June, 2025 Reading: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” (Joseph Brodsky)

I have a number of promising volumes of poetry waiting for my attention.

Been busy for the past week but I shall get to them soon.

Watch this space...

Scarpetta 18: Port Mortuary, Patricia Cornwell

I read Port Mortuary while travelling back home from Copenhagen by train. These books are becoming increasingly easier to polish off in a single sitting, even if they seem to be getting longer. Mostly, I suspect, that’s because I know the character of the protagonist, Dr Kay Scarpetta, pretty well now after 18 novels, and also probably because the plots are beginning to settle into something of a rut. Again, a puzzling murder is the springboard to a conspiracy to attack Scarpetta’s profile, credibility and relationships.

Scarpetta has spent six months at Dover Air Force Base, where US casualties from the invasion of Iraq are shipped. Shortly before this, she had set up a new forensic centre in Cambridge (Massachusetts), and left it under the command of Dr Jack Fielding, a character familiar from earlier books. But when a body appears to have bled out while in the freezer in this new centre, and Fielding has gone AWOL, Scarpetta is helicoptered in to fix things.

Unfortunately, nothing looks good. The centre is falling apart, things cannot, er, hold. The dead man in the fridge was murdered using some strange weapon which left pockets of air in his chest cavity. Benton is treating a young man on the spectrum, a near-genius working in the R&D department of a nearby defence contractor, who has confessed to murder a small boy by hammering nails into his head. Benton is convinced the man has been manipulated into confessing - but by whom?

Scarpetta is also having flashbacks to the autopsy of two young women she performed for the US military in South Africa, back at the beginning of her career. She knows their murders were staged, likely by government agents to foment hatred - Cornwell seems to think Afrikaaners were black South Africans, which is, well, the exact opposite - but has always regretted following the party-line.

The murder of the boy and the man who bled in the fridge turn out to be linked, and clues point back to the defence contractor’s R&D lab. Fielding is also involved somehow. It all slots together neatly - Cornwell has been doing this for a while - but it does, unfortunately, fall back on Cornwell’s favourite solution: the super-intelligent psychopath who manipulates everyone around them. And Cornwell throws in an ending she over-used in the first few books of the series, where the villain of the piece attacks Scarpetta at home and is defeated.

Port Mortuary has moved back to first person, and is far more introspective than earlier books. There are a lot of words on the process, and means, of discovering the facts surrounding the two murders. Plus, everyone seems to know what’s going on, but is deliberately keeping Scarpetta in the dark. It makes for a frustrating read at points.

I’m not sure where to rank Port Mortuary among the Scarpetta books I’ve read. Too much in it feels like retcon, and Cornwell’s changes in narrative style - we’re eighteen books into the series here! - make it hard to get a real purchase on the series arc. Lucy’s inconsistent aging notwithstanding - cf Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone books, which stuck so rigorously to their internal chronology her last book, Y is for Yesterday published in 2017, was set in 1989. I do like the Scarpetta novels, I like their focus on the science and, increasingly, technology of forensic pathology. But they’re nowhere near as rigorous - perversely - than other series in the same space I like.

The Girl with All the Gifts, MR Carey

I’d heard this was zombie fiction, and I don’t like me zombie fiction no matter how you spin it, and that includes The Passage, so I had no great expectations for this, even though: a) it was nominated for the Clarke Award (but lost out to Station Eleven, a book I admit I did not like), b) I’ve met Mike Carey and he’s a nice guy, and c) it was on offer at 99p.

There’s a “but” implicit in all that, and yes, I did think The Girl with All the Gifts was actually pretty good. It opens firmly focused on the titular girl, Melanie, who is in some sort of research facility. Clearly, she’s not an ordinary girl - she has to be locked into a wheelchair for classes, she eats once a week (a bowl of worms), and the staff of the underground bunker where she lives is scared of her and her classmates.

Carey doles out his information slowly and carefully. The UK - the world - has collapsed following a plague of some sort, which has reduced the bulk of the population to flesh-eating zombies, or “hungries”. But Carey provides a rationale - the zombie fungus which infects ants, takes over their bodies and forces them to climb plants in order to provide a higher platform to spore (and which really exists)... has crossed the species barrier and infected humans.

