Robert H

• Rated 3 stars

“A stranger buys a run-down mill in a small Finnish town. He refurbishes it and repairs it. Meanwhile, the townspeople notice that he is a little strange. Soon enough, they start to persecute him.

The howling miller is a fairly easy novel to read. The Finnish names do add an element of quirkiness purely on account of being Finnish, but the novel itself, a fable/parable is reasonably interesting. Throughout the book, the hero turns out to be not much more crazy, or perhaps even rather less so, than his contemporaries. At the same time, they look at him with different eyes. Perhaps it is because they don't have mirrors and cannot see themselves.

Some things in the story are a bit baffling. The passing of time is often poorly indicated - he must have lived in the village for several months between the first and second chapters etc. - which can be a bit confusing. Some of the characters seem to be there for a purpose that is not their own. The love interest seems little more than windowdressing - she exists only because the story needs her, not because she is ever a convincing character in her own right.

In other words, this book is not flawless. It did, however, hold my attention, and it was a reasonably enjoyable read. The final chapter seems a little rushed (and I would have ended the story differently), but on the whole, it's worth a read.”

Robert H wrote this review Friday, August 28 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“The Somnambulist is a rollickiing tale of detection, adventure, thrills and mysterious goings-on in Victorian London. In short, it is a bit like the image we have of Sherlock Holmes.

The story revolves around Edward Moon, stage magician and occasional detective, who is asked to solve a mysterious and creepy murder. Always delighted to be faced with a mystery and a worthy adversary, he throws himself into the case, dragging those around him along for the ride. This includes the Somnambulist, a pale hairless giant who never speaks. It is a little odd for the book to be named in his honour, as he is essentially windowdressing. He adds to the creepy atmosphere, but is never central to the story.

The story, meanwhile, mixes the realistic with steampunk, science fiction, and complete fantasy with ease, throwing in some sinister conspiracies, secrets and dramatically named entities. The narrative voice is very much a character of its own, with throwaway remarks, interjections, and a flair for the dramatic. It is exactly the kind of story and narrative I enjoy.

I nearly gave this book 5 stars, but in the end it did not quite sustain the menace and sense of high adventure. The resolution felt a little muddled and rushed.

That said, I'll definitely keep an eye on the writings of Jonathan Barnes, and buy whatever he writes next. Very much my kind of thing, this book. Terrifically enjoyable. ”

Robert H wrote this review Sunday, August 9 2009. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 2 stars

“Clumsy teenage girl moves from big city to small town. Notices good looking, semi-hostile boy. Is mesmerised. Then he turns out to have superpowers, saves her life, and romance ensues. Oh, and he's a vampire.

Twilight is hardly an original novel. Admittedly, I can think of few other human-vampire love stories, but aside from the gimmick, the novel is painfully pedestrian. The writing is not particularly engrossing or delightful. While there is a sense of humour, it is a fairly repetitive, simple humour based on smirky taunts and glares. (Someone should do a word count on this novel. The word glare appears more often than any other....)

In many ways, this reads like wish fulfilment literature. Scenes play themselves out over and over and over again, with small variations. The mysterious, but stunningly beautiful boy keeps working hard on being mysterious and slightly threatening, but protective. There is constant emphasis on fast cars, fast driving and the physical strength of the boy, who knows just how much to overcome the girl without ever losing his "gentleman" appeal to her. Her heart keeps futtering, pounding and stopping like a rusty car engine with clogged exhaust pipes. I have never read any Mills & Boon, but this is roughly what I imagine it would be like, minus a bit of porn.

Which is not to say it is a complete disaster. Its commercial success eludes my comprehension, but it is an easy, quick, occasionally vaguely amusing read. The characters may be uninteresting, and the plot beyond predictable, and the back cover blurb gives away the first third of the book without batting an eyelid, but if you're in the mood for literary junk food, this is not the worst possible choice. After all the "romantic" stuff, there is a vaguely tense thrillery finale, because, let's face it, if our young couple had met one more time to talk about why this is oh-so-wrong but oh-so-right at the same time, they might have induced nausea in even the most romantically inclined of readers.

(There is a lot of talking in this novel. I would estimate it's about 1/3 dialogue, and it's more or less the same dialogue, over and over and over again).

Twilight is the literary equivalent of Galaxy chocolate. It's just about good enough if you don't know any better and it's all that is available conveniently. ”

Robert H wrote this review Monday, August 3 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“The Knife of Never Letting Go ended with a massive cliffhanger, followed by the words "The End".

