Devil’s Charge (Stryker Chronicles 2) by Michael Arnold

Publisher: John Murray
Pages: 480
Year: 2011, Pb 2012
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Bought copy

Review
Captain Stryker is a man to be reckoned with – with one eye obliterated and masked by scar tissue and the other one always alert for danger, he has by his side a small troop of dedicated and loyal men, good shots one and all. Their mission is to forward the cause of Prince Rupert and the prince’s uncle Charles I against the Parliamentarians. Stryker’s more pressing concern is to protect Lisette Gaillard, the agent of Charles’ formidable Queen and ‘She-Majesty Generalissima’ Henrietta, who would protest that it is she who must look out for Innocent Stryker. What is clear is that while reading Michael Arnold’s The Stryker Chronicles you are behind Stryker and Lisette every step of the way, urging them on and shying away when they take one of the many blows aimed for them.

The first novel, Traitor’s Blood, is set in the closing months of 1642, beginning with one of the first major conflicts of the English Civil War at Edgehill. Devil’s Charge picks up the action in 1643 with the battle for Cirencester. Much of the novel, however, focuses on the siege of Lichfield, a strategically-placed city between Charles’ capital in Oxford and his more northern strongholds. Lichfield is held (just) by a gout-ridden royalist who, fortunately for him, has Stryker and his men within the city walls thanks to the presence of a wounded Lisette in the infirmary.

Devil’s Charge is a more substantial novel than Traitor’s Blood. At almost 500 pages, all opportunity is taken to extract every ounce of drama, action and suspense from the conflicts, whether a full-scale battle or a duel to the death between Stryker and whichever mortal enemy wants to kill him next. There are a fair few of them.

The focus of evil in Devil’s Charge is Major Girns, whose sole desire is to destroy the two Blaze brothers. The Blaze brothers are masters of artillery and and as such hold the gift of victory in their hands. For this is a turning point in warfare. Guns and swords are used equally on the battlefield. A bullet might be deadly but a gun was cumbersome, slow to be reloaded, unwieldy to carry. A sword would often be used to finish the enemy off. But with Black Bess on your side, and a genius like Jonathan Blaze lighting its fuse, much could be gained. Stryker has his hands full with Girns – and Lisette.

One of the reasons why I enjoy The Stryker Chronicles so much is that they present a living and breathing map of an England torn into many pieces by civil war four hundred years ago. I recognise the names and places and it’s extraordinary to think of battles in the fields and streets of some very familiar places. However, if you know nothing at all about the time or the place, that won’t matter at all thanks to the details, the action, the characters and the spirit and pace of the storytelling. There are a wealth of characters to enjoy here, regardless of the size of their roles. Stryker is at the heart but around him we have friends, lovers, commanders, enemies, scoundrels and frightened soldiers – even the horses have names and a place here.

The story of the struggle between Stryker, Lisette and their comrades is what matters here. The ‘greater’ conflict between king and parliament is secondary. There is good and bad on both sides and it is clear that in a war such as this loyalty is more complicated. It did indeed divide towns and families. It is that human drama, wrapped up in an exciting adventure full of as much swash and buckle as you could possible wish for, that makes Devil’s Charge well worth your time and pennies.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Publisher: Headline Review
Pages: 416
Year: February 2012
Buy: Hardback
Source: Review copy

Review
A middle-aged couple, Mabel and Jack, are about to endure their second Alaskan winter. Far from their families, they are trying to make a life for themselves farming land that for much of the time is either too frozen or too wet. With Jack labouring all day, Mabel is left in their cabin, remembering a lost child and contemplating whether to take a walk across the barely frozen nearby river.

Yet, when the first snow falls, Jack and Mabel are enchanted and for the first time in a long, long while they play together and build with great care a snow girl, complete with red lips, red mittens and scarf and yellow hair. The next morning, the snow child is gone and, when they begin to catch sight of a young girl in the trees, watching them, Mabel becomes convinced that the child is a snow girl, brought to life, just like the snow child fairy tale in the Russian book that she treasures, even though she can’t read a word.

