Three young women, a lone scientist dedicated to saving snails and two sisters who will try any means to win back their mother, have signed up as supposed nubile prizes in a bridal agency for visiting foreigners. The women’s impulsive kidnapping of thirteen bachelors using Yeva’s laboratory van is temerarious enough, but this is Ukraine, it’s February 2022, and as the old vehicle rumbles through the forest, the already off-kilter romance tour is sucker-punched by Russia’s full-scale invasion. And the narrative slides off like the van on winter ice.
 
This is, in effect, what happened to Maria Reva’s novel satirizing the exploitative trade in—allegedly—traditional, submissive Ukrainian brides.  She had to decide, halfway through the story, with the country of her birth suddenly at war, how to continue writing. The book, unsurprisingly, takes a radical turn. The narrative is abandoned, replaced by fictional correspondence between the author and her editor, with a magazine that objects to the gallows humour of an essay when this is precisely faithful to the conversations taking place in Kyiv’s air raid shelters, and a surreal conversation with Yurt Makers. Reva even tosses out a derisory happy ending and an Acknowledgments page, before the original story is taken up again, with the difference that everything has changed.
 
Russian tanks and infantry are streaming towards Ukraine’s major cities, already under aerial bombardment. Meanwhile, Reva still has Yeva and the two sisters with a bunch of foreign men locked in the campervan. And Yeva has a particular obsession with a unique snail for which she seeks a mate, lest it become one more endling. An endling being the very last living example of a species. Yeva, being asexual, knows what it is like to feel the end of a certain evolutionary line. The metaphor of the danger of independent Ukraine being eradicated does not need spelling out.
 
War is a natural habitat for the absurd. As the van lurches from one direction to another, so does the fate and narrative of its characters, including the hopelessly romantic Pasha, one of the trapped bachelors, a native-born Ukrainian who (like Reva, the author) has grown up in Canada.
 
Fragments of memory, or imagined memory, alternative versions of their attempt to rescue a grandfather in besieged Kherson, who refuses to leave his apartment, remind us that this is and can be is no normal storytelling. Is he the grandfather of the two sisters? Or of the owner of the bridal agency? Those who have read about her will know that we are really reading about Maria Reva’s own desperate concern for her own grandfather in that city, bombed and occupied by the Russians, before being liberated, and fighting still for its survival.
 
The changing versions of the story reflect the real uncertainty. What is certain is the women’s “shared blood” and a bond amidst the emergency.

Son muchas las cosas que me han gustado de este libro.
 
En el pasado, me ha costado mucho encontrar escritores españoles con los que conectar. He empezado libros en español y los he encontrado inaccesibles, demasiado literarios, o que intentaban impresionar demasiado, pesadamente irónicos, floridos o simplemente decepcionantes. Probablemente porque mi español no estaba a la altura. Con este libro, he encontrado a alguien y un estilo de escritura con los que me entiendo. Rosa Montero tiene claro lo que quiere comunicar. Tiene ritmo. Funciona.
 
Si me sitúan en un mundo que recuerde remotamente a Blade Runner, mi mente tiende a crear su propia atmósfera. El título por sí solo me atrajo, citando el inesperado y trágico discurso de Batty al final de su lucha, y la cita del Eclesiastés que precede la novela se reflejaba en las últimas palabras del humanoide (y me recuerda, de mi propio panteón personal, de mi propia memoria poco fiable, Take It As It Comes de The Doors: “Time to die.”)
 
De hecho, hay muy poco del desolado mundo de Deckard aquí, pero se mantiene la fuerte premisa de los replicantes con una esperanza de vida limitada que no les permite envejecer, acompañada de la igualmente poderosa y fértil imagen de los implantes de memoria y las preguntas sobre la identidad. Creada como una replicante de combate, Bruna Husky será a la vez formidable y vulnerable. También es detective solitaria, inteligente y escéptica pero empática, justo el tipo de personalidad que sabrá guiarnos por la acción y el razonamiento a lo largo de las páginas. Se tratará de supervivencia, intrigas, misterio, valentía y amor.
 
