The Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko

In Moscow, amoungst the businessmen, prostitutes, drunks, petty criminals, organised criminals and blameless citizens living in their grey concrete appartments and cooking with Remoskas are the Others. Some of them are nice and some of them are nasty. After years spent in conflict which nearly destroyed both sides, the Others have come up with The Treaty. Light and Dark magicians have agreed to a truce where neither of them will influence normal humans. 2 forces have been set up to police it: The Night Watch observes the Dark Side while the Day Watch ensures that the Light forces live by the truce. For example, the Light has to allow vampires to eat a certain number of humans, provided they are hunted according to rules agreed by both sides. To a casual observer, there can often be precious little moral difference between the Light and the Dark.

Anton is a 30-something programmer (I like him already!) and lowly officer of the Night Watch. He is quite at home running queries on the Big Database of Magic Stuff and keeping the servers of the Light up. He's definitely not at home walking the corridors of the Metro with a clip full of silver bullets looking for a rogue vampire. Unfortunately, while the Dark is over-subscribed and probably has a waiting list to join, the Light is always short-staffed. Anton's problems don't end with the Dark; his own boss, the staggeringly Machievellian Boris Ignatievich, is quite capable of sacrificing pawns from the Light in the cause of a larger strategem against the Dark. And then there's Anton's new girlfriend who is turning out to have the makings of a top-notch sorcercess. Pretty soon, Anton will be the intellectual equivalent of tumble-drier-fluff to her and that makes it kind of hard to feel pleased for your partner. The book is essentially three stories centred on Anton in which he has to try and stay alive, not break the Treaty and avoid causing evil in increasingly difficult circumstances.

One of the things that really works for me in this book is the setting. Maybe I absorbed too much Yankee propaganda during the Cold War, but I find Russia intrinsically sinister and have no problem believing that Moscow might be full of vampires and werewolves. Maybe it's the endless snow and greyness, maybe it's the terrifying architecture (I've included a picture of one of the “Stalin Buildings”, scariest buildings in a scary, scary city), maybe it's the fact that the population appear to have recently voted to hand their country over wholesale to the KGB. When I think of Russia I think of Stalin's purges, the 3 am knock at the door from the secret police and (latterly) of a country where the politicians and the gangsters are impossible to tell apart. Think of all the “psychogeography” bollocks that has been written about London and imagine doing the same thing with a city which is equally old, but also has a rich history of seige, torture and tramps freezing to death. I visited Moscow in 1993 as part of a school history trip and rode on the Moscow Metro and as Mr Snipes says, “There are worse things out there than vampires”.

For what it's worth, here are my pretentious theories about what the deeper meaning of the book might be: It seems to me that the theme of the book is compromise and appeasement which leaves everyone tainted, but avoids open warfare. Perhaps this is meant to represent the way the USSR has been divvied up between robber baron business types the elected authorities. The difference between Light and Dark is all in their attitude to normal people. The Light is protective (communism?) while the Dark magicians seek to exploit the ordinary folk for person gain (capitalism?). Both sides are capable of murderous or duplicitous actions and are locked in stalemate. So perhaps the book is not a metaphor for modern Russia and it's really the Cold War all over again. Or maybe it's just a Russian fantasy novel...

Whatever, The Night Watch might not be literature, but it is an absolutely cracking read. I can give no higher praise for fiction than this: this book gave me nightmares. It fired up my imagination such that I spent the whole night trying to evade Dark magicians on the Moscow Metro.

I now fancy reading more sinister soviet goings on in the form of “The Master and Marguerita”. Hope it has Roger Delgado in it. He was my favourite Master.

Many thanks to L for lending me this book – sorry about the page I got marmalade on. Couldn’t put it down for breakfast!

Modesty Blaise - Peter O'Donnell

When I was a kid, there was only one kick-ass babe to serve as a role model, and that was Wonderwoman. These days I seem to be armpit-deep in Buffies and Laras and Trinities, all exhorting me to express myself via the spinning kick. If I didn't have to earn a living, I would spend a couple of years on a women's studies PHD*, on an academic quest to find the very first kick-ass babe. One contender for the title would be Modesty Blaise.



Before reading the book, I had assumed that Modesty was some kind of cowgirl, but she is in fact an ex-international-jewel-thief-turned-secret-agent. She is of course fantastically beautiful as well as having her own, somewhat unrealistic fighting style. Modesty would fit in very well with our current Nuts culture in which stripping and feminism seem to have become confused, as her clothes come off pretty regularly. One of her preferred moves is "The Nailer", which consists of getting her nawks out and then taking advantage of the surprise this causes. Hilarious, but only a male author would think hand-to-hand fighting with unrestrained hooters was a good idea.

