wot i red on my hols by alan robson (septem novem ber)

Seven of Nine

I remember reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet when it was first published a decade or so ago. Now it’s a decade or so later and I find that I remember almost nothing about it except that I have a vague sense that I really rather enjoyed it. Recently the story has been turning up on recommended reading lists that have been published on various discussion groups where I lurk unseen. So I decided to read it again in order to find out what I might have been missing.

And I hugely enjoyed it all over again…

Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, a patched-up space ship built from bits and pieces of junk. But at least it gives her somewhere to live, somewhere to catch her breath as the ship relentlessly adds more and more distance between her and a past that she is trying to escape. What could possibly go wrong?

I must admit that not much happens in the book. Oh there’s the odd incident or three, but mostly the book is just members of the Wayfarer’s crew (both human and non-human) talking to each other and to Rosemary as they show her how things work. And that’s the book’s major strength for the ship and its crew are extraordinarily and endlessly fascinating. Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy – everyone and everything is gloriously eccentric. The ship makes a precarious living by tunnelling wormholes through space. Normally that’s a fairly routine task, but things threaten to turn sour and dangerous when the ship is offered the job of a lifetime. It will make them rich, if they manage to survive. All they have to do is build a tunnel that will require them "to boldly go where no man has gone before". So to speak…

The book starts off with the assumption that living beings are essentially good-hearted. The better side of human and alien nature is considered to be the norm and the story takes off from there. The clever characterization is the story’s main strength as indeed it has to be when the bulk of the story is little more than the characters talking to each other. Rosemary, Sissex and Dr. Chef are perhaps the most well-rounded. Ashby, the captain, is presented as a clever manipulator (though not a cynical one) as he schemes to get his crew cooperating with each other (and with him) to make the ship run smoothly. Kizzy and Jenks are the engineers tasked with keeping the ship’s ancient, cobbled together systems running smoothly. Kizzy in particular is a constant comic relief delight. Jenks runs her a close second, particularly given his not quite secret relationship with the ship’s A.I., known to one and all as Lovelace. Corbin is the ship’s very grumpy and anti-social algae biologist who keeps the fuel running. Somehow (it’s never explained exactly how unless I blinked and missed it) the biological algae is a vital component of the ship’s space drive, Dr. Chef is both the cook and the medical staff, Sissix is the reptilian pilot and Ohan is a virus-merged Sianat pair, the only ones (yes, Ohan is a plural being) among the crew who can compute the complex physics required to tunnel through space.

In addition to the cleverness of the structure and the writing, the story also has interesting things to say about a number of complicated and sometimes rather subtle ideas revolving around individual and collective safety, responsibility and defence, a living being’s right-to-die, and the psychological problems of identity, sexuality and the necessity to control violence. Then it asks how these things can and must be compromised and lived with for the sake of the greater good of the community.

In short, this is a book whose audience will be readers who enjoy character-driven stories that make them think. The envisioning of alien cultures and the philosophical problems these things create are  breath of fresh air in comparison to the superficial thud and blunder of the more straightforward space operas that tend to be the norm these days.

* * * *

The Shadow Step is the third novel in Mark Billingham’s hilarious series about DS Declan Miller, the Blackpool detective whose hobby is ballroom dancing. The shadow step of the title describes a subtle dancing technique taken simultaneously by a pair of dancers leaving them facing the same direction, one of them just behind the other and slightly shifted leftwards, thus standing in the shadow of the first. It’s an extraordinarily difficult manoeuvre which demonstrates a synchronized elegance. It showcases a couple who are in near telepathic harmony with one another. It does not normally end with someone stone-dead in a lake. But there’s always an exception to every rule.

The story starts in the park with two dog walkers. A thug in nominal charge of two out of control hounds takes it upon himself to menace a small sausage dog and his dad. Fortunately for the dachshund, the thug trips over his own dog and falls into the lake where his body is discovered later in the day. The man and his sausage dog go home, grateful to have escaped so easily.

When news about the body begins to circulate, the man and his sausage dog confess to the killing despite the fact that the police aren’t looking for a murderer because the post mortem shows that the dead man hit his head on a rock when he fell in the lake and that therefore no murder has been committed.

Unfortunately, the dead man turns out to have been a small cog in a bigger drug-dealing wheel and his death attracts the attention of the paranoid Queenpin of the Blackpool drug scene. She is convinced that enemies are plotting to take over her empire and nothing that Declan says will convince her otherwise. The man and his sausage dog have to go into hiding to escape her wrath. It isn’t long before a real murder takes place, albeit more by accident than by design. This added complication, together with an oddly attractive pair of ceramic leopards and the lingering smell from the local biscuit factory all mean that Miller will need all the help he can get from his dead wife in order to get to the bottom of this complex case as he stands there in the perfect shadow step position pulling strings...

