evocation of this tale makes it seem not only entirely valid but a completely reasonable possibility.

Shaman, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Shaman is breathtaking. For a book that, in it’s most basic interpretation, is about a boy – or young man – growing up in the ice age of 32,000 years ago, following the daily, monthly, and yearly routines from hunting and fishing to shoring up for the winter, it is a compelling and epic piece of storytelling.

A boy by our standards, a man by ancient standards, Loon is twelve at the beginning of the story, and we are introduced to him as he’s sent off by his pack, his family, on his Wander: two weeks alone on the land to fend for himself. He is stripped of everything he owns before being turned out in the cold and the next few days are dedicated not just to gathering together the things he needs to survive, but also evading the danger that constantly lurks outside the safety of camp – the cold, the animals, the Neanderthals. Through Loon’s travels we gradually learn the intricacies of ice-age living: family dynamics, pack dynamics, the turning of the seasons, the interaction of Homo sapiens with Neanderthals and with the animals and land they cohabit, the constant pressure to find food, the shaman’s role.

It’s a strange and fascinating telling; a story that begins as a simple recanting of daily life, but which takes a turn in the middle as events converge and Loon and Thorn, chief shaman of Wolf pack, must make a life or death decision after Loon’s wife is stolen by a pack of ice-cold Northers. What will Loon do? How will his pack respond? Can Loon follow, and if he does, how will he get Elga back? From following the Northers’ tracks north, to a cold cold winter in the shadow of a giant ice shelf, this phase of Loon’s path to Shaman-hood culminates in a dramatic race for life across the tundra, down mountainsides, over raging rivers, and through forests, all the while pursued by howling wolves, angry men and the pangs of hunger while Loon fights with injuries old and new, Thorn with instinct to protect his pack versus the instinct to do right by the spirits. The decisions made here will change everything forever, as his wander changed everything forever, as his marriage changed everything forever.

I am forever fascinated by the lines between science fiction and fiction – why is one author classed as sci-fi while another isn’t? Where does the distinction lie? Kim Stanley Robinson writes the kind of literary books that should be placed alongside ‘mainstream’ authors such as Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, J G Ballard – and Shaman is no exception. Atwood traditionally refers to her more sci-fi-esque fiction as ‘speculative’ rather than sci-fi, which is a very apt description, and this is absolutely the category to which I think Kim Stanley Robinson’s work most closely matches.

I found myself biting back tears in several places. Who were these people really? How much is Robinson’s writing based on imagination, how much on research? Do these exact paintings exist? Shaman is not the first time that an author has recreated ancient times – Jean Auel and Michelle Paver come first to mind – but it still feels unusual and fresh for a science fiction author to turn his powers of world-building away from the future and into the past. Robinson is visionary in the way he builds this world and these characters, from the cold winters to hungry springs to summer eight eight festivals, the snow and the wind, the caribou hunt, the impenetrable blackness of the caves where they paint. This is a tale of life on the edge, life in the extreme, and it’s beautiful.

The Bone Season, by Samantha Shannon

The citadel of SciLon, 2059: a London familiar yet strange; a London controlled by Scion for 200 years, pitting 'unnatural' clairvoyants against normal, amaurotic folk. In this world, being clairvoyant is an everyday occurrence, but it’s also illegal, considered a disease, and if you are voyant you have only two choices: to become a pawn of the state, serving in their army for thirty years prior to compulsory execution, or to disappear into the underground and eek out a criminal life on the streets, hiding your true nature as far as you are able.

Paige is a particularly powerful clairvoyant, and she hides herself within the most powerful of the crime-lord gangs, the Seven Seals. But when she is cornered and captured by the state, everything she thought she knew about her world comes crumbling down: Scion is hiding a bigger secret than anyone could have guessed. In a prison she cannot possibly escape, a person named only by number – XX-59-40 - who can Paige trust?