The Ask and the Answer starts with the words "The End" and carries straight on. Where the first novel was a long chase story, introducing us to this strange world and the history of the people there, this second novel is not a novel about chases, but about oppression and moral compromise. Todd and Viola are separated, and they have different political paths in a morally murky world of fascism, segregation, oppression, torture and war. The first story was like an action movie. This one is like a dystopia.

The Ask and the Answer deals with many issues - appeasement, terrorism, fascism and so on - without delivering easy answers. In a way, this book gets too educational, too school-friendly for its own good. Where the first was entertaining, this one is much less of a thrill-ride, much more of a book wanting to be analysed and chewed over. Except, there are things in it that undermine the intellectual developments. The cure, the mayor's ability to cloak and weaponise noise, convenient coincidences, the completely unrealistic tendency of all the villains to give Todd and Viola central importance in all their schemes... for all its earnestness and seeming good intentions, the book is not deep or literary enough to match its own ambitions.

It's a decent read, but it did not grab me as much as Knife did, and it felt very bleak and cold as a read. It lacked the energy and joy that I had hoped for.

”

Robert H wrote this review Sunday, April 26 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I wanted to love this book, I really did. I remember being not a huge fan as a kid (back then, Rikki Tikki Tavi was my favourite story, and all the others did not really resonate with me). I hoped to enjoy it more this time around.

Unfortunately, I found myself less than floored by it. I knew that Mowgli only featured intermittently, but I had forgotten that he is only the hero of three stories. The rest are mowgli-less. The Mowgli stories are good. The story about the seals is excellent and haunting. Rikki Tikki Tavi was OK, but not the masterpiece I remember from childhood. Unfortunately, the final story, about animals in the military, was badly disappointing. (I actually really disliked that one) The story about the elephant dance has an incredible imagination behind it, but I never quite connected with the humans in it. And the songs - I mostly skipped them, because they got on my nerves.

As a collection of animal themed fairy tales / new myths, this is a good book. It is just not quite as good as I'd like it to be. Kipling has a magnificent imagination, and most of his stories succeed brilliantly at giving the animals real character, and at the same time, a strange authenticity that one would not expect in humanised animal characters. But in the end, the book simply did not win me over - it felt disconnected, and a collection where not all stories are great. ”

Robert H wrote this review Sunday, April 19 2009. ( reply | permalink )

0 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 1 stars

“Have only read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (without Through the Looking Glass), and find the book every bit as baffling, frustrating and unpleasant as the Disney movie. It is different, but still bereft of any joy for me.

The insanity is not interesting, there is no plot, and I am unclear why this is a classic. I did not find anything worthwhile here.”

Robert H wrote this review Saturday, April 11 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Better than I remembered from my childhood. Momo is the story of a girl who is basically a kind of muse. She can listen to people like no one else can, and by talking to her, people realise their own problems and solutions and find some inner peace. She can inspire the imaginations of children (and a storyteller) around her, without really doing much herself. She lives in the ruin of a Roman coliseum, and is visited by friends and neighbours.

And then one day, the grey men arrive, and start to steal the world...

It is a fascinating fairy tale. There are tales within tales (one of my strongest memories of tales is the one about the emperor who decided to build a better world...), there are magnificent flights of imagination, there is a magical, wonderful tortoise, and there is just about enough surreal in the story to be something I would consider art - a well-judged and at times genuinely creepy tale,

The resolution is not quite as wonderful as the rest of the novel, but it is a wonderfully written story. I have no idea whether it was ever translated into English (or whether the translation is good, like Cornelia Funke translations, or bad, like the Neverending Story translation). If you speak German and like children's literature, read this. It's wonderful.

(The movie really creeped me out as a kid though, and I did not really like the Momo of the film)”

Robert H wrote this review Thursday, April 9 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“This is a sequel to "The Lies of Locke Lamora" - a swashbuckly heist novel in a fantasy world that seems inspired by George R R Martin, China Mieville, and pulp adventure fiction.

Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen are now embroiled in anoither con scheme, trying to lighten the purse of the richest and most powerful crime baron of Tal Verrar. Soon, they attract the attention of a military dictator wannabe, and the Bondsmagi of Karthain have unfinished business with Locke, too...

Starting out in a very similar style to "Lies of...", the book thankfully soon abandons the dual narrative strands / flashback gimmick and becomes much more linear. That line, however, is not the plot line you would expect. Rather than a con / heist novel, it becomes a novel about pirates! Shawshbuckling ahoy, me mateys. The sudden turn into a completely different direction left me wondering when the main plot strands would kick in - and the first three quarters of the book felt like a loooong (but highly enjoyable) introduction, until I realised that this was it - I was already reading the main plot, I just had not realised that this would be the theme of the book.