En lugar de Los Ángeles, tenemos un Madrid reconocible, que para mí es aún más íntimamente familiar. Montero hace muy bien una cosa en la que muchos autores de ciencia ficción caen en detrimento propio y ajeno. Tiene cuidado de no sobrecargar el entorno futurista—ni al lector—con demasiados cambios tecnológicos y sociales que pueden hacer sentir que el mundo es una fantasía privada del escritor que no tiene nada que ver con nosotros. Hay elementos e incluso seres nuevos, pero son pertinentes para la trama. Del mismo modo, los neologismos se mantienen dentro de una cuota manejable y comprensible.
 
Como muchas novelas sobre tecnohumanos que conviven con humanos normales, el libro tiene un ambiente algo existencialista y un tema subyacente sobre el racismo, por lo que Rosa Montero, naturalmente, aporta seriedad a la historia, pero sin ser tendenciosa.
 
 Confieso que tengo dudas sobre algunos detalles, sobre todo en el desenlace y el final, pero la historia y la caracterización son más que suficientes para que salga bien. Me quedo con una larga e interesante lista de vocabulario desconocido que buscar (palabras maravillosas como
engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) y con ganas de leer el próximo reto de Bruna en El peso del corazón.
 
                                                                            *          *          *
 
There is so much I liked about this book.
 
In the past, I have had real difficulty finding a Spanish writer I can get on with. I have picked up books in Spanish only to find them inaccessible, too literary, or else trying too hard to impress, heavily ironic, or flowery, or just disappointing. Very probably because my Spanish just wasn’t up to it. With this, I found someone and a writing style I could connect with. Rosa Montero has clarity about what she wants to communicate. It has pace. It works.
 
Put me in a world even remotely reminiscent of Bladerunner and my mind tends to produce its own atmospherics. The title on its own drew me in, quoting Batty’s unexpectedly tragic, dying speech, and the prefaced quotation from Ecclesiastes was echoed by the humanoid in his final words (which always brings to my mind, from my own personal pantheon, from my own unreliable memory, The Doors’ Take It As It Comes:  “Time to die.”)
 
There is, in fact, very little of Deckard’s desolate world here, but the strong premise holds of replicants with a limited lifespan that will not allow them to grow old, accompanied by the equally powerful and fertile image of memory implants and questions about identity. Created as a combat rep, Rosa Montero’s Bruna Husky will be both formidable and vulnerable. She is also a lone detective, smart and sceptical yet empathetic, just the kind of personality to lead us by action and reasoning through the pages. It will be about survival, skulduggery, mystery, bravery and love.
 
Instead of L.A., we have a recognizable Madrid, which for me is even more intimately familiar. Montero does one thing very well that many SF authors indulge in to their and our detriment. She is careful not to overload the futuristic environment—or the reader—with too much technological and societal change that can make one feel that the world is a writer’s private fantasy which has nothing to do with us. New elements and even new creatures there are, but they are germane to the plot. Similarly, neologisms are kept to a manageable and comprehensible quota.
 
Like many a novel about technohumans coexisting with regular humans, the book has a somewhat existentialist ambience and an underlying theme about racism, and so Rosa Montero naturally lends gravitas to the story but without being tendentious.
 
I confess to some doubts about a few details, particularly in the denouement and ending, but the story and characterization are more than strong enough to bring it off. I come away with a long and interesting list of unknown vocabulary to look up (wonderful words such as engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) and a desire to read Bruna’s next challenge in El Peso del Corazón.

Unless there are redeeming features (such as humour or splendid characters), I tend to find stories of horror and sentimentality redundant and typically distasteful. They foist on us cheap, shallow emotion that disturbs while teaching us nothing. The Kite Runner is light on the horror, but makes one insistent tug on the heart strings after another.
 
Once Amir the boy and his particular unpleasantness were left behind and he was grown up and in courting in the USA, I managed to warm to him briefly, but not to the book.
 