Melanie is infected, but she is different. As are her classmates. She may crave human flesh, when triggered by pheromones, but she’s not mindless, she can think like a normal human being - if anything, she actually has a genius-level IQ.

Junkers - Mad Max-like survivalists - attack and overrun the military base holding Melanie and her classmates. Melanie escapes with Sergeant, the head of base security, a trooper, Dr Caldwell, the head of the research programme, and Miss Juneau, a teacher on whom Melanie has a crush. They must travel south to Beacon City, the sole bastion of uninfected humans in the UK.

As they make their way through a deserted London, populated only by “hungries”, they learn more about the fungus. Sadly, Caldwell is something of a Mengele figure, happy to sacrifice people if it leads her to a better understanding of the fungus, and her willingness to let the others die gets annoying quickly. Having said that, she does discover Melanie’s secret - although her proposed “cure” would kill Melanie, and the kids like her they’ve encountered as they travelled toward Beacon - but not necessarily save humanity.

I do not, as I said, like zombie fiction much, and The Girl with All the Gifts is pretty much a zombie novel. But the use of the real-life zombie fungus to explain it, the focus on the disease, rather than just using it as a mechanism for menace, lifts this novel above others of its ilk. I rather enjoyed it. A good Clarke nominee, I think.

GAZA: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah.

Obviously, Gaza has been on my mind of late and so when I spotted this volume in the poetry section at McNally-Robinson, I picked it up.

It's part of the City Lights "Pocket Poets Series" (which contains some fine volumes).

Nasser employs abstraction to communicate the incommunicable, seeking to do his best to come to terms with displacement, exile, rootlessness and brutality.

"I don't have a violin to spill my soul all at once on the sand..."

"...the eucalyptus tree became a canoe when it desired the sea..."

There are cycles of poems and short, aphoristic snippets, wise and, inevitably, tragic.

Recommended.

Kallocain, Karin Boye

I’m not a big fan of dystopian fiction, mostly because it all seems so obvious. Oh noes, things are bad, this is what they will look like if they carry on in the same vein… Which , of course, they rarely do. And there’s no real evidence dystopian fiction helps prevent what it describes - if anything, it’s the reverse, as pointed out by the oft-repeated meme about a Torment Nexus…

Of course, dystopia is in the eye of the beholder - or rather, the politics of one era define that era’s dystopia but may not hold true a decade or a generation later. (On a side-note, I find dystopias where the citizens have been programmed - chemically, technologically, or neuro-surgically - to be happy with their lot fascinating; Alastair Reynolds describes one such in one of his Glitter Band novels, John Varley has written something similar.)

Boye, a Swede who lived in Nazi Germany, wrote Kallocain in 1940, and it was very much a response to her experiences living there. In the world of Kallocain, there is a World State. But it has enemies. And a border. Which means it’s not a world state. But that’s just a name. Leo Kall is a chemist in a Chemistry City (which sounds very Soviet). He discovers a new truth serum, which he names after himself and for which the book is named. It allows the authorities to interrogate people while they are only thinking about crimes - pre-crime, as Philip Dick has it.

Kall uses his discovery to better his situation, and to destroy his superior, who he believes (wrongly) is having an affair with his wife. What follows is pretty much inevitable. There are hints the leaders live lives of luxury and freedom, which reads as a direct dig at the Nazi leadership. The general air of paranoia and deprivation echo both the USSR and the final years of the Nazi regime.

If you’ve read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four or Zamyatin’s We, there’s little here that’s different, although Kallocain is less brutal than the former and less science-fictional than the latter. It should by rights be held in as high regard as those two novels, but it wasn’t translated into English until 1966 and, of course, its author is female. A good historical dystopian novel that stands alongside better-known examples.

MODERN POETRY: much-lauded American poet Diane Seuss delivers a majestic collection.

Courageous, self-revelatory, unflinching.

What can you say about a writer who can close off a poem ("Rhapsody") with lines like:

"Don't be Jesus, be the Shroud.
Don't be the savior, be the stain."

Great book.

Her poem 'Romantic Poet' was going the rounds a few weeks ago. A. O. Scott featured it in the NYT. I hadn't read her before and it was delightful.

Finishing up a stunning Holocaust memoir, Do Not Cry When I Die by Renee Salt. You can search "Grandchild of the Holocaust" to find the BBC coverage of her story on Youtube.