Modesty also comes equipped with Willie Garvin, her surprisingly likable right hand man. Willie is a cockney ex-criminal and in many other books in the "silly thriller" category would just have been a generic forelock-tugging representative of the lower orders. However, it soon becomes clear that he lays on the "apples and pears, guv'nor" stuff because it suits him to have the toffs write him off as an idiot.

Modesty's prefered weapon is also absolutely cool as... well, too cool for corroborative nouns. She favours the yawara, a tiny, handbag-sized blunt instrument. I was so impressed I considered making one for a bit, then decided that any hard object which will stick out a bit from your fist (phone, pen, hairbrush, cutlery) could be used the same way, without the legal implications of having a purpose-built weapon.

I can see myself searching Abe for the rest of the Modesty Blaise books, now. The only thing that can touch them in terms of adventure coupled with high camp is the Saint books. And would Simon Templar ever distract the guards by dropping his kecks, then take them on in unarmed combat with his tackle swinging about? He would not.

*Yeah, I'm well aware of the irony that only kept women have the time to pursue academic feminism. Nevermind, I'm living the dream instead.

Great Apes - Will Self

Will Self is a love him or hate him kind of author. I've loved his short stories ever since I read "Grey Area" back when I was a student. I think that his deliberately overblown writing style is well-suited to the short form and becomes wearing if you have to read more than 10 pages of it. I had previously read "How the Dead Live" and didn't rate it much. I thought that the premise that when you die you just have to move to an unfashionable part of London was a good idea for a short story which had been padded out to novel length. And then there's his use of deliberately obscure words. There are 2 ways to go about reading anything by Self. The first is to have his book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. The second is just to assume that any words you don't know are probably rude. You won't go far wrong with this second approach.

Simon Dykes is an annoying Young British Artist happily spending his time getting wasted with his YBA mates and having unsuccessful attemts at drug-fuelled sex with his almost-entirely worthless girlfriend Sarah. One morning he wakes up to find that Sarah has turned int a chimpanzee... so has he... and so has everyone else in the world. Screaming and raving, Simon is sectioned and meets the notorious Dr Busner (a recurring character from some of Self's short stories) who makes it his mission to help Simon come to terms with his "chimpunity" at least partially because there might be a TV series in it for him.


One of the first things you cannot help but notice about chimps is their upsetting backsides which looks as if they’ve had a rectal prolapse. This is not glossed over, but dwelt upon with loving attention to detail. The chimp characters admire one another's floppy pink arse bits. In fact the phrase, "I revere your anal scrag" is used by the subservient chimps to suck up to the alphas. The whole book is pretty much obsessed with the wrong end of chimps. And with perineums. Most of us can g0 hours (actually, maybe months) without thinking about our perineums, but Will can only manage a few pages - it's a compulsion! I complained to a friend about it and he suggested that Mr Self's obsession is because he doesn't have a perineum himself. We think he has just one hole for everything, like birds do.

Anyway, back at the book, the apes represent everything about humans that we try to pretend we don't do, from indiscriminate public rutting, to hurting one another to enforce the pecking order, to picking horrible things out of their bum cracks. Apparently, this is satire. I just wish it was shorter satire! The quote on the front describes "Great Apes" as "Prodigiously original and very funny". I think I would have chosen the words "long" and "scatological" instead. As a short story writer, I revere Will Self's anal scrag, but there is a limit to the number pages I want to read about ape arses.

Don't go to Sedbergh...

I am sure that "Sedbergh" means something nasty in The Meaning of Liff, and whatever it is, the place probably deserves it.

Sedbergh is supposed to be a "book town" in the style of Hay-On-Wye, although it only has 4 bookshops and one of them was closed when I visited. It was full of confused tourists wondering about, looking in the windows of closed shops (this was on a saturday). Like Budleigh Salterton, the place looks like it could use a short, sharp lesson in capitalism.

Of the three bookshops I could enter, all but one seemed to deal exclusively in musty hardbacks about Victorian cricketers.

I tried to make the best of Sedbergh by finding a cafe to sit and read the book I had with me. Alas, I was kicked out when the cafe shut at only 4pm! The pre-teen serving closed the cafe in the face of American tourists wanting traditional English tea and cake. Do the Yorkshire folk have no idea of economics?

Anyway, that's Sedbergh. I've been so that you don't have to.

On Finishing the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy...

Altered Carbon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2003, and it was a well-deserved win indeed!