I hadn’t bargained for all the lachrymose parallels and coincidences: the tragic family deaths, the return of Aseef, the sexual assaults, the split lips, the noble generosities, the motherless sons, the fated return of the bloody kite.
 
By the time I reached the end, the corny inevitability of what was going to happen was unbearable.

Milton Pitt is something of a worrier. The reader, naturally siding with the protagonist, will very soon start to worry about him, also.
 
At the age of twenty-six, when one really should be bright and brimming with energy, discovering the world and exercising talents, Milton is just hopeless, lost and alone. He lives in the inspirational setting of Oxford, yet cut off from it, semi-broke, girlfriendless and apparently friendless. It reminded me of the time I spent on the dole, in existential angst and a mildewed bedsit, down the same Cowley Road.
 
Something has to give. And so Edward Vass goes about getting seriously inventive to give his protagonist the chance of another kind of experience altogether. Only it won’t be an easy ride.
 
Meaninglessness dogs Milton from a tedious office job by day to getting drunk at night. On top of all this, he’s a Spurs fan. He really doesn’t seem to have much going for him. Could it, you might reasonably wonder, get any worse? Well, stand by, because you’re about to find out. If you thought life was hard-going, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
 
Because there’s the crux of it. Milton wakes up in his room and discovers every reason to believe he has died. Only it isn’t anything like what you might expect, and so much so that he has to remind himself: “I’m not mad — just dead.” Edward Vass lets imaginative possibilities lead where they will. He clearly roots for his hapless hero, but suffice it to say that the helter-skelter after-life—or is it a dream?—can get somewhat gory as well as bewildering. That’s life — only it isn’t.
 
I liked the butterfly of Milton’s experience (you can see it on the front cover). It brought to mind Zhuangzi, who on waking from dreaming of being a butterfly, did not now know if he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
 
Present tense narratives tend to keep you guessing, and this appropriately matches our protagonist’s confusion in his plight, expressed with the jocular, self-deprecating defensiveness of a young Englishman. A new surprise awaits Milton Pitt around each corner, until a neat resolution that you will have to discover for yourselves.

Click hWhile we’re on the subject of 18th century seafaring and mutinies, here’s the private record of the boatswain’s mate on no less than The Bounty.
 
Another voyage that was confounded by Cape Horn, only this time the ship’s commander, Lt. Bligh, did not insist on making it through the treacherous Strait of Le Maire and turned back to sail for the Cape of Good Hope and warmer climes, although Bligh’s treatment of the crew would then provoke another kind of treachery.
 
The manuscript, beginning with the Bounty setting off from Deptford in 1787, has its own story.
 
Well-read recreations of the events made reference to the journal, in particular that of Lady Belcher, stepdaughter of a shipmate of Morrison’s, both of whom were sentenced to death for their part in the mutiny, but later pardoned.
 
The original manuscript was finally tracked down many years later by a certain Owen Rutter, who was tipped off that it was to be found in a special section of the Public Library of New South Wales in Australia, to which it had been bequeathed by a Reverend A. G. K. L’Estrange. (Of course. How could it be otherwise? I half expected Sherlock Holmes to appear and play a part in this true tale.)
 
The Trustees of the Library permitted Rutter to publish the faithfully edited and unexpurgated MS in book form, as long as it was (don’t ask me why) put out by Golden Cockerel Press. In 1935, coinciding by chance with the first ever movie of the story with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, it printed a limited edition of 325 copies “on Van Gelder paper”, of which mine is number 235. I picked it up in a second-hand store ages ago and promptly forgot about it until now.

The journal falls into two parts. The first, which covers the voyage and the mutiny itself, was severely “worked over” by Lady Belcher where it offended her sensibilities and this publication has restored the vivid style of the authentic original. Whereas Lady B. declared that at Annamooka Lieutenant Bligh used “some very strong language” with the mutineers’ ringleader, Fletcher Christian, Rutter gives us Morrison’s true record of the conversation word for word, and we learn that Bligh damned Christian as a “cowardly rascal”.
 