My third book of great poetry this month: BIRDS, BEASTS AND A WORLD MADE NEW, a compilation of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimer Khlebnikov.

Translator Robert Chandler makes the canny decision to link two great poets geographically distant, living in totally different worlds, but sharing certain attributes. Both were harrowed by the experience of World War I and its aftermath. Both were short-lived but during their abbreviated time on this Earth managed to gain the respect and companionship of celebrated peers.

This is not cheerful stuff: Apollinaire gives us a soldier's eye view of trench warfare and in "Hunger', Khlebnikov has people stripping bark off trees and devouring clay to survive.

Hard to read, hard to put down.

Highly recommended.

BEFORE YOU KNOW IT: Prose Poems 1970-2005 by Louis Jenkins.

A midwestern writer, touched with magic.

I'd read one previous volume by Jenkins but this lengthy overview of his career only reinforces my high regard.

A poet and keen observer of his fellow human beings, a compilation of dreamy interludes you can revisit time and time again.

Further on this point, some examples of Jenkins' work:

https://www.prairiehome.org/story/2001/10/27/poems-by-louis-jenkins.html

WASTE LAND: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan.

Kaplan, like Niall Ferguson, is a conservative historian and commentator but I have a lot of time for him because years ago I read a lengthy article he authored for THE ATLANTIC called "The Coming Crisis". It addressed the optimists who thought the world would be transformed for the better after the fall of the communist bloc. I shared his pessimism and have returned to him occasionally ever since.

WASTE LAND is similarly downbeat--the institutions of governance derided and marginalized, technology transforming the political, social and cultural landscapes, social media creating a kind of "mob rule", a collective stupidity that cares little for due process and verifiable truths (btw, unlike conspiracy theories and mass delusions, the truth comes with footnotes). He sees parallels between our current situation and the last days of the Weimar Republic--extremism lurking in the wings.

Not a cheery read, but timely.

The This, Adam Roberts

It has been suggested good Bruce Willis movies are the ones where he’s bald, and in bad ones he has hair. Obviously the same wouldn’t work for Adam Roberts’s novels, because, well, his hairline may be receding but it doesn’t vary by book. I did think, however, something similar might operate with the titles of his novels - those which start with the word “the” were excellent, those without are merely good. But, according to Wikipedia, of Roberts’ twenty-four novels, only three have the definite article as the first word in their title…

True, I liked two of them, including The This; but I’ve not read the third. And, to be honest, I did like some of the ones without an initial “the”. So, not a good theory then. I suppose I was trying to find a reason why I liked The Thing Itself and The This so much more than the other novels I’d read by Roberts. The answer was, of course, there in the books: they are explicitly explorations of the ideas of individual philosophers, Kant and Hegel, respectively. What I know about philosophy and philosophers can be written on a small post-it note, so perhaps it’s the discipline which hewing to the particular philosopher’s works has forced on Roberts - sort of like Oulipo, I guess - which has, to my mind, produced works of science fiction I find I much prefer.

On the other hand…

The title refers to a company which creates a hands-free app for social media. In the future, a war between Hive Mind Theta, the end-result of all those people having the hands-free social media client implanted in their brains, and the rest of humanity takes place in orbit about Venus, which HMΘ are intending to terraform.

The two main narratives are set around a century apart. In the very near future, Rich Rigby, a freelance journalist, interviews a PR person from The This. The company then sets out to recruit him to their network, so intently it draws the attention of, er, HMG. They persuade him to join The This, but he’ll have a computer virus embedded in his brain. This will allow the authorities to spy on the hive mind.

Then there’s Adan Vergara, a none-too-bright New Yorker of a century or so after Rigby, who is cut off by his mother and has to join the military. They’re fighting HMΘ, but Vergara seems to be able to shutdown HMΘ droids on the battlefield simply by uttering a single gnomic phrase. He was told this phrase by someone, or something, who hacked his Phene (a semi-aware sexbot, essentially), which Adan profoundly loves.

As the war ends, Adan is pulled into the far distant future, where he meets the embodiment of Hegelian world spirit, which was threatened by the existence of the hive mind. He is told how he, and Rich Rigby, helped put humanity back on track, so the universe would end with a Prime Mover as intended.