Actually, who cares about the plot? It’s largely an irrelevance, being merely a vehicle for the jokes, and trust me the jokes come thick and fast and very funny. Of course if the plot wasn’t there at all the jokes wouldn’t work so to that extent I suppose it does matter. But all the way through Mark Billingham remains in perfect control of what turns out to be a very complex story indeed. Never mind, all the loose ends are neatly knotted together as the story winds to its conclusion and, as a bonus, Miller manages to satisfy a lifetime’s ambition when he gets to sit in the driver’s seat of the big mower that keeps the grass in the park well trimmed. Well it did before Miller drove it…

* * * *

Direct Action by Stephen Leather is the 23^rd novel he has written about Dan "Spider" Shepherd.  According to a note on his website, his usual publishers refused to accept the book, feeling that not only did it examine some rather dangerous ideas, it also put certain demographics under the microscope to the extent that "...[the] demographics were being negatively described". This despite the fact that the negativity just highlighted individuals who were themselves guilty of rape, child grooming, drug dealing and murder! Presumably that’s where the publishers saw their major market share and they didn’t want to lose it. Fair enough, I suppose, though perhaps somewhat short-sighted. Rather than let the book languish in limbo, Stephen Leather decided to self publish it.

The basic premise is that across Britain too many violent criminals are seen to be walking free – when they come to trial sharp-witted defence lawyers and (seemingly) soft hearted judges conspire to let them off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket. A groundswell of public fury is becoming more and more vocal, and more and more angry at what is perceived to be a failure of the justice system.

A vigilante group who call themselves the New Crusaders have taken it upon themselves to hunt down those criminals who have slipped through the net. Then the Crusaders mete out what they consider to be more appropriate punishments for the crimes those people have committed in place of the token sentences handed down by the courts. The sentences implemented by the New Crusaders are generally painful, somewhat barbaric and may include a grotesque death penalty. All the punishments are live-streamed on social media pour encourager les autres.

The live streams have become hugely popular with the public at large who mostly think of the New Crusaders as heroes. But to the government they are simply criminals, perhaps even terrorists. Shepherd is tasked with infiltrating the group and bringing their home-made brand of vigilante justice to an end.

If that’s all there was to the plot then probably the publishers would have been perfectly justified in refusing to publish the book. The plot as I’ve described it so far could all too easily be seen as little more than an apologia for raving ultra-right wing loonies who want to take the law into their own hands, convinced that they themselves know better than those who are actually charged with administering the law as it is written. After all, everybody knows that in the real world social media overflow with unthinking basement-dwelling bigots who would, vocally at least, support all the ideas espoused by the New Crusaders – eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. It says so in the Bible, for goodness’ sake. It’s a simple extrapolation from that viewpoint to the situation described in the novel.

But there’s a very clever twist in Stephen Leather’s tale. Certainly the New Crusaders firmly believe in what they are doing but it eventually becomes clear to Shepherd, and therefore to the reader, that the Crusaders are themselves being manipulated by a much more subtle puppet-master who, unknown to the Crusaders, is pulling their strings off stage, taking advantage of the growing ultra-right bigotry in the country in order to implement their own much more nefarious and devious agenda. Shepherd finds himself faced with two problems – he has to destroy the New Crusaders (or at least neutralise them and their influence) and at the same time he has to deal with the deeper conspiracy that inspired them in the first place.

Needless to say he succeeds because he’s Dan Shepherd and he always does. But that isn’t the point – the point is that the novel is much, much more than the simple bit of ultra-right wing wish fulfilment that Stephen Leather’s publishers considered it to be. I can only assume that they didn’t read the manuscript all the way through to the end.

* * * *

I read four novels by T.  M. Payne this month. The first three were brilliant – they grabbed my attention and held me transfixed all the way through to the end. But the fourth book was so unutterably stupid that I really had to force myself to finish it, and now I’m seriously considering not reading the fifth novel in the series in case it turns out to be even more dumb than the fourth…

The books are all set in and around Liverpool. They are often quite funny – Liverpudlians (Scousers) have a sardonically humorous turn of phrase that is second only to that of Glaswegians (Weegies). The stories describe cases that are investigated by one Detective Inspector Sheridan Holler. Sheridan herself is a driven person. Thirty years ago, when she and her brother were just children, her brother was murdered. The police never found out who killed the child and the case has long ago gone cold. But her brother’s death was what inspired Sheridan to join the police force in the first place and, in the back of her mind, she has always hoped that one day she will find out who killed him.

