Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (24 page)

—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

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.

Small wonder that now, in adulthood, Clara has become an alcoholic. When her condition threatens her ability to cope with the stresses of the New York battered-women refuge she's in charge of, she's sent to rehab, where she encounters the gentle, sensitive Mark. Love springs between them, and they rush into marriage. Yet the psychopath Niko, who all these years has been conducting his murders and other crimes on the West Coast, has never forgotten the one woman who ever succeeded in sloughing him, and the idea of recapturing or at least punishing Clara has become an obsession to him. And now he has returned to New York with the express aim of seeking her out ...

Clearly a main storyline of this novel follows in the footsteps of classic noir, but it's only
a
main storyline. Equally in the foreground is the tale of Clara's struggle to accept herself as a product of her past and thereby escape its clutches, something she must needs do if ever she's to become a whole person – and, not incidentally, if she's ever going to be able fully to fulfil her role as Mark's wife. It can by no means be taken for granted by the reader that she will in fact achieve these aims.

As Jones juggles the various strands of this many-layered novel with a skill one can only gasp at, it becomes steadily more moving, fascinating, absorbing, and even white-knuckle – all these at the same time. This is a monumentally impressive piece of work, and should certainly be on anybody's shortlist of the best thriller novels published in 2005.

—Crescent Blues

Dark Terrors 4

by Stephen Jones and David Sutton (editors)

Gollancz, 352 pages, hardback, 1998

There's a rather defensive introduction to this book by its editors, saying that many reviewers will disagree with their choice of one story or another but, dammit, they stand by what they've picked. This is a perfectly fair stance for the editors to have adopted; it is also a clear indication that what we can expect from this, the 4th Gollancz Book of Horror, is a bit of a mixed bag; and on top of that it is an invitation to the reviewer – well, this reviewer, anyway – to go through the book story by story rather than simply discuss the book as a whole.

So, here goes.

It is indeed a mixed bag. Very few of the stories are horror stories (none of the good ones are); rather, most are fantasies of varying degrees of darkness, generally not very dark.

19 stories.

Deep breath now.

"The Great Fall" by Richard Christian Matheson is a mercifully short squib which has resonances of the work of the author's father, Richard Matheson. "Normal Life" by Christopher Fowler seems to be based on the career of Dennis Nilsen, albeit generally hetero rather than homo; it's neatly enough written but the ending is a bit predictable. "The Wedding Present" by Neil Gaiman is a creepy psychological number that's the best thing I've read by him. "Never to be Heard" by Ramsey Campbell is again good, but seems to be crying out to be turned into a novel. "Tumbleweeds" by Donald R. Burleson has as its central idea the notion that, if you get up a dark alley with a tumbleweed, it's going to rip your throat out; this is not a worry that has hitherto had me lying awake at nights. "Family History" by Stephen Baxter is a contemporary Minotaur fantasy; his science fiction is better. "The Incredible True Facts in the Case" by David J. Schow presents a Jack the Ripper theory, but very clumsily; some of Schow's other work is very fine, so this was particularly disappointing. "Mr Guidry's Head" by Roberta Lannes is a very moving study of parenthood: highly recommended. "Inside the Cackle Factory" by Dennis Etchison is a professional piece: it reads well enough, but a half-hour later you've forgotten what it was about. "Entertaining Mr Orton" by Poppy Z. Brite is an exercise in gay (male) pornography; as either a horror or a fantasy story it has little to say. "The Country of Glass" by Joel Lane is about alcoholism and is very good indeed, except for its last paragraph. "My Pathology" by Lisa Tuttle is the first story by Tuttle I've read that I've not liked: she is one of our best writers. This one, though, just doesn't work – for me, at least. "Curing Hitler" by Thomas Tessier is a genuine chiller. "Weak End" by James Miller is a confused and confusing attempt to explain ... well, that's the trouble: at the end of it you're pretty certain there was something goddam profound going on here, but, er ... On the other hand, "Sullivan's Travails" by Jay Russell is superbly lucid: good fantasies about the movie industry are few and far between, but this is one of them (even though it's unkind about Veronica Lake, which in my book is akin to blasphemy). "The Suicide Pit" by Conrad Williams is just dull; a pity, because Williams can obviously write well. "Making Monsters" by Geoff Nicholson is a fascinating little piece about the inability of men to understand women. "A Place to Stay" by Michael Marshall Smith shows someone trying to write a fresh New Orleans vampire story; it is a colossal pity that horror and fantasy authors don't talk more to each other, because here Smith, whose ambitions for the story are admirably high, reinvents the wheel. And, last, "Suburban Blight" by Terry Lamsley is not only extremely long but so very bad that one can't really understand why Jones and Sutton thought to include it.

All in all, that predicted mixed bag, but a worthwhile anthology.

19 stories.

Phew!

Hope you took that deep breath.

—Samhain

The Tooth Fairy

by Graham Joyce

Signet, 342 pages, paperback, 1996

Once upon a time, back when the Beatles were God, there were three schoolboys who were all each other's best buddies. Then one of them, Sam, was visited by the Tooth Fairy – who proved to be not a cute androgyne with gauzy wings but, at least initially, a vast-cocked male with razor-sharp fangs and an interest in messing up every relationship Sam tried to form. Then the Tooth Fairy became – as he grew through adolescence and discovered great love for the horse-riding Alice – a female, ready to take on the form of either Alice or his buddy's beauty-queen sister Linda in his bed at nights. The Tooth Fairy is his nightmare, as he is the Tooth Fairy's; in many ways she deteriorates as he grows out of the age of nightmares.

Graham Joyce is adept at making one turn the pages, and he supplies plenty of chills as he tells his tales. This book is no exception to the rule, but there is a certain half-heartedness about it, as if he started out with a great idea but could never quite work out a proper resolution. The depiction of characters is highly variable – Alice lives on in the mind whereas the central figure, Sam, is never much more than a cypher, the main distinguishing feature of whose personality is his compulsive masturbation: he's a sort of Everyadolescent. A murder turns out not to have been a murder, although a quite different murdered body is discovered and never explained. There is some remarkably sloppy writing: "And with every minute urging the evening on to midnight, the leather football of anxiety inflating in Sam's stomach was pumped still further"; "The shocking stillness of the room wanted to blister and peel back like a layer of skin"; etc.

But make no mistake about Joyce's page-turning capacity: if you want a good fast and enjoyable read, this is certainly for you, and there are enough good ideas along the road to make you think about the book, and its ambience, long after you've finished reading it.

—Samhain