The Snow Child is a wonderful novel. Wonderful. Extraordinarily, it is Eowyn Ivey’s first book, something that is quite incredible as you realise that not a word is superfluous and not a sentence detracts from the beauty of the story and its characters, not to mention the atmosphere of the harsh but magnificent Alaskan setting. As the story unfolds, there is something inspirational and very moving about Mabel’s rediscovery of herself and her husband and her new found love affair with this most beautiful and ultimately giving of environments. As for the snow child herself, there’s every chance that you’ll fall as much in love with her as Mabel and Jack.

I don’t want to talk too much about the story of The Snow Child because the novel’s mystery is entrancing. There are few characters, not surprisingly considering that it is set in such a remote part of the world in a time (the thirties) when deprivation and hardship caused many to give up their dreams and return to the cities. The people who survive in Alaska have to adapt, be able to live off the land and its animals for food and warmth, and must find comfort where they can. The ties that bind Mabel to her husband, neighbours, the girl and even her family back home, are tender and unbreakable.

Eowyn Ivey’s prose is truly bewitching and at times you may catch your breath, smile or cry a little. She has achieved the sophisticated air of simplicity and naturalness while going straight to the heart of her fully-rounded, breathing characters, yet still always making sure that the Alaskan environment is never more than a cabin wall from us, even when we read this novel wrapped up and snug in our homes. It is a marvellous achievement and Eowyn Ivey has a great talent which we must watch in the years to come. The fact that Eowyn lives in Alaska and clearly knows and understands it brilliantly well is apparent in every page.

I’ve read many novels this year but The Snow Child ranks high among them and I don’t think I’m going to forget it. The book isn’t out until February 2012 so I’ll make sure I remind you of it again nearer the time.

Huge thanks to my good friend Liz for the read.

Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 400
Year: 2011
Buy: Hardback, Kindle
Source: Bought copy

Review
I have been a fan of Michael Crichton and his fantastical and yet somehow believable technothrillers since I leapt on Jurassic Park back in 1990. Since then, I don’t think there’s been a title I’ve missed – with the exception of Pirate Latitudes (I have an aversion to books about pirates). Crichton’s death in 2008 was a great loss. It was an unexpected pleasure, then, to hear that he left more than one novel in a near completed state. The first of these, Micro, was finished off by scifi writer Richard Preston and published yesterday. I’ve read it already and that’s because I was counting the days until Micro came out and I wasn’t going to let a little thing like work, eating, sleeping, communication with fellow humans, get in between me and this book.

I’m delighted to report that there are no pirates in Micro – at least, not the sort with one leg who sail around in boats. Instead, we’re back to what Michael Crichton does so well: taking a hugely attractive and exciting idea (here deadly nanorobots – bots – and humans shrunk to about an inch) and putting them in an environment that catches the imagination (here the Hawaii jungle complete with every creeping, crawling and wriggling critter you could try not to imagine), all carefully slotted into a tight plot that will keep those pages turning.

Seven graduate students, including Peter Jansen, leave their studies (ethnobotany, arachnology, venomology, biochemistry, psychology) in the NE US to join Peter’s brother Erik who is Vice President of a hi-tech company in Hawaii called Nanigen. They have been headhunted. Nanigen doesn’t have enough scientists. It’s not too long before we realise why. From the moment of their arrival, nothing goes to plan. Erik, an experienced sailor, has been lost off his new boat and his brother Peter, using some hi-tech methods of his own, soon suspects Nanigen’s part in his brother’s loss. But there’s not much he or his fellow students can do about it when they’re shrunk to an inch and a bit and banished into the Hawaiian jungle.

If I could have read some of Micro with my eyes shut I would have done. There are some very exciting and truly horrific moments as everything with no legs or a lot of legs sets out to eat, dismember or impregnate our resourceful but surely doomed little heroes. There is relish here in the descriptions of some of the very many disgusting ways in which to die in the jungle but there is also a beauty and an appreciation of some of the wonders of nature. And that is a characteristic of Michael Crichton’s work – a love of nature and the environment even though it frequently clashes with the technology that he enjoys equally. The students are scientists and they too respect and admire the animals and insects that they work with. They don’t want to kill unnecessarily and when reduced to the same size as the beetles, mites, daddy longlegs and spiders that they know well, they see them with fresh, appreciative eyes. They can hear their sounds for the first time, they can see fear in their eyes. A mite crawling up the leg is carefully placed back on the squirming jungle floor.

