by John Grant
Here's an odd thing. Throughout the civilized world at the start of the 21st century the US fascination with the death penalty is widely regarded as a noxious practice, a barbaric hangover from earlier ages; and there's much debate even within the country as to its effectiveness and morality. Yet in Jackson's future, a full five hundred years hence, not only is capital punishment still practised, it's inflicted so frequently that it's just taken for granted, despite its complete pointlessness in the society he paints.
Anyway, Jim Robenalt, a pal of Thorndyke's who has cottoned on to the conspiracy, is framed for the murder of Ben Mitchell, a pal of both of them who likewise sniffed out the conspiracy. As a result Robenalt is condemned to die by being irreversibly "jumped" into the past of an hour ago, where he will eventually dissipate, as folk do. This galvanizes Thorndyke, his boss Hollock, Hollock's number one squeeze (who happens to be Secretary of State Lillian "Call Me Lillian" Dorr), Thorndyke's own squeeze Sharla Russell, Thorndyke's mathematician pal Quentin Cottle, Cottle's squeeze Ruth – those women are all first-class citizens with admirable minds, you understand, but for some reason not remotely connected with the fact that they're merely women and sexy as hell fall short of the geniushood displayed by their respective menfolk.
And so the novel rambles on until the conspirators are defeated in a maze of spelling errors, further wacky science and poor proofreading.
There's a good bit, too, marred only by Jackson's ignorance of the fact that nouns ending in "a" are likely to be plurals rather than singulars (throughout the book we're told that "jumpers" must seek out an individual strata of Beta Light, the word "stratum" clearly being, um, terra incognita). This good bit occurs when Thorndyke and Russell go to have a meal in a restaurant where customers can call up authentic scenes from the past as ambience (they choose the court of Henry VIII), and it occurs at the top of page 82 where the waiter tells them:
If you have need of any other services, please throw a resin-polymer rib bone at the candelabra in front of the King. You'll strike a sensor pad behind that spot that will signal someone from customer services. Enjoy.
Those four lines are something of an oasis for the reader, alas; if you want to get the best out of this book, rush to page 82 and read that top paragraph again and again and again. Elsewhere we discover how infernally difficult it is for characters actually to say their dialogue; by way of compensation they have the ability to chuckle, smile, smirk or laugh not just single words but whole sentences: "'If you don't mind my asking,' Quentin frowned", the words presumably appearing on his wrinkled forehead in Braille.
There are other good bits, but only for the unpardonably vindictive reader. Here's an example of the New Botany:
... A genetically engineered virus-sized organism that can be introduced into the stem cells of plants to migrate to their leaves, then bind with the plant's own genetic material to fundamentally alter its indigenous respiratory process. Instead of simply scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air, the altered plants will take in even the most virulent form of airborne pollution, break it down chemically into harmless components, and then excrete it into the soil where it will remain a harmless constituent of the earth.
"Shitting plants!" shuddered my wife, nervously skirting a potted geranium in our back yard. The New Ecology is not far behind:
What was it they called it? Political correctness? Can you imagine actually working under conditions where basic research was so heavily influenced by the personal prejudices of petty politicians who were bound and determined to make science conform to their own preconceived notions? The ozone layer wasn't affected by sunspots and other natural climatic processes ... just aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology. Well, we stopped the spray cans and changed cooling systems, but the ozone layer kept getting thinner. So we curtailed fossil fuel emissions and other byproducts of technological advancement, but still the problem worsened. It was only when the solutions became more and more perverse, and their anticipated beneficial effects farther and farther away, that the public finally began to see the pronouncements for what they were – tools to advance a private, social agenda.
Sort of makes you wonder why the commie bastards in authority are so keen to curtail your fundamental American freedom to light cigarettes in gas stations, doesn't it? And it makes you wonder about the ignorance of a mindset that has failed to notice the action taken on "aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology" was a brilliant success, reversing the dangerous depletion of the ozone layer. Or that thinks the need to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions has anything to do with the ozone layer. And, as for "tools to advance a private, social agenda", I have yet to find of these frightwing antiscientific conspiracy theorists able to identify plausibly exactly what that agenda might be.
Now, apart from the candelabrum/candelabra and stratum/strata problems, and the problem of the characters mystically smirking and grinning all those words, there are a number of others. For example, things emerge from the "bowls" of the earth, someone "pours" over a manuscript, "jumpers" are shot into the "breech of history" – I promise I'm not pulling your leg here – and all in all one begins to think that perhaps the publisher didn't bother putting a copy-editor through the text; at a level even below that, quite often there are double letter-spaces between words. Of course, it would be unjustifiably sceptical to suggest that the web-based publisher AmErica (www.publishamerica.com) was merely a vanity press economizing on the editing in order to make itself more effectively profitable.