This thread of motivation is an underlying theme in all the novels and when Sheridan does eventually find her brother’s killer the solution to the mystery does not bring her any real peace of mind for it turns out that the murderer had been hiding in plain sight all along. So it goes…

Temperamentally Sheridan is well suited to a career in the police. She has a twisted and very insightful mind that can extrapolate plausible scenarios from the flimsiest of hints, the barest trace of a clue. Her instincts are (mostly) sound and her colleagues respect her for them.

And that’s what made the first three books so much fun to read. Watching Sheridan zero in on the culprits is a never ending joy. Sheridan’s private life also adds an enjoyable dimension to the stories. Her interactions with her partner’s cat are an absolute delight (you might find them less than convincing, if so then clearly you have never lived with a cat).

In the first novel. Long Time Dead, a decayed corpse turns up in a cemetery. Nothing odd about that you might say. After all, aren’t cemeteries where corpses normally go to decay?  But this one is rather odd. It has been murdered and then buried on top of the legitimate owner of the grave and it clearly doesn’t belong there at all. Further investigation finds Sheridan reopening not one but two cold cases. Seven years before the body was found, two women had been gunned down. One died and one was severely injured. The only suspect at the time was a drug dealer called John Lively who vanished without trace after the shooting. However DNA analysis confirms that the body in the cemetery is definitely John Lively himself, which raises the interesting possibility that perhaps Lively’s killer was actually the real gunman. The game’s afoot! And the final solution to the case is ingenious, clever and, in retrospect, perfectly obvious. But that’s how hindsight works, isn’t it?

The second and third novels are equally as quirky and equally as much fun in the working out of the problem. But then we come to Count the Dead, the unbelievably dire fourth book in the series. I’m going to reveal a spoiler in my discussion of the story, but it’s only a spoiler because Sheridan doesn’t realise what is actually going on until quite a long way into the book.

There is a serial killer at large in Liverpool who is obsessed with the value of pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. 3.14159…

Every 22^nd of July the murderer kills the number of people indicated by the next digit of pi. On his first outing he killed 3 people. Then he seriously injured another one to "make a point" as he is heard to mutter to the victim. A year later he killed 1 person. A year later he killed 4, a year after that he killed 1 person and a year after that he set himself up to kill 5 people, but that’s when Sheridan caught him, so that’s when the killings stopped. Probably it’s just as well because if she hadn’t caught him he’d have had to kill 9 people the following year, not an easy task to organise and perform in a single day. Quite a logistical nightmare in fact…

The premise of a pi-obsessed maniac is so unutterably stupid that the story never quite manages to recover from it. From that point on it is all down hill.

The pi-man chooses to kill on 22^nd of July every year because that day is pi-day – the fraction 22 over 7 is a very close approximation to the actual value of pi and the 22^nd day of the 7^th month is generally written as 22/7. So that’s the day that pi is celebrated, and that’s the day that the killer kills.

Of course his cunning plan wouldn’t work in the USA, Ethiopia or Eritrea because those countries write their dates as mm/dd/yy. So to them 22/7 is the 7^th day of the 22^nd month which simply doesn’t exist as far as they are concerned. Consequently in those countries pi-day is celebrated on the 14^th March because the first three digits of pi are 3.14 and 3/14 in mm/dd format becomes March 14^th. I don’t think that Ethiopia and Eritrea care very much about pi-day (certainly they never seem to make much of a fuss about it) and so the USA is really the only country that ever celebrates pi-day on 14^th March. Everybody else in the world (those of us who care about pi-day anyway) celebrate it on 22^nd July. Clearly it is a proud and lonely thing to be an American on 14^th March...

Fortunately for Sheridan’s peace of mind, the killer is English…

What, you may ask yourself, does the pi-man do with himself on days that are not the 22^nd July? Well, it seems that he spends much of his time constructing elaborate and recondite clues about his upcoming plans which he mockingly sends off to the police. He taunts them with hints about his ideology because he is secure in the knowledge that he is much more clever than the bumbling plods and he knows that they will never be able to work out what he is telling them. Can’t catch me for a penny cup of tea! Unfortunately for him, Sheridan is anything but a bumbling plod and she manages to make sense of the hints he is dropping and eventually she is able to work out his whole nefarious scheme. So there! Take That!

My suspension of disbelief became more and more unwilling as this whole sorry bundle of nonsense played out on page after tedious page. It really was quite a struggle to finish the book.

So do yourself a favour and instead of reading Count the Dead, go and listen to Kate Bush singing pi – it’s a track from her 2005 album Aerial in which she sings the value of pi to 78 decimal places and then, later in the song for mysterious reasons of her own, she sings its value from its 101st to its 137th decimal place.. It’s a brilliant song, lots of fun and very cleverly arranged. It’s much, much, much more entertaining than T. M. Payne’s ridiculous novel.