However, this wonder at nature has its limits – and these limits are embodied in ants, centipedes and wasps and other nasties which are even more horrible when they’re the size of a dog or car.

The environment is the strength in Micro. There is also a real charm in the students’ discovery of this new world, despite the appalling danger, and this exuberance is infectious – I learned quite a lot about creeping creatures and plantlife. The baddies, though, and more than one of the students, are not particularly rounded and some strands are left inconclusively dangling. While some moments are savoured with relish, others are hurried and unsatisfying. Also, some of the description is repetitive and I wonder if this is an inevitable result of the book being left incomplete and finished off by another’s hand.

Nevertheless, I am so pleased that Micro reached the light of day. It might have reminded me of Innerspace and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (inevitably, I think), but it also reminded me very much of the good old Jurassic Park days and that is a very good thing indeed.

Tao Zero by Poul Anderson

Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 196
Year: 1970 (this edn 2006)
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Bought copy

Review
My mission to get to know some of the masters of science fiction continues and although it’s barely begun I consider myself very fortunate to have read Poul Anderson’s Tao Zero. First published in 1970 and now part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks (reissued 2006), it is a little short of 200 pages in length and yet the story has such a depth and scope to it, it is in every other way a substantial, hefty piece of literature.

Tao Zero tells the story of a starship, the Leonora Christine, and the 25 couples aboard who set out in the 23rd century to colonise a planet 30 light years from earth. These men and women, with their different skills and personalities, are setting out to establish a new frontier, leaving everything behind and with little hope of returning to earth, at least during the lives of their loved ones. The clock of the cosmos means that journeys through space are also journeys through time. It is supposed to take the ship five years to reach the planet, thanks to the forces that reduce Tao to zero – matter is used to create and increase acceleration, sending the ship speeding through space and time while, inside the vessel, lives continue on a human clock. But when the Leonora Christine encounters a young nebula, the catastrophic collision destroys the decelerators and sets the ship off with infinte acceleration into the universe. With no way to stop, the ship, ever increasing in matter, passes through millennia and galaxies.

There are two perspectives to the story. One is outside the ship, giving us the background to the science, charting for us the path of the vessel through the universe and counting down the vast ages of time. Within this universe, so economically and quite beautifully described, we have the story of the 50 men and women aboard who, already faced with the stress of leaving earth and their families, now have to deal with a lifetime in transit from one star system to another, knowing that so much time has passed that not only all their loved ones on earth have died but even that the earth and its solar system are now destroyed.

Each of the crew must deal with their condition in his or her own way. The reality of spending a lifetime confined in a vessel with the same people, the relationships formed and broken, the desire to continue the human race while knowing that they are its end, the need to search for solutions and keep self-control, the attraction of an easy mass suicide – these questions and dilemmas face everyone from the captain downwards.

The brevity of the novel means that we don’t get to know many of the characters in much depth. Instead there is a focus on a handful of key personnel and friendships and animosities. Their problem-solving exists side by side with their desire to form lasting relationships as the physical and psychological distance from earth increases.

There is a fair amount of science here and I’m not going to pretend that I understood all of it or even most of it – I still couldn’t tell you what Tao is. However, my lack of scientific background didn’t impede my enjoyment of this compelling book. It’s a work of art painted with exquisite sentences; the universe it presents is a thing of beauty and the resilience of humanity is inspirational. My only complaint would be the length – the end felt relatively contrived because there weren’t enough pages given to it. Nevertheless, Tao Zero is one of those books that will stay with you for its ideas and storytelling – how would I deal with such a situation? – and I have no doubt it’s one to which I’ll return.

