Ascending the Throne

There is a theory that, the better the book, the harder it is to adapt for film or TV.  The HBO producers of Game of Thrones, which has just finished its first season, must therefore have approached their task with some trepidation; their source material,GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, is one of high watermarks of fantasy literature.  With its sprawling narrative arcs, multiple viewpoints and uncompromising bleakness, Martin's epic is not natural television.

Sean Bean leads a highly accomplished cast

Lovers of the books--among whom I count myself--need not have been worried.  Game of Thrones was as close to flawless as any fantasy drama brought to the screen can be.  The first season (which covered the first book in the series) was faithful to the source without being over-reverent; new scenes were added judiciously; and the series worked on its own merits while not alienating those familiar with the story.  The casting was impeccable--not just the big ticket actors like Sean Bean and Charles Dance, but also the considerable array of child actors.  Peter Dinklage, given the most promising material as the cynical dwarf Tyrion Lannister, delivered the most eye-catching of performances.

The series over, I have returned to reading the books with renewed pleasure (happy to be able cart such monstrously thick volumes around on my Kindle).  I had forgotten until I watched the series how strong an influence on The Dog of the North the series had been, with its political intrigues and moral ambiguities.  Now if anyone out there fancies making a big-budget ten-part adaption of The Dog, please do let me know...

Game of Thrones returns for a second season next year.  I can't wait!

At Long Last!

After many frustrations and delays, The Last Free City is available to buy

Although I am a lover of my Kindle, I don't view a book as having been published for real until you can hold a physical copy in your hands.  By that definition, The Last Free City is published today--more than two years after I finished it.

The book is only available through online retailers - £12.32 from amazon.co.uk (where Amazon tempts the wavering buyer with a 3p discount off RRP) or $19.99 from amazon.com (US readers are less fickle and need no discount to persude them to buy).

The Kindle edition is still available for those who have no more space in their house (or who balk at paying the prices quoted for a paperback) although these readers miss out on the splendid Bellotto artwork cannibalised for my cover.

Taking a Stand

At long last I steeled myself to tackle the 1,400 page doorstop that is Stephen King's The Stand.  Almost all books this length are too long, and this was no exception, but that aside, The Stand is a powerful and impressive novel.  It wears its desire to be the American The Lord of the Rings on its sleeve (Tolkien is referenced explicitly several times, and the final quest across the mountains to destroy a dark lord with his all-seeing eye will be familiar to most); but all 20th century fantasy writers owe a debt to Tolkien, and The Stand succeeds on its own terms.

Indeed, so adeptly does it build its apocalyptic narrative on the late Cold War American zeitgeist, that a case could be made that it is The Great American Novel, defined by Wikipedia as "presumed to be written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of the common American citizen".  Actual real live Americans may send me screaming for the hills for a) forming a judgement on this most American of questions and b) suggesting that fantasy/horror novel should be admitted to the company of The Catcher in the Rye & co.  I merely offer it as a suggestion...

King's virtues as a writer are unarguable: he sharply and economically delineates character; he understands pace and structure (to pull off a 1,400 page novel, you have to); and he can terrible significance in the most everyday details.  His core gifts of character and plotting are seen as almost too humdrum to be worth celebrating, except perhaps by anyone who has settled to the business of writing their own novel.

The Stand is not without its imperfections, but whole is immersive and accomplished.  I highly recommend it - but make sure you have a lot of spare time once you pick it up...

TV Review

More Cops 'n' Robbers

The Saturday night slot on BBC4 once filled by the Danish noir The Killing has in recent weeks been given over to another foreign language cop show - this time the French Spiral.  In its stark exploration of the French judicial system, and its cops who'll do anything to get a confession, it's certainly as dark as The Killing.  It was less immediately compelling than the Danish show, but more consistent in its footing (it didn't leave a slew of loose endings or mar the conclusion).  The acting was impeccable, especially Catherine Proust as unwashed obsessive Inspector Berthaud and  Thierry Godard as the incorruptible prosecutor Roban.  There was very little in the way of happy endings, but this was powerful and compelling drama that, once again, made me wish British TV could offer something similar.

The opening episode of the much-touted The Shadow Line, starring Chiwitel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston, did not immediately camp out in the same territory.  The cast is top-notch, but the brooding and portentous tone of the first hour, underpinned by stilted dialogue and almost palpable desire for noir cool, was not a sure-footed debut.  It was like Luther, but without the overacting which, perversely, saved the Idris Elba  vehicle.  I'll stick with it, but with expectations suitably muted.