We learn of Bligh’s temper and greed. He detained and ill-treated native Chiefs and claimed all the hogs brought on board by the crew “and everything else was his, as soon as it was aboard, and that he would take nine tenths of any man’s property and let him see who dared say any thing to the contrary.” The authority of a ship’s commander cannot be underestimated. He had the power of life or death over every man under him.
 
The last straw, which produced the seizing of the ship, was a wrangle over coconuts, which Bligh accused his officers of stealing. Said his first officer, Mr Fletcher: ’I do not know, Sir, but I hope you dont think me to be so mean as to be Guilty of Stealing yours!’ Mr. Bligh replied “Yes you damd hound I do— you must have stolen them from me or you could give a better account of them—God dam you, you Scoundrels, you are all thieves alike, and combine with the men to rob me—I suppose you’ll Steal my Yams next, but I’ll sweat you for it, you rascals, I’ll make half of you Jump overboard before you get through Endeavour Streights.’” Upon which, he had the officers’ grog ration stopped.
 
On taking over the Bounty and casting Bligh adrift, Fletcher Christian, who would complain of being “used like a dog” by Bligh throughout the voyage, behaved quite honourably, giving the pleading Bligh his Navy Commission and more importantly, his own sextant and plenty of provisions, the carpenter’s tool chest and a new sail for the nineteen men in the castaway boat. Fletcher had, it turns out, intended to abandon the ship on his own the night of the insurrection, but was persuaded by others on board that he would have support enough for what would be a bloodless coup. Morrison played his own hand cannily, remaining on the fringe of events—and remaining on the Bounty.
 
These events are fairly well-known. The second part of the journal, however, had never been published before. It is more intriguing to my mind than the mutiny, relating at length and in detail the people and customs of Tahiti. I will relate and quote from it.

Of Morrison himself we know little, other than of being of slender build, sallow complexion and long dark hair, and that he was properly prepared as a Navy seaman and gunner. A 1779 Admiralty examination for a gunner’s certificate states: “He knows how to Charge, & Discharge a piece of Ordnance, readily an artist-like, and how to sponge the same, and to Muzzle, and secure it in bad weather.” We also discover that boatswain’s mate was, as Rutter notes in admiration, “a born writer”.
 
Until his party was discovered, apprehended and transported back to England for court martial, Morrison lived on Tahiti and described at length in his journal the people and their appearance, society and customs, their buildings, canoes, food, dress, dances, disputes, wars, beliefs and religious practices; also the island itself, its vegetation and animal life.
 
I personally found it fascinating to read this first-hand account. How the behaviour of the natives could fluctuate between friendly and vicious, being suitably pragmatic when it came to trading hogs and other supplies for iron. How a child was considered sacred and head of the family. How “Men wear their Hair and beards in different forms as they please, and the Young Weomen wear their hair Long flowing in ringlets to their Waist and dress it with the White leaves of the Fwharra or Palm like ribbands and Oderiferous Flowers. They also make necklaces of the Seeds of the ripe palm apple & flowers Elegantly disposed; which not only sets their persons off to advantage but afford a Continual Nosegay to themselves and all who sit near them”.
 
“Both sexes want a part if not the whole of their little fingers, which we understood was cut off as a tribute to the memory of their deceased friends.”
 
There’s plenty more: on the use of kava, which he calls “Yava, or intoxicating peper”, on stowaways, ceremonies, skirmishes, and of the gay Mahoo.
 
Of the people of the island of Tubuai, where Morrison also spent some time, he makes this rather refreshing observation:
 
“They have no Marriage Ceremony, but Join and live as Man and Wife while they agree; nor is virtue deemd of any consequence among them. While they agree they live on the Estate of either, & if they part after having Children, the Man takes the boys and the Woman the Girls, & each retire to their own Estate, the Children being No Obstacle being no hindrance to their getting other partners.”
 