Marius’ Mules I: The Invasion of Gaul by S.J.A. Turney

Publisher: YouWriteOn
Pages: 423
Year: 2010
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Prize copy

Review
I don’t know what it is about novels on Rome and its legions but I can’t get enough of them. Nothing spread Roman imperialism and culture to the masses quite like its armies and, if I had to give a reason why such novels fascinate me so much, I might argue it’s because they can dramatise so well the tension of life on the fringes of Rome, sometimes literally and often in other ways as well. The clashes of cultures and worlds, culminating in hand to hand conflict, is, if written well, very exciting and immediate on the page. Two thousand years ago, a Roman soldier would have found himself in all sorts of sticky spots before, if he were fortunate enough not to be struck down on the battlefield, finally settling down many miles from his place of birth – another type of Roman conquest. Not surprisingly, then, I was delighted to win a copy of S.J.A. Turney’s The Invasion of Gaul, which is the first in a series of novels about these heavily burdened, mile marching legionaries known as Marius’ Mules (after the popular military hero of Republican Rome Marius) who followed Julius Caesar across Gaul in the mid 1st century BC.

Julius Caesar might be the most important man of the novel but our attention focuses on Marcus Falerius Fronto, the legate in command of the Tenth. Fronto is a man from a wealthy and privileged background but he has turned his back on a potentially rewarding political career in the senate or as a province governor in favour of leading a legion – not for a year or two, but for good. As such, he is one of the few high rankers that Caesar can trust, not that this necessarily means that Fronto trusts him back. As well as Fronto, we get to know his primus pilus, or chief centurion, Priscus, the chief training officer, Velius, the extraordinary military engineer, Tetricus, the commander of the Eighth, Balbus, and Longinus, the legate of the Ninth and commander of the cavalry. And that’s just to name a few. There are quite a few more I could mention. That is one of the great strengths of Marius’ Mules – it introduces us to a range of men aiming to do Caesar’s bidding while keeping their own men alive on the march, in the camp and on the battlefield. After a chapter or two, you’ll be very concerned to know how they fare.

The story is straightforward. Caesar is out to win political glory through military conquest and the best way to do that is to stir up the tribes of Gaul and Germania. Matters are helped by the fact that the tribes spend as much time fighting each other as they do the Romans but Caesar isn’t after a diplomatic solution. He wants victory, land and the kind of honour he would get from leading the chieftains of Gaul in chains behind his chariot in triumph back in Rome. As a result, this is a novel about life on the march, broken up by regular battles or skirmishes. In the second half of the book, Caesar’s mission focuses on one man, the enemy King Ariovistus but to conquer this real threat takes a little more ingenuity and strategy – just the kind of service Caesar expects from Fronto.

Although the attention is very much on the men leading the legions from the front, these are mostly career soldiers respected by their soldiers or young men experiencing their first command and earning their dues. As the soldiers get to know them, so do we. Fronto might be a skilled strategist but he’s happiest on the frontline, away from Caesar’s staff especially the unpleasant Crassus, and he spends the majority of his time getting into scrapes, getting battered and drinking it off. There’s no time for niceties when you’re on the march, constantly looking over your shoulder for enemy scouts, risking an arrow in the back. Fronto and his friends are hard drinking (they’re regulars in most of the taverns of the empire), gambling, joking, jostling men, who know that each day may be his last and enjoying it all the same.

Caesar isn’t quite the hero we’re used to. He makes his mistakes and he surrounds himself with both good and bad advisers, largely because he can’t take one eye off the senate, and he is prepared to sacrifice thousands of lives – Roman and barbarian – for his ambition and still proclaim it for the glory of Rome. Nevertheless, he is the boss and we see little more of Caesar than Fronto shows us. Likewise, because this is the story of Fronto and the other legates, we see relatively little of the enemy, except as glimpses in the forest or on the other side of the shieldwall

By the end of Marius’ Mules there won’t be much you won’t know about the construction of Roman camps, Roman battle formations and troops, military equipment and uniform, personal possessions, the treatment of the dead and life on the march. I was as fascinated by all of that as I was entertained by the repartee between Fronto and his friends. It all feels very realistic while letting you get close to the men due to their banter and bravery in the field. As a result I felt quite moved in places. This is a self-published book but it deserves to be on the shelves of our bookshops. I’m delighted to say that I have already bought Marius’ Mules II: The Belgae and look forward to seeing what Fronto and Caesar get up to against the next bunch of unlucky barbarians.