The Bone Season has a little bit of everything – it’s a bit sci-fi, a bit fantasy, a bit dystopian, a bit mystery. Samantha Shannon has created a complex world both just like  ours and yet unrecognizable. She launches us right into the story and Paige’s life and at times, to begin with, it’s hard to follow all the detail, the terms and the divisions that are simply everyday for Paige, but as her story progresses, things are explained, the puzzles pieced together, and I found myself completely hooked. I was totally intrigued by Arcturus, Paige’s Warden in her new life - the mystery of who he is, who his race, the Rephaim, really are, what his intentions are (and yeah, ok, maybe I have a little crush on him too).

While all the pieces of the puzzle do fit together, I’m left feeling that I’m not sure I fully understand the world of Scion. It might be because there are things Paige doesn’t understand, or because Shannon’s imagination hasn’t been interpreted on paper as clearly as it’s present in her head. Paige is a character I got on with really easily, though I did feel frustrated with her here and there – sometimes she grasps information far quicker than I could as a reader, but at other times she seemed a bit slow on the uptake – for instance, even though it was quite clear from the word go that Arcturus was not like other Rephaim, it took a good 200 pages for Paige to get there. Although, credit where credit is due, this was basically because Paige was blinded by her hate, a perfectly respectable character flaw. However, this uncertainty was exacerbated by the fact that the passage of time was rather unclear – the structure of the storytelling made it seem as if only a couple of days had gone by, that Paige had only had one training session with Arcturus to develop her clairvoyancy powers, but it was then implied that several weeks had actually passed, which slightly threw me.

These are minor things though, and didn't detract from the experience of the book - for, while The Bone Season isn’t always as slick as it could be, it is a great new fantasy. I think it probably asks more questions than it answers, and brings ideas to fantasy writing that I haven’t seen before. The Rephaim dose out plenty of detail about their history, but how much of it should Paige believe? What exactly are the Emim? Who are the Scarred Ones? What is freedom worth? And in the land of Scion, can anyone be truly free?

Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett

Eden: A planet shrouded in darkness. A colony living in stasis, unquestioningly repeating the annual ceremonies, living by the laws set five generations ago. Waiting for rescue. Waiting for Earth to return, to take them to a home they have never known. When will they come?

This is the world in which John Redlantern has grown up. Nobody questions the status quo. It is what it is. They do what they must to survive, to find food, though it gets harder every day as their numbers grow and their food sources dwindle. But John; John has different ideas. He thinks they should travel across Snowy Dark, explore beyond their safe circle, find out what other secrets Eden hides. But the Family Heads, Oldest and the Council, they live by the teachings of Angela: stay in Circle Valley and wait for Earth to come. This is what they were told and this is what they must do. Otherwise, when Earth comes, they will be left behind.

They have been waiting for 160 years and John, while he dreams of light and Earth just like everybody else does, can’t help but wonder: are they going to come at all? Probably not in his lifetime, he realises. He can’t help but question the laws and the reasoning behind them and, gradually, as his questions go ignored, he is compelled to force change, committing an act so heinous that even after he’s done it he can hardly believe what he has done. An act that causes ripples that become rifts that become chasms in understanding and tolerance, from this action and those that follow, the formerly serene – if hungry – family life is forever changed, changing both Family and himself beyond anything he could have foreseen.

A societal earthquake.

I love the way that Chris Beckett ever so subtly plays with language in Dark Eden, just slightly altering word forms and sentence structure here and there to help enforce the differences in this new world without alienating the reader from the world which we know. And I love the way he plays with his characters, circling around them and Family and Family’s origins before launching John fully onto his path; the way that he makes me want John to do the things he is compelled to do, yet simultaneously creating in John, through these acts and the changes he invokes, a character that you start to question.