A reproduction of the text can be read online, but there’s nothing quite like the feel of these pages in your fingers.

Click here to ediI take back what I said about O’Brian’s depiction of adversity and calamity in The Unknown Shore (though not his tiresome overdramatization of excess). The terror and the magnitude of the seas off Cape Horn and the atrocious hunger, exposure, sickness and despair that the castaway sailors of His Majesty’s Ship The Wager underwent were all too real.
 
Grann’s book is the historical account of the ill-fated expedition that left Portsmouth in 1740 and the personal stories of the very few men who, years later, made it back to England against all the odds. It’s one of those chronicles that is so meticulously and carefully researched that the author has all the events and elements totally clear in his mind and is able to lay them out in a lucid and immediately apprehensible story. “A tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” reads the subtitle, and so it is! A true story, rather than a dry history, and far more compelling than O’Brian’s fiction, which overlooks much of the real drama.
 
Unless things have changed since I was a lad (I do hope so), when history is taught at school, the one thing that is never brought home to youngsters is the fact that these events actually happened and these people actually lived. If you had been there, you would have seen Napoleon, Cleopatra or Siddhartha Gautama. That’s what fascinates me about written history these days: and Grann does make the events and people feel real. It undoubtedly helped that he went by boat himself down the Patagonian coast to what is still called Wager Island and saw the environment of that forbidding place, where the sailors were marooned. The permanent absence of food, save for a little wild celery and seaweed. The sleet and lashing rains. The raging seas and the vast distances to human habitation on the remote shores of Chiloe Island or Brazil. Seeing rotten planks washed up from the 280-year-old wreck would certainly have focused his mind on the veracity of the tale.
 
The Wager is well-paced, nicely structured and exciting. If you have the slightest penchant for naval history or seafaring yarns, don’t miss out on this one.

O’Brian’s early voyage on the pages of seafaring drama shows a writer in the learning stages of crafting character, ambience and story. He was clearly his own best pupil, because from the lessons acquired, he went on to write the fabulous 18-novel Aubrey-Maturin series.
 
In Byron and Barrow, we have the prototypes of his twin protagonists, and the fictional recreation of an ill-fated 18th-century expedition will provide a template for the stories to come. In the making of it all, O’Brian falls into all kinds of error and excess. When you start out as a writer, you have to throw it all out there and learn what you can from your mistakes. 
 
It means we accompany the two friends on not just challenging ordeals of shipwreck, hunger and exposure, but on extremes of endurance that outdo each other ad infinitum. Just when you thought the sea could not get more monstrous, the exhaustion more consummate, the deprivation more abject, they get even worse. In the later novels, the extravagance will be managed—or else heroes and readers alike would not make it out alive—and in those books, also, the characters will be properly developed and deepened.
 
While it is only right for an author to be on the side of their lead characters, it starts to grate when Jack and Tobias, even under protracted, unspeakable duress, never display the slightest meanness or selfishness. These examples of nobility of soul, disasters at sea, and gruesome trials on the inhospitable unknown shore, make for something of a dated ripping yarn, not least when the native Patagonians are depicted as brutal savages, with the exception of the converted Chilotans, who consequently “knew how to live like human beings”. This attitude might well have been the one prevalent at the time of the tale in the 1740s, but O’Brian writing in 1959 might have know better and tempered his account accordingly.

The tale remains a very fair attempt, with evidence of skill, pace and wit. Nonetheless, I would recommend anyone interested in reading O’Brian—and I do wholeheartedly recommend him—to skip this book, and the unhappy Wager, and set sail in “Master and Commander”, with Aubrey and Maturin on the Sophie.

I was talking to a lawyer last week about how all the state needs to do these days to disempower a citizen and turn them into a nonentity is to take away their access to internet and banking. The precariousness of status and autonomy in an untrustworthy world was a theme that came to prominence in the 20th century; in the artifice of our present, all smoke and mirrors and alternative truths, it conditions all that a person might propose in their life.
 