It's a science fiction detective story (love a bit of crossover, me!) and also a kind of noir pastiche - it always seems to be night in the city and raining. One of the central ideas of the series is that a throughout their life a person's consciousness is continually backed up to a small storage device at the base of the skull, the “cortical stack”. The first consequence of this is that death is not necessarily permanent. For example, after being gunned down following some kind of botched criminal activity, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in the rather used body of a Policeman, to find that a millionaire has paid to have him downloaded from the giant prison hard disk on which his data had been residing. The millionaire took his own head off with a plasma weapon a couple of days ago and had to have his last off-site backup downloaded into one of his spare bodies. Although it appears that no-one else could possibly have committed the crime he refuses to believe that he would ever kill himself (even temporarily) and has hired Kovacs as detective and enforcer, to find his murderer.

Takeshi Kovacs is a man with a past, or more accurately a whole heap of them. Until recently, he served in the Envoy Corps, the most feared soldiers anywhere in the “Protectorate” of human worlds. In this version of the future faster than light travel is not a possibility, but FTL communications are. This means that if you don't want to end up in a “Forever War” situation, you can send digitised humans to wherever you want to deploy your forces, download them into specially-built combat bodies. The Envoys are trained to deal with finding yourself on a new planet, wearing a new body with people shooting at you. As well as being trained in practical things like shooting and killing, they are also trained to observe, recall, learn to fit in and infiltrate. As a result they are so mistrusted that ex-Envoys are barred from nearly all positions of any power or responsibility in civilian life.

I think the reader can appreciate that when Kovacs works out who has been pulling his strings on Earth and why, he's going to embark on an ass-kicking spree of epic proportions.

How good was this book? It was so good that by the time I was half-way through, I was having nightmares about my time in the Envoy Corps. It was so good that I slightly resented the other two books in the trilogy for not being Altered Carbon (a bit of an own goal for Mr Morgan, that).

Broken Angels

I was rather sad to see that after playing detective Takeshi Kovacs is now back to killing people for money, serving with “The Wedge” (feared, but nothing like so much as the Envoys) in the civil war on Sanction IV.

By the time the book begins he's desperate to extricate himself from the war by any means possible. He is approached by a pilot and a younng archeologist who claim to have discovered some sort of portal leading directly to a fleet of abandonned Martian spaceships. Never mind the intellectual excitement of alien technology, the salvage on that lot has to be worth enough get the hell out Sanction IV! So a crack team is assembled by sorting through a bucket load of cortical stacks found on the battlefield, looking for special ops personnel with the right qualities for a spot of extra curricular speed-archeology. Getting to the Martian fleet before anyone else isn't going to be easy, especially since the area containing the portal is now full of illegal, experimental nano-tech wepons...

I felt that Broken Angels lacked a lot of the style of Altered Carbon, but it was enjoyable enough. The bad-ass spacemarine Wedge Commander aggrieved at the defection of his pet Envoy makes a fitting end-of-level baddie for the big fight at the end. And we get to find out more about the mysterious Martian artifacts left hanging about which humanity as used to jump-start their colonization of other planets, 2001-style.

At the start of Woken Furies, Kovacs is now killing for fun rather than profit, attempting to slowly wipe out the entire priest caste of the religion that killed his ex-girlfriend, Sarah. While running from the law in a damaged synthetic body he falls in with deComs, teams of mercenaries hired to decommission the 300 year-old weaponry which has been cluttering up his home planet since the Quellist uprising known as the Unsettlement. One of his new deCom friends has an unfortunate mental problem in that she appears to be sharing her head with someone who claims to be the long-dead revolutionary leader, Quellcrest Falconer. (Like Communism, Quellism has some excellent slogans and quotations, one of my favourites being, “When they ask how I died, tell them: Still angry.”).

Once again, it was nothing like as good as Altered Carbon, but “Woken Furies” still inspired me to vote Quellist at the local elections on May 1st.

While reading this trilogy, I had some logical problems with the cortical stack - why would the state pay for everyone to get one? Especially when the Protectorate is Uber-capitalist in all other ways. When do you fit one? Can the very young be killed off completely? Humans being what they are (and they do not seem to have become any less violent in Morgan's future) I suspect that the invention of the cortical stack would be followed pretty swiftly by the invention of some stack-frying EMP weapons.

On the whole, I was rather surprised to find that I like Takeshi Kovacs much more when he's being nice. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age... I understand the concept of the flawed hero, and I totally get the premise that we can have a lot more tension in the story with a rather amoral lead charater, 'cos we never really know which way he'll go. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that if I don't really like the hero, I don't really care if he's properly killed, "stack irretrievable" or not. Sorry Tak!