As I read the final section of The This, I was reminded of AE van Vogt’s The Universe Maker, where the hero is pulled into the far distant future to have the plot of the novel explained to him by a giant space brain. The This is, of course, considerably better written, and a “novelisation” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is hardly the same as Van Vogt’s crackpot science and dream-inspired haphazard plotting.

To be honest, I was more taken with Rigby’s and Vergara’s narratives. The opening section, a piece of experimental prose, was good, but experimental prose is best in small doses. But Rigby and Vergana - it’s superior prose. I do wonder how much of Roberts’s The Black Prince project, the completion of an unfinished novel by Anthony Burgess, rubbed off on The This, because there’s a distinct Burgessian feel to the language. I also suspect one of the earlier sections, which features a string of social media posts as marginalia, was included only so Roberts could include some of his bad Twitter jokes - but perhaps that’s unkind.

The This is the best of Roberts’s novels I’ve read so far (which is around half of them). Recommended.

>13 iansales: I tried really, really hard to figure out how anyone could prefer Willis' baldie-era masterpieces like Survive the Game, Midnight in the Switchgrass and Fortress & Fortress: Sniper's Eye over those hairy Die Hards of yesteryear that originally made him a household name. I failed. Miserably.

CATCHPENNY, by Charlie Huston.

I was at least halfway through this novel before I realized Huston also authored another oddball favorite of mine, THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH.

CATCHPENNY shows similar originality and entertainment value. A dark fantasy, with a wise sharp edge.

Recommended.

>14 supercell: Ha! I got it back to front. You're right, it's actually the other way round. Oops. I remember reading it in Nick Lowe's Mutant Popcorn column in Interzone years and years ago. I obviously remembered it incorrectly.

Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. (It has always puzzled me that books can be shortlisted for the Booker in their year of publication, sometimes before they’re even published - but, of course, the award is totally fair and impartial, of course.) And (breaking out of parentheses) I can hardly point to Quartet in Autumn as evidence, as it’s apparently unlike Pym’s previous work (so much so, she’d been unable to sell a novel for fifteen years).

Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin work in an office for a company in London. They have worked there for many years. The novel doesn’t explain what they actually do - although apparently the rest of the company, as well as the author, have no idea either. All are in their sixties - in fact, the two women retire halfway through the novel (women retired at 60 until 2010). You see what Pym did there with her title: “in autumn” means the “autumn” of the lives of her quartet of protagonists. Clever, that.

The four are lonely and mean-spirited. Edwin is active - although perhaps “interfering” would be a better word - in his local church. High Anglican, I think. Norman lives in a bedsit, and seems to have no hobbies other than the occasional flutter. Letty also lives in a bedsit, and seems the most active and pleasant of the four. When the house she shares is bought by a Nigerian reverend, Letty decides to move. (Some racism here, although Letty does like the Nigerian family.) Marcia is a hoarder, and grows increasingly frail following a mastectomy.

The UK in the 1970s was a mostly grim place. I remember visiting London in 1975 or 1976 (I vividly recall reading a Tarzan annual containing a story in which Tarzan makes a special fireproof suit so he can walk through flames; unfortunately, the covers for the Tarzan annual in 1975 and 1976 are very similar, so I’m not sure which annual it was in). We stayed in a hotel somewhere in the centre, with a shared bathroom on each floor and a TV lounge.

Pym’s depiction of London in 1977 reminds me of that hotel, and the dourness of it all is reinforced by her four characters. They’re petty and narrow-minded. Even the supporting cast - such as Marcia’s visiting social worker, or her neighbours - are snide and contemptible. It makes for an unpleasant read. There’s a thing you sometimes see in British television and films from the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, especially those set in London, where the city is plainly culturally and politically important globally, but Londoners live small lives of impotence, pettiness and middle-class scrimping. Quartet in Autumn documents the latter but ignores the former. I didn’t like it.

Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree Jr

Tiptree, whose real name was Alice Sheldon, not only convinced the science fiction world she was a male writer for much of her career, she also wrote a number of stone cold classic science fiction short stories. I am definitely a fan of her short fiction. She only wrote two novels, however: Up the Walls of the World, published in 1978, and Brightness Falls from the Air in 1985. This was my first read of Tiptree at novel-length.

