Category Archive: Fiction
Neuromancer
Mr Gibson
(William Gibson). I thought that, having read Neal Stephenson and Philip K. Dick, I knew all about cyberpunk and would find Mr Gibson’s most famous book old-fashioned and dull. Wrong. Mr Gibson invented it all. This book is even referenced ( via a bendy, circular world) in the recent blockbuster, Interstellar. Read it.
Continue Reading →The Crimson Petal and the White
Petals & Thorns. Both good and bad.
(Image by Y Nekonomania)
(Michel Faber) I have never understood the concept of “beach”, “holiday”, or “summer” reading. The idea seems to be that, for some reason, when my toes are being lapped by a foreign sea, I want to read the sort of rubbish which I would not give shelf space to at home. Because my feet are damp, my brain must be too. Being the gullible type, I have fallen for this publishers’ spin in the past. I have packed “light”, much vaunted contemporary fiction in my carry-on bag and have optimistically bent back the first of the 600 or so pages as the A380 taxis. By the…
Continue Reading →A House and its Head
(by I Compton-Burnett) Ivy Compton-Burnett* must have had a strange family life (just look at her hair). She was the seventh of her father’s children and the first of her (less than affectionate) mother’s five. A brother died of pneumonia, another on the Somme. Two of her sisters (“Baby” and “Topsy”) committed suicide together one Christmas Day. None of the twelve had children. None of the girls married. Certainly her books are about strange families. The Edgeworth family of A House and its Head is unhappy, decidedly in its own way. The solipsistic father Duncan is oblivious to his (first) wife’s misery and to…
Continue Reading →The Clearing House
Are we over the publishing tactic of “tease, obfuscate, hit-and-run”? Reports (and comma errors) are rife over the discovery of a Harper Lee spin-off, Go Set a Watchman, with Scout Finch now grown up and sittin’ at the back of the bus. The latest in a long line of similar finds, from The Original of Laura (nb: notes on index cards, not a novel) and similar teases over Kafka and J. D. Salinger, this has the added frisson of publication in the author’s lifetime. TVC can’t wait for future unearthed treasures: Luke Rhinehart’s Snake Eyes; J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter Goes to…
Continue Reading →The Good Terrorist
Truth
(Doris Lessing) Once a vice is renounced, a delusion pricked, one looks back at it with second sight. It took the 1956 Hungarian massacre, in which Soviets deployed tanks against civilians, to budge Doris Lessing to resign from the British Communist Party. Fierce and radical, she could not resist casting some light on the leftish radicals of a new era – Thatcher’s Britain. It is to her credit that we are engaged by the story of the dreariest, most self-centred, whiniest, galactically feckless soft cell in the history of modern terrorism. Their ‘earth mother’, Alice Mellings, a thirty-something going on…
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