Richard Morgan won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award (http://www.clarkeaward.com/) with “Black Man”. Llet's hope this means a return to Altered Carbon standards!

Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown

There are not many occasions when I feel that I have to justify my choice of reading material to anybody, in fact, this is the first one. I bought this book mainly in order to annoy my friend E. As I was examining the back cover in Waterstones she came up behind me and said in her finest disparaging tones, “You’re not buying Derren Brown, are you?”. “I am now!” replied the part of my brain that just likes to be contrary. Another motive was that whilst I find Brown creepy but fascinating, my husband refuses to watch any of his TV shows on the grounds that he is “a stinking wank-pixie”. You can’t argue with logic like that. You can only quietly buy the book instead.

As well as trying to persuade my chosen life-partner to watch “Trick of the Mind”, I had also seen Derren on a number of documentaries about the paranormal, on which he was pleasingly damning about stage mediums. I was puzzled, though, by fact that he seemed to think that preying on people by pretending to contact their dead relatives was a bit think, while persuading them to knock over a Securicor van was OK.

The book is divided into sections on magic tricks, memory, hypnotism and the paranormal. For my money, this final section is pretty much redundant. I can’t help feeling that the ground covered here has been covered better already by other books (Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World”, for example). Fortunately, the other sections are far more interesting, and possibly even useful...

The section on memory takes a while to get to anything useful (Why would I want to remember lists? The only reason I can think of would be to show off my list remembering abilities to family and friends. And they'd only be entertained the first time round.) like memorizing sequences of digits. I don't yet have a Hanibal-Lector-style memory palace, though. I am still trying to find all the items to remember I've placed in an imaginary version of my house amongst the clutter. I think than when using the location technique in future, I should imagine a clean and tidy version of my home, rather than an exact copy.

I was a bit disappointed to read that, at least according to Derren, there is nothing particularly magical about hypnotism and that (according to him) the trance is not even a special mental state. Apparently it works though the facts that:

• People tend to do whatever they're told anyway
• They've been told about a magical thing called hypnosis which will make them do what they're told even more.

So, in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, you do it to yourself. There was a section I really enjoyed with instructions for using some of the prnciples of NLP cure yourself, or a friend from phobias caused by traumatic incidents in your past. Alas! I have no phobias to experiment on and I can't really imagine any of my phobic friends letting me have a go of theirs...

ME: Oh, go on. I promise you, I know what I'm doing. I read a book about it.
THEM: (skeptically) Oh yeah?
ME: Yes. By Derren Brown.
THEM: Fuck off.

Possibly I should try doing the opposite to the instructions and see if I can give myself a phobia.... The bit I'm most eager to get out and practice is spotting lies, though, as I can see immediate real-world uses for this skill at the poker table.

Book Derren does not seem the same as his stage/screen personality which is heavy on the sinister, and long on black coats. Perhaps I should have guessed that nobody can spend all their time hamming it up like a pantomime villain. He's also a lot cleverer than I ever gave him credit for, but very, very pleased with his own cleverness!

As I think you can tell from that last paragraph, I want to like him, but every so often he goes and writes something so jarring that we are back to square one. I can give no better example of than in the section on pacing and using leading language during “hypnotism” to achieve a given result on your patient/client/victim: “Think of it,” says Derren, “As a seduction..”.

(Bear with me people, I'm going for an extended metaphor here.) Go to your local Chinese takeaway and buy a tub of their glutinous sweet and sour sauce. Let it go cold, or better still, chill it in the fridge over night. Now arrange to have a friend take you by surprise at some point during the day and tip the whole lot down the back of your neck so that clammy, gellid slime drips down the line of your spine... Done it? Well, that is EXACTLY the sensation I feel when Derren Brown asks me to think of anything as a seduction.

Also rather disturbing are the pictures of portraits Derren has painted, which I can only describe as Gerald Scarfe meets Max Ernst.

I have always (well, ever since The Affair of the Big Glass Box) wanted to see David Blaine and Derren Brown fight to the death. I believed that whichever it went, the winner would be society as a whole. It’s still an appealing image, but I think I’d go as far as cheering for Derren now. Maybe I’d even hold his sinister, black coat for him.

And at least he’s not Paul McKenna! I have a horror of Paul McKenna. Just typing the name makes me shudder so hard I think my muscles are trying to detach themselves from my skeleton in order to slither off to some hypnotist-free bolt-hole. I think it is because he looks a bit like alleged celebrity sex-attacker Michael Barrymore. It is one thing to be convinced to eat raw onions on stage and quite another to find yourself dead in a swimming pool with a sex-toy up the bottom.

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

• Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
• Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
• Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
• Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
• Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.