The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan

Publisher: Avon
Pages: 432
Year: 2012
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Review copy

Review
The Istanbul Puzzle might be the first novel by Laurence O’Bryan but it is such a confident, atmospheric and thoroughly gripping thriller that I’m relieved to report that the second, The Jerusalem Puzzle, will follow after just a year. That book will continue the adventures of the two extremely likeable leads introduced to us here: Sean Ryan, a director of the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford, and Isabel Sharp, a British diplomat in Istanbul. Their dayjobs are about to get a little unpredictable…

Their task here is to uncover the murderer of Sean’s friend and colleague Alex, whose beheaded body has been found close to the Hagia Sophia. But as they inch closer to revealing the truth, the threat to Istanbul, to London and to the rest of the world increases by the hour. What did Alex stumble across? And what dreadful legacy from the ancient city is about to be unleashed?

The answers to the secrets lie under the very heart of Istanbul, in the Roman and medieval cisterns, sewers and underground tunnels. Sean and Isabel are both very human and attractive protagonists. They don’t face danger and deceit with the bravado of comic book characters and they’re not the stereotypes found in some thrillers. When they’re in the tunnels, trapped under water and nibbled at by terrifying shapes in the dark, their fear and panic are tangible and the pages will fly through your fingers. O’Bryan knows Istanbul, as becomes clear in his enjoyable guide to a day spent exploring the sites of the city that closes the book. This knowledge adds colour and depth to Sean and Isabel’s adventures around and under the city. You can almost taste the damp in the air and feel the crush of the busy streets.

The threat that waits through the novel is all the more frightening because it is something that could conceivably happen as terrorism changes its shape. But it’s also terrifying because humanity has faced this catastrophe before, albeit it inflicted by nature and not by a man pressing a button, in the Middle Ages and in the post-Roman years. It could happen again. The stakes are very high and the clock is ticking. Istanbul, the meeting place of continents, cultures and religions provides the perfect setting.

The Istanbul Puzzle is the first in a series of novels and so we have much to learn about Sean and Isabel’s background and natures. Both are turning a corner in their lives and discovering that they have a great deal to lose. The book is extremely well-written, with prose that manages to be both to-the-point and colourfully descriptive. The dialogue is particularly excellent and there were a couple of lines that made me guffaw out loud. Just as you would expect from a good thriller, The Istanbul Puzzle is indeed unputdownable. I was very sorry to finish it in little over a day and I’m grateful for being given the chance to read an early proof.

Do keep an eye on the author’s website for competitions and further information about the book and its characters.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Pfeffer

Publisher: Marion Lloyd Books
Pages: 352
Year: 2006
Buy: Paperback
Source: Bought copy

Review
Clearly, watching the superb Melancholia, followed up by reading the imagination-catching The End Specialist and Altered Carbon, has seized hold of my mind and set it on a quest. It culminated this week in reading all three books in Susan Pfeffer’s The Last Survivors series published by Marion Lloyd Books between 2006 and 2010. The three novels are ostensibly aimed at Young Adults but, without doubt, as with all good fiction, the books are ageless in their appeal and execution. The first novel, Life As We Knew It, appears to have been written originally as a standalone novel and, as such, this is a review of this alone. Reading this book undoubtedly whets your appetite for more and so it’s a huge relief that two sequels followed in quick succession. You’ll find those two novels in the next review. But, without doubt, Life As We Knew It deserves to be treated as something else.

One evening in May, crowds gather around barbecues to celebrate a once in a life time event – a meteor is about to pass by the earth. But it doesn’t quite make it – it hits the moon and pushes it just a little off its orbit, resulting in fear in those who watch the moon loom larger as well as an ever-increasing ripple of effects on our planet. In Life As We Knew It we follow events through the eyes and journal of teenager Miranda, who lives with her brothers Matt and Jon and her mother Laura in a quiet town not too far away from NYC. Her father, Hal, has a new wife Lisa and a baby on the way. As the novel opens, Miranda is looking forward to spending a summer month away with her dad. But then the asteroid hits.

Immediate impacts include radio reports of massive tsunamis, wiping out much of the west coast as well as NYC. It’s not long before electricity becomes a rare luxury and days of existence are counted in tins of vegetables.