Right at the beginning John tells us, “Never mind drowning or starving from lack of food, though. I was going to starve inside my head long before that, or drown in boredom, if I couldn’t make something happen in the world, something different, something more than just this.” (pg. 33) Does he do what he does out of sheer boredom? Later on it seems perhaps that this is so, yet I felt as a reader that the changes were absolutely necessary, especially as John and his new Family come up against the despicable David Redlantern, a truly nasty and hypocritical character I cannot help but hate with all of my soul. Why, when David is the one who introduces the concept of murder and rape to Family, is John the one who gets the blame for it? And why, when David criticizes John for introducing new thought and ideas to Family, is he so eager and willing to incorporate these supposedly hated things into his own new way of organizing Family?

With each new step into the unknown that John takes, others will hate him, yet they will eventually follow in his footsteps. And with each new step into the unknown that John takes, he gets closer to uncovering a secret that could either destroy Family or free them. Is John a hero or a destroyer of peace? A foresightful leader or a calculating dictator?

Whichever viewpoint you choose to take, Dark Eden is a fantastic new piece of world building. Winner of the 2013 Arthur C Clarke award; I’m quite excited by rumours of a follow-up. As John’s cousin Jeff says, “We are here. We really are here.” So you better get used to it.

The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

This is a book I have been waiting for for the last two years. The publication date was put back and put back, and put back again - and then an early reading copy landed on my desk (well, after a begging phone call to the very nice publisher, Orion). Was it worth the wait? Oh yes.

The Passage
The Twelve is part two of the story that Justin Cronin began in The Passage, one of the most incredible books I have ever read. The premise may sound old-hat, but the execution is fresh and original, and makes for truly compulsive reading.

A new virus has been stumbled upon in a remote forest, a virus which changes its host into a vampire-like creature. In a typical human response, the virus is sampled and studied and manipulated - and then injected into humans for experiment. A group of criminals on death row are on the receiving end; they are the first virals, no longer quite human. All of this we learn in the first quarter of the book, along with other things - the build-up to apocalypse, the event itself and how it comes to be, and those who are caught in the middle of it, both willingly and unwillingly. But then the story jumps, leaping forward almost one hundred years, to a survival colony.

The colony knows very little. They have their survival methods, ways of protecting themselves from the virals that pound at the gates when the sun goes down, and for the most part they get by, but they know they are on limited time and their power source is failing, and this is when Amy appears. To all appearances she is a fifteen year old girl who steps out of the desert one day as if from a mirage. The colonists cannot believe it. How has she survived on her own? Where did she come from? But the reader knows there is more to Amy than meets the eye: for she was there at the beginning, she was there when the viral scourge began a hundred years ago. She is traumatised, silent, but slowly she comes back to herself, and a small group from the colony set out with her to try and uncover their past and her past, and to find out if anyone else survives.

The Passage is written as an amalgamation of disparate stories which, at first, don’t seem to have much in common, but as time and reading goes by, they gradually link together into one immense and breathtaking experience. It's an adventure of epic proportions. Extremely well written and cleverly put together, the story barely lets up for even one minute. By the time I reached the end, my brain was almost fried by the immensity of the storyline - and then, just when it seemed like everything was pretty much concluded, Cronin throws in a nice little cliff hanger for book two.

The Twelve
For anyone who hasn’t read The Passage, ‘The Twelve’ refers to the apocalypse’s viral fathers: the twelve criminals who were experimented on at the start of the story, and changed, and then broke free to wreak their havoc upon the world, spreading the viral disease that makes vampires of men. The Twelve are the key to ending the scourge, the key to releasing the survivors from their terror.

As a book, The Twelve was very surprising, and not what I expected. It simultaneously continues the story begun in The Passage whilst creating a whole new story of its own. It's difficult to describe the storyline itself without giving too much away: Cronin has pieced The Twelve together in a similar, disparate way as he did The Passage, beginning with a set of individual, seemingly unconnected storylines which gradually coalesce into one, culminating in one grand event. To tell the story, I would have to begin with in the middle, and ruin the surprise.