It is a superior work to the first (largely because flashbacks were abandoned, keeping the story more tense). It is still well written, and still not quite as convincing as Martin or Mieville. The writing still strays into linguistic choices that are ok, but not great. (One would have hoped for more colourful swearwords than motherfucker).

I would recommend this series so far. Still, a lot remains unresolved. I suppose this is all part of the plan for writing a longer series, but it does leave the individual books only partially satisfying this reader's desire for closure.”

Robert H wrote this review Thursday, April 9 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Company of Liars is a medieval road movie, set during the time of the plague. Its narrator, Camelot, slowly gets surrounded by strangers, and together they travel to escape the pestilence, and to find a safe haven.

The prologue is promising and intriguing. The rest of the book is rather upstaged by it. I don't read huge amounts of historically set literature, but Company of Liars is quite disappointing. The language is not very rich and never really feels authentic enough for the reader to get engrossed in it. Of course it shouldn't be ancient English, but the story should at least feel partially submerged into another world. The story itself, moving along at the pace of a very slow wagon crossing England, is not particularly worthwhile. (People travel, some people die.)

The biggest problem is that the book never really finds something to be really good at. It starts out mysterious, but is not really good at being a mystery (and what mystery there is, is not satisfying in its revelations). It includes a howling unseen wolf, but does not sustain the creepiness. It is a story of the plague, but it is always at arm's length, never really being as claustrophobic around our characters as it should be. Plot twists are hinted at many pages in advance, the characters are not really exciting, ...

Basically, Company of Liars is an average novel that tries to do many things, but does none of them well. It's an easy read, but not a satisfying one.”

Robert H wrote this review Thursday, March 12 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“The Lies of Locke Lamora is a swashbuckling, tongue in cheek tale of grand adventure and confidence trickstery.

Or: That is how it starts out. Written in competent and engaging prose, the story starts very much as a cheeky, rollicking tale of adventure. The start is flawless - it hit all the right notes. As tale about a group of conment in a slightly fantastic world, the story has a certain amount of originality (and inbuilt fun) right from the start. Later, things get a little more serious than I would have expected, and some characters that receive a lot of set up find themselves, much to the reader's surprise, ... well... I won't spoil it. Let's just say the book is not exactly predictable, which can be infuriating and rewarding at the same time.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of flaws. The biggest flaw by far is the back story, which slows down the main narrative and mostly just annoys. The flashbacks in the first part do have a point, and are even engaging. But once we know how and why Locke ended up with his mentor, all the other flashbacks are detours. His training and youth are important to the author, but should not be that important to the reader. Admittedly, there are some stories that serve to set up later events - but even those feel a bit forced and superfluous. This book could have about 30% cut and it would be better for it.

Aside from the annoying interruptions of narrative, the only real other flaw is that some of it feels a little derivative. Probably every book in the world is derivative; the key is to hide the derivation. Locke Lamora seems to owe a lot to George R R Martin's and China Mieville's work. Some of the place names have an echo of Bas-Lag (the Angevine river, etc.), and, tellingly, the giant indestructible structures left behind millennia ago by lost civilizations echo the giant ribs in Perdido Street Station. There is a slight aura of creepiness about the concept (Tolkien did something similar in parts of Fellowship of the Ring - but there you always felt as if the back story was just around the corner and probably involved elves. In Perdido Street and Locke Lamora, you feel that the answer will never be revealed, just as we will never meet dinosaurs in our world). On top of the artefacts, the tone of the story can sometimes get enthusiastically descriptive. By the end of the book, I would regularly skip paragraphs because the descriptions got a little tiring, and because the narrative was actually quite exciting at that point. In Mieville's work, I do not recall skipping paragraphs. With regards to plot developments, George R R Martin's unsentimental approach to his characters may well be the inspiration for some of the plot developments in Locke Lamora. Scott Lynch has talent, and the story is gripping, the tone usually engaging, the story well-crafted - but his descriptions do not have the melodic, almost hypnotic quality of Mieville at his best (Let's just ignore the disaster that was Un Lun Dun and the dreary Iron Council at this point), nor quite the epic grandeur that GRR Martin conjures up.

So, a good read, too often forced to slow down by back story and an overdose of description. Definitely fishing for a series or trilogy, as entire characters are infused into the book without ever making a personal appearance - but I am quite sure I'll buy the next book.
”

Robert H wrote this review Saturday, February 21 2009. ( reply | permalink )