Philip K. Dick, as ever, has a whole lot of serious fun with the idea of a powerful individual rendered an unknown. His existentialist sci fi carries the reader forward on a wave of rooting for the flawed Taverner, dropping in occasional absurdist treats during the ride.
 
I got the feeling that Jason Taverner secretly knows that he’s a fraud from the moment he wakes up, and then plays out the destructive script of his worst fear: “I don’t exist.” In this alternative reality, Dick presents us with a warning of a police state of forced labour camps, the slaughter of students, the sterilization of blacks and a cult of the leader. He throws up philosophical and theological arguments and introduces mescaline to make Taverner and us question and wonder — and fear the dangerous power of fundamentalist religion twisted into meaninglessness. An abusive policeman declares: “All flesh is like grass. Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given.”
 
I found pleasing gravitas in a certain cultural weight leant to the novel by references that start out with Dowland’s lament in the title, respect shown by characters for Rilke, Brecht and Sibelius, and respect shown by Dick to his teenage character, Kathy, who is reading Proust, and who continues Taverner’s quotation from Finnegan’s Wake with: “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.” Together with Felix Buckman’s (the eponymous policeman) poetic reflections, they provide a kind of choral commentary.
 
At the same time, Phil Dick being Phil Dick, we have some priceless humour. The protagonist has set upon him a gelatine-like Callisto cuddle sponge, Kathy’s talking toy, Cheerful Charlie, brings strongly to mind Johnny Cab in “Total Recall”, and Buckman’s sister mentions a porn song called “Go down, Moses.”
 
Two other moments that jumped out at me were—in this 1974 novel—Taverner’s question: “Do you have an encyclopedia machine?”, and when Kathy asks in the Italian restaurant: “Are you responding to my warmth?” Really rather nice.

The Burroughs I admired in The Naked Lunch as a uniquely talented poet of the drugged body and mind, comes across here as an asshole. He’s still smart and brutally honest, able to bring a sinewy travelogue from another angle altogether, but it’s a self-indulgent, disrespectful one. He just lusts after young boys and the ultimate high on ayahuasca (the “yage” of the title). I’m not saying that today’s selfie-taking experience-seekers are any less shallow and self-absorbed, but I don’t want to read their letters, either.
 
His account of Colombia piqued my interest, having been to Cali, Popayan and Pasto. Decades later, the perennial poverty holding back development in living conditions makes these places sound little different, while USA and Europe were racing ahead. The procedure of random police checks on buses between these places —noting name, marital status, profession— in 1953 was unchanged in 1987.
 
Ginsberg’s later contribution amounts to little more than a cry for help after a bad trip on ayahuasca. The slim volume concludes with a “poetic cut-up” by Burroughs. It’s a risky style that he made work in Naked Lunch, but here it is two pages of random snatches, like jottings for a feverish diary that was never put together.

A thriller with wit and dark intent is just my cup of tea. Give it a female lead and I tend to like it even more.
 
This is the first in the Zoë Boehm series, although it would be more accurate to call them the Zoë Boehm and Sarah Tucker novels. An engaging protagonist, smart asides, plenty of intrigue and believable scenes make it a fine read.
 
The only way it falls down for me is that Herron sometimes makes hints about character or allusions to events that want to be returned to, developed or shown to be motivation, but are then left behind. An idea is sometimes introduced that could be made into a theme and then go towards tying the narrative together, but he doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity. The same goes for imagery. Down Cemetery Road was his first book and I wonder if he puts this right in later novels.
 
He’s better at working with characters who are basically decent people, possibly because he has more time for them. The baddies in this book have no saving graces and it kind of makes them into ciphers.
 
What you can’t fault is his neat, acerbic humour. By way of example: “a daytime burglary that went ‘tragically wrong’, according to the paper, as if there were some ideal template of burglary that this had failed to live up to.”

I might gripe a bit, but I’d certainly give another by Mick Herron a go. Maybe one of his Slough House “Slow Horses” books.