The title refers to the “walls” of a vast maelstrom in the atmosphere of a gas giant, Tyree. It is inhabited by huge manta ray-like aliens, who communicate using light but also seem to experience some radiation as “sound”. It takes a while before the synaesthesia Triptree uses makes sense, and I’m not entirely convinced it, and the fact the males nurture the young, makes the aliens as, well, alien as Tiptree intended.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Dr Dan Dann (yes, really) is the medical support for a US Navy-sponsored experiment in ESP involving a handful of varied subjects - a pair of identical twins, two teenage girls, a a matronly housewife, an embittered dwarf, and a somewhat dim-witted young man. The experiment is moved to a remote Navy camp, when the twins are used to test telepathic communication between land and a submarine.

A third narrative, written entirely in CAPITALS, which proves really irritating to read, is the stream of consciousness of some sort of distributed interstellar intelligence, which has been destroying stars.

The Destroyer’s attack on Tyree’s star prompts the aliens to attempt to take over the minds of Earth’s humans, and a “test mission” results in some of those involved in the Navy experiment to find themselves in alien bodies on Tyree. One of the experiment’s staff, however, a POC computer programmer instead finds herself in the Destroyer. Which she tries to control, using her knowledge of programming.

There are things to like in Up the Walls of the World, but I’m puzzled at the praise given to the novel around the time it was published. I get that a novel from Tiptree, a controversial figure and a well-known writer of top-notch science fiction short stories, is worthy of serious consideration… But I suspect time hasn’t been especially kind to the book. The descriptions of Tyree are good, and its inhabitants are original and well-presented - but not all that, well, alien. Dr Dan Dann (yes, really) is very much a typical narrator for US science fiction of the time (and Tiptree does well at channelling her inner Jubal Harshaw), and her POC character is unusual for the late 1970s and handled sensitively.

As I read Up the Walls of the World, I couldn’t help thinking of CJ Cherryh’s Voyager in Night, published six years later in 1984, wasn’t partly written in response. It’s another novel that hasn’t quite survived the millennium. Nonetheless, I still recommended reading everything Tiptree wrote.

ATAVISTS, the latest short story collection by Lydia Millet.

I liked the interlocking nature of the stories, the characterizations were sound and the writing impressive.

But with the exception of two or three stories, the tales tended to end with the sound of air being released--whatever ideas she'd been pursuing inexplicably deflating, leaving nothing notable or memorable, the final little "pop" that the best stories evoke.

"Pastoralist" was one exception, told from the point of view of a high functional psychopath who delights in wooing and dumping women, indifferent to the damage and pain he inflicts on them.

Millet is an astute observer of human nature and there is much to admire in ATAVISTS. I will certainly not shy away from reading more of her work.

J.L. Carr's A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY: a short, poignant novel, overflowing with melancholy and regret.

Had been passing over it for years, finally just plucked it up and had at it.

Interested in the film adaptation, with Kenneth Branagh--anyone see it?

Here are my May readings. Better late than never!

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: This is a portrait of the artist as a young milenial, or late gen xer to be precise. The organizing concept is simple but rich with resonance. Heti took sentences from her diaries and arranged them alphabetically. Some sentences work as aphorisms. Other are like tweets. Some are verses. Reading feels like scrolling, like looking at a social media feed. It has the energy of a late 20's, early 30's life. First time I tried it didn't care for it. Gave it a second try a few weeks later and was pleasantly amused.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner: This is what they call a novel of ideas. In this case many of the ideas are intriguing, but to be fair most just went over my head. Not satisfying dramatically. Love Kushner though. Super smart writer.

Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel: Short, simple stories, well written. A bit too careful for my taste.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: The first third was absolutely brilliant. It was ambitious and it was inspired. It included some of the best writing I've seen this year. Then the book turned smaller and smaller. It was not about a generation, it was not about a historical period. It was about a not very likeable narrator and her friend. Meh.

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux: Kind of a mixed bag. The book leaves you with a sense of abundance. Theroux himself though is not the most likeable of travel companions.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle: Fun little gothic read. I was confused by the ending and think that maybe it would've been stronger as a short story. Worth checking out though.

Last book of the month, a selection of essays and reviews by music journalist Mikal Gilmore, NIGHT BEAT: A SHADOW HISTORY OF ROCK & ROLL.

Gilmore covers most of my favorites bands, like the Clash, Sex Pistols, Joy Division, his prose intelligent and well-honed, his opinions deeply considered and well argued.

Excellent cross-section of his work.