Rummaging through the more cobwebbed recesses of his memory, your reviewer recalled the time about a year ago when AmErica was actively soliciting freelance editors and copy-editors to work with their authors; offered in lieu of a fee was a royalty share and so your reviewer, reckoning that each author could have only so many moms, abruptly lost interest. It may be that he was not alone in this or there may have been some other, completely unrelated reason, but AmErica no longer boasts to the authors it recruits about the advantages of having copy-editors. Quite the contrary, the press has new strengths:
Furthermore, you are always the intellectual owner of the book. No one is allowed to tamper with the text after you have made it final. Digital printing makes it technically possible to make changes to texts at any time, therefore your contract protects you against such outside tampering. You are your book's creator, writer, and owner.
Then, last but not least, you are entitled to having fun! It is important that you enjoy being a published writer. To have your book out and have other people buy and read it, is pure joy. It makes you feel proud and fulfilled. Your name and face are in the newspaper, people discuss your work and are impacted by what you wrote: all that is sheer pleasure. Enjoy it!
In other words, a great advantage of publishing your book with AmErica is that you won't have some clown correcting the spelling without your permission – or, in fact, at all. But at least it's obvious from the rest of the site that potential authors are not expected to pay for publication; one suspects it may be rather easy to gain acceptance of your book at AmErica, but at least there's none of the nonsense other, similar organizations promulgate about it being "fair" that authors "contribute to production costs".
Over the decades, this reviewer has sometimes wondered about the advantages of publishers having copy-editors. To be sure, having a paradigm of the trade like Nancy Webber or Katrina Whone or Lydia Darbyshire going through your text is a great boon; my bacon has been often saved. At the same time, not all copy-editors meet those same standards.
All such doubts about the advisability of using copy-editors were banished on reading Timeshift. This is a fairly short novel (211 pages, big print), yet it took me a long time to read because it is – to doff my aura of demure charity for just a moment – a mess. Struggling through the last forty pages or so was an ever-slowing task made possible only by the thought that the alternative was helping my wife re-wallpaper the landing. If you ignore the bad science and the bad grammar and the bad spelli
ng and the bad characterization and ... But you can't.
This reviewer has no wish to be unnecessarily cruel, but here is a book that should never have been published. That it has been – and that there is a sequel on the way – is a cause for great depression.
Or is it?
Like it or not – and most of the big publishers don't – there's a justified air of excitement at the moment about the "new publishing". Thanks to advances in printing technology, small presses are proliferating: it now costs only a fraction of what it did a mere decade ago to set oneself up as a publisher. At the same time, the big commercial houses have been forming themselves into ever-larger conglomerates with a redefined editorial brief: where once there was the faith that a good book would bring in the pennies, now there is the belief that only a strong media-related hook will make a genre-sf novel sell. The folly of this notion is symptomatized not just by the fact that, six months after publication, these sf novels are crowding out the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble but by the difficulty InfinityPlus's US Reviews Editor has in finding reviewers to take them off his hands – in other words, the difficulty he has even giving them away.
By contrast, what the new small presses are releasing is often very exciting. Timeshift is at the bottom end of the garbage pile, to be true, but it's not actually much worse – if for quite different reasons – than much of the stuff coming out of the commercial houses at the moment. Perhaps the price we have to pay for seeing good, un-commercially-adulterated novels from the small presses is the occasional Timeshift. If that's the case it's a price worth paying.
—Infinity Plus
The Murder Room
by P.D. James
Knopf, 432 pages, hardback, 2003
The small Dupayne Museum, on the edge of a large area of parkland, Hampstead Heath, in North London, houses exhibitions devoted to life in Britain between the two World Wars. Although the museum draws relatively few visitors, it does have one perennially popular attraction, the Murder Room, containing exhibits related to the most notorious murders of the period.
Old Max Dupayne, its founder, willed that his three children – Neville, Caroline and Marcus – should have unanimously to agree any important decision related to the museum, and what could be more important than that its lease is due for renewal? This is, in effect, a decision as to whether or not the museum should continue to exist, which Neville alone among the three feels strongly it should not.
Then Neville is murdered gruesomely in the museum garage, in a manner reminiscent of one of the killings celebrated in the Murder Room. Commander Adam Dalgleish and his officers of Scotland Yard's Special Investigation Squad are immediately called in; the crime is sensitive because one of the museum's staffers is a sleeper for MI5 – hence the prompt involvement of the SIS as opposed to a more routine squad. Before their investigation is done, another apparently copycat murder victim will be discovered – this time right inside the Murder Room itself – and many secrets will be laid bare.
The first 110 pages or so of this novel are taken up with a section called "The People and the Place." During this section almost nothing of relevance to the novel's plot takes place that could not be covered elsewhere in a few paragraphs. What we are treated to are, more or less, vastly expanded versions of the character notes that many writers make preparatory to undertaking a novel, so that they may ensure consistency of background and of behaviour. In the hands of a defter and more graceful writer than James, this long preamble might nonetheless be absorbing; however, James has always had a somewhat lumbering, drab prose style, so that for large tracts of this section one has the feeling of being subjected to some sort of literary endurance test.