The best I can do is this: The Twelve is a whole new aspect of the tale. From page one, it defied my expectations by not beginning where The Passage left off. There is a clever introduction, written as if it is Biblical text, that summarises the events of book one, but then the story goes back almost to the beginning, back to the time of the apocalypse itself, introducing a new set of characters. A little further in and the old characters pop up, but for them time has moved on, they have all grown up a little and lived a little more. They have fallen into lives and routines outside of the colony and outside of their journey undertaken in book one, but those lives are about to get shaken up all over again. I never imagined the story would go in the direction it takes, and that is a good thing: because I would never have imagined something as interesting as this.

The Twelve is similar and yet different to The Passage. It is extremely good, but it is not quite as good as The Passage. It is less journey-based, and thus has a different feel to it, and there was one storyline that I just didn’t 'get'. Whilst that one small thread did have an important role to play in the denouement, my ‘not quite following it’ didn’t take away from the face-down. Said face-down was also slightly more confused than the one at the end of book one - not quite as dramatic or revealing, perhaps, but fairly satisfactory. Ultimately, though, these are two very small things that can easily be forgotten amidst the awesomeness of the book as a whole - they only seem like an issue when compared to the perfection of The Passage.

I am left intrigued for book three, and looking forward to seeing where Mr. Cronin takes the story next. One of the things I have been thinking about most since finishing The Twelve is whether - or how - the rest of the world has been affected. Whilst reading The Passage, I simply assumed that the apocalypse had extended its fingers around the world, but after reading The Twelve I find myself wondering whether this is actually the case. Have the virals been limited to the American continent? If so, what has been going on in the rest of the world since? Even if they instituted a quarantine on the States, would they not have been able to see the survival colonies from satellites? And if so, why would they not help?

Mr. Cronin, I really hope you don’t make me wait too long for the next installment. Or, at the very least, no longer than the the two years I have waited for this one. Please?

The Rogue, by Trudi Canavan

This is a good, all-round fantasy. The second installment of Trudi Canavan’s Traitor Spy Trilogy, it lives up to all my expectations, following the threads on from where they left off at the end of The Ambassador’s Mission: Black Magician Sonea and her search through her home city in Kyralia for a rogue magician; Sonea’s son Lorkin, captured by the rebel ‘Traitors’ in the neighboring land of Sachaka; fellow magician Dannyl and his search for lost magical history, particularly the mystery behind Sachaka and Kyralia’s angst. And it introduces a new character, Lilia, a magical novice who is tricked into learning the forbidden ‘black’ magic by a conniving ‘friend’, and thus becomes embroiled in Sonea’s hunt.

I loved Trudi Canavan’s first books (The Black Magician Trilogy) and The Rogue has given me a craving to re-read this earlier work. The Rogue itself is well constructed and well paced. It is enjoyable, evenly pitched and, though not all-consuming, had me caught up in the story. There’s a good balance of little puzzles woven into the four different yet interlinked plot-lines, some of which get solved along the way, one or two left hanging for book three. As a whole, the story is very cleverly worked out because the reader isn’t left hanging, per se - it doesn’t finish on a major cliff-hanger, but there is enough left unresolved, or enough new ideas introduced toward the end, to make me want to keep reading the series.

My experience with Canavan is that the first book in her trilogies (see also The Age of Five Trilogy) tends to be a little slow to get going, as she sets up the political background, the characters, and their various threads. Book two then takes the story up a notch, furthering the intrigue and character development, before book three where it all really kicks off - the action becomes more intense as all the little threads start to weave together and the denouement approaches. Furthermore, while there are a handful of themes running through the storylines - in the case of The Rogue, ideas of social structure and equality vs inequality stand out - her novels aren’t about ground-breaking theories. They are comfortable, easy. Unchallenging, but with plenty to keep the reader interested, the story moving, the tensions and the puzzles building. I know what I’m going to get with a Trudi Canavan book, and I like that. Roll on August, then, when The Traitor Queen is released.