Immediately, Miranda’s mother provides us with the perfect example of what to do when disaster threatens. She organises her kids in a sophisticated onslaught on shop supplies, for themselves and for their good friend and neighbour Mrs Nesbitt.

The decline in civilisation is as slow as it is relentless. Earthquakes are followed by dormant volcanoes coming alive with a force that turns the skies grey with ash and temperatures plummet. We’re spared the mass carnage of the coasts and cities. Instead, we have a drip by drip loss of everything that Miranda had and hoped for. But far from being depressing, with little news coming in from the outside world, we keep hope alive because we watch events through the extremely likeable and resilient Miranda. She has to grow up and she does. She and her brothers hang on, attending schools and libraries, grabbing fleeting moments of fun, ice-skating on a lake, saving gifts for birthdays, making sunrooms cosy, never giving up, while still keeping something of the teenager in herself, fighting with her brothers, squabbling with her mother, missing her father. Miranda’s voice and spirit make for a wonderful and often very endearing guide, so much so I read Life As We Knew It in a day and I couldn’t buy the sequel fast enough.

Life As We Knew It shows us Miranda’s life for a year after the meteor hits. At the end of the year, very possibly, just like me you’ll be longing to pick up the story.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 480
Year: 2002 (this edn 2008)
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Bought copy

Review
It’s more than likely that Altered Carbon will stay with you long after you close the final page or consign it to the archive of your eReader. The reason for this is that author Richard Morgan has composed a masterpiece that doesn’t just satisfy your every science fiction need, it takes the genre and mixes it up with a dark detective drama (ala Blade Runner and Chandler), places a worthy puzzle at its heart, and throws ideas at you that will make you marvel at the imaginative prowess of their creator but are also guaranteed to agitate your mind like a cyberblender.

Altered Carbon introduces us to Takeshi Kovacs, a detective of sorts, who has been hired to investigate the violent death of the immensely powerful Laurens Bancroft. The unusual point to make here is that it’s Bancroft himself who hires Kovacs.

In this universe, for the wealthy at least, death is simply an inconvenience. Everything that makes a human what he or she is, is preserved in the ‘stack’ which lies at the top of the spine. If killed, this stack is transplanted or ‘re-sleeved’ into another body or clone. The poor are just as likely to find themselves in storage, bodiless, for decades. At worst, their bodies are reused by the rich, put on like suits. Even soldiers killed in action are re-sleeved in the only bodies available for them. Imagine, then, being reunited with a family that doesn’t recognise you. Could you stand it? Would you walk away?

Death is temporary and life is both cheap and priceless. The vulnerable and the poor can be ‘snuffed’ out in the games played by the wealthy. Torture has become an art form and a human can suffer through more than one lifetime. The Catholics, though, refuse to be re-sleeved but as a result they are popular targets for violence because they can not be recreated to bear witness.

The powerful are as good as eternal, living hundreds of years, with even their stack backed up. They are the Meths, named after Methusalah of the Bible. If their body and stack are destroyed, as happens to Bancroft, all they will lose is 48 hours of memory. It’s these two days that Kovacs is tasked with recovering.

Kovaks is himself re-sleeved. He has been given the body of Ryker, a copy from a city once called San Francisco, who, rather unfortunately and conveniently, has money on his head and killers on his tail. Things get complicated. It also makes his characterisation and personality wonderfully rich and enigmatic, to us and to the people around him.

The world of Altered Carbon is fantastically layered and textured with idea after idea after idea filling the pages. Without doubt, many of them will make you stop and think. What would it be like to be a woman re-sleeved into the body of another woman very different in appearance, knowing that your own body has been invaded by someone with enough money to choose, and now finding that your loving husband cannot escape from the idea that he is committing adultery by lying by your side?

There are moments in this book of great emotion, shock, horror and amusement. The compelling ideas are matched by the superb characterisation. Both humans and robots, virtual monsters and criminals, have depth and life to them. Altered Carbon is beautifully imagined, tightly grafted and perfectly constructed. It is an absorbing, riveting read, littered with unexpected humour, hints of Martians, alien wars and other worlds. It’s a relief to know that these themes, as well as Kovacs, are to be picked up in the subsequent two novels.

Above all, the achievement of Altered Carbon is the wonder of it all.