And then, a few pages before the section's end, the plot starts.
This transition, however, does not curb James's urge to dollop further frequent bucketsful of exposition into her text. It seems at times that virtually every stray thought of, particularly, Dalgleish and his sidekick Miskin must be qualified by a ponderously long paragraph or three of explanation as to why they had this thought. It took a long time for me to work out why James should be indulging in this sort of apparent padding – this almost obsessive level of amplification of each action or thought – but finally I realized that it was because she was having difficulty getting her characters to come alive on the page. All these extraneous passages were attempts to conceal this; they were substitutes for characterization. Almost the sole character in the book who really does live and breathe is the museum's housekeeper, Tally; the rest, Dalgleish included, are essentially cyphers – collections of often stereotyped attributes rather than real people.
By the end of the book, the cumbersomeness of James's prose begins to work in her favor, in that by then a slow but unstoppable momentum has built up. It's arguably worth persisting with The Murder Room until that happens, but I suspect many readers will have abandoned the novel before then.
—Crescent Blues
Deadly Visions
by Roy Johansen
Bantam, 307 pages, paperback, 2003
Cop Joe Bailey used to be a professional magician and escapologist; he gave up that career to join the Atlanta PD as its one-man bunko squad – exposing fraudulent spiritualists and the like. His life is complicated by young daughter Nikki – whom he has reared as a single parent since the death of his wife some years before – and by the fact that, somewhere in the backstory, he had a torrid liaison with the only spiritualist whose claims he has been unable to disprove, Suzanne. Now Atlanta is being rocked by a series of bizarre murders, each with a different modus operandi – unusual for a serial killer – but each bearing enough in common with the rest that it's clear they're the work of a single perpetrator: the victims are prominent citizens, and each was tormented beforehand by mysterious voices.
Monica Gaines, host of a hugely popular psychic tv show, is brought in at the behest of a local lawmaker to assist the investigation, into which Joe is drafted both to keep an eye on her and to help out as he can. Initially he is mightily impressed by her seeming abilities, and his belief in her possible genuineness is bolstered when she herself is hospitalized as the victim of apparent spontaneous combustion – an event recorded by her hotel's security video. What he only slowly starts to realize is that there is much more at work here than psychic forces and a serial killer: there is also a covert espionage agenda involving the agencies of two different nations ...
Deadly Visions is often clumsily written; its characterization is at best tepid; its plot is ludicrous ... and yet, in a strange way, it's rather a delight to read. What it's excellent at doing is what it has been, in effect, paid to do: keep the pages turning. It's strongly reminiscent of the kind of midlist mass-market paperback pulp fiction that was very widely published thirty or so years ago but has now to a great extent disappeared: a rattling yarn that transcends all its flaws to offer thoroughly enjoyable, if strictly temporary, entertainment. As such, it is in its unpretentious way a better book than most of the ostentatiously published thriller hardbacks I've recently read – the ones marketed in the book-trade category "Bestseller" (whatever their eventual sales) with their embossed-print dust jackets and their screamingly huge author names and their expensively purchased cover quotes and all.
As an additional attraction, the author clearly knows his stuff when it comes to professional magic and fraudulent mediumship. Lengthy explanations of the attainment of seemingly impossible effects occasionally hijack the plot; in theory these infodumps should be infuriating distractions from the main thrust, but in fact they're fascinating in themselves.
Johansen may not soon be knocking at the doors of those who judge the various mystery genre awards, but with Deadly Visions he shows himself to be a fine practitioner of his less glamorous though nevertheless – in this reviewer's opinion – extremely estimable craft.
—Crescent Blues
Speak Now
by Kaylie Jones
Akashic, 260 pages, paperback, 2005
&n
bsp; This is a magnificent and entirely engrossing novel about the inability we all can on occasion share to reconcile ourselves with our pasts.
Clara Sverdlow is the daughter of Auschwitz-survivor immigrant father Viktor, a faded academic; her mother died long ago and Anna, her surrogate mother – although not, apparently, her father's lover – is another survivor of Auschwitz. Both Viktor and Anna are imprisoned in the cage of their nightmare past experience, with Viktor being further haunted by the guilt of his quasi-collaborationist role in the death camp. All Clara's life Viktor has self-centredly attempted to exorcise his guilt by in effect passing much of it off onto her through repeatedly recounting to her fragments of what went on there.
But there are further ways in which Viktor, with the acquiescence of Anna, has been, for all the love he undoubtedly feels for his daughter, an appalling father, not least through his encouragement of her teenaged – in fact, somewhat underaged – sexual relationship with Niko, of whom Viktor approved because the youth clearly relished Viktor's Auschwitz reminiscences so much. Even after Clara came to realize that her lover was brutal, sadistic scum and then later, worse, that he was dangerously psychopathic, it was difficult for her to overcome her father's resistance in order to push Niko out of her life.