Story and Genre

Last week I reviewed Patrick Bishop's Bomber Boys, part of the research I've been doing for my fantasy novel Shadow Puppet.  One strand of the protagonists in Shadow Puppet is a bomber pilot and so I've been doing a lot of reading around World War II--to the level, in fact, where I could begin a novel, exploring the same themes using much the same story, about bomber pilots set in that period if I wanted.  So why don't I?  It would almost certainly have more commercial potential than the "mechanised fantasy" I have in mind.

Why can't fantasy fiction have bombers?

There are several reasons.  First, the novel I would want to write about bomber pilots and WWII has already been written: Len Deighton's Bomber.  This novel is so perfect in concept and execution that any attempt to tread the same ground could only be callow in comparison.

Second, there are a couple of plot dynamics which would seem either anachronistic or ludicrous in a QWWII novel.  Curtailing these elements would weaken the structure I have in mind.

Third, in a WWII novel you already know the ending.  Your protagonist might or might not survive the war, but you know from their nationality whether they're on the winning side.  This allows a fine dramatic irony but inevitably leaches much of the tension from the narrative.

The final, and most important, reason is the moral ambiguity I can introduce in a created world.  An English language novel about WWII almost forces you into a "white hats versus black hats" scenario, good against evil - a setup that doesn't interest me as a reader or a writer.  There aren't going to be many readers rooting for the Nazis against the Allies - but Lauchenland against Beruzil?  Who are the good guys in that one?   Not knowing whose side you're supposed to be on--or inverting your sympathies during the course of the novel--are much more interesting for everyone.

Now, all I need to do is get on with the minor details of writing the damned book...

Why Should I Read...?

Bomber Boys

Patrick Bishop, 1997

I recently read this remarkable book--a history of Bomber Command's activities in World War II--as research for my latest fantasy novel.  Bomber Boys is far more than a research source, though: it's a meticulously researched and morally balanced survey which also packs considerable emotional power.

The story of Bomber Command is more complex than any other branch of the British military.  The astonishing bravery of the aircrew, and the appalling risks they encountered, is beyond dispute.  Figures vary, but most sources agree that around 75,000 airmen flew active missions during the war; 50,000--two-thirds--were killed.  A tour of duty was 30 operations, and at the height of the casualties, 1943, only one crew in six survived to complete a tour; only one in forty made it through a second.  The crews knew the odds, and still they carried on volunteering.

But the bomber crews are not remembered today in the same way that other branches of the armed services are.  There is no national memorial, and no campaign medal.  The reason is easy to find: the nature of the missions they flew.  The technology of the age was not adequate to bomb small targets precisely, and the strategy, under Sir Arther 'Bomber' Harris, was to bomb German cities into oblivion.  Over 40,000 civilians were killed in one raid on Hamburg, nearly as many in the more notorious Dresden attack when the war was nearly over.  After the war, the Allied leadership felt it necessary to distance itself from these tactics.

Bishop is to be commended for even-handed treatment of the issues.  His account has eyewitness testimony from German survivors of the raids, and he never seeks to minimise their impact.  He does not allow his undoubted admiration for the aircrew to blur the difficult moral question of whether the strategy was justified.  He presents the evidence, and lets the reader decide.

Bomber Boys is a moving, troubling account of a grotesque period of human history.  Recommended for anyone with an interest in the period or the morality of warfare.

Reading and Viewing

One reason--beyond natural indolence--for some downtime on the blog is that I'm doing what might loosely be called research for Shadow Puppet, and generally catching up on some reading and the Sky+ box.

Having finished Stalingrad, which was most definitely research, I continued with two contrasting Spitfire pilot memoirs: First Light, by Geoffrey Wellum, and The Last Enemy, by Richard Hillary.  Both were vivid and moving accounts of pilots' experiences, and humbling to read how these seemingly ordinary young men were able to endure the most horrific conditions--taking their planes into combat two or three times a day, with their colleagues killed around them.  Both understandably take on a certain detachment under a devil-may-care exterior.  Wellum survived the war, understanding even at the time that nothing in his life would match the intensity or significance of these early experiences; Hillary, terribly burned after being shot down, was then killed in a training crash.  Sobering stuff.

Less emotionally engaging was the final series of The Tudors.  This, by almost any standards, was a stinker: historical accuracy, competence of script, acting merit--all were wholly cast aside.  Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) lapsed deeper and deeper into Irish as the series progressed, and the dream sequence in which he was visited by Death on a horse defined risibility.  And yet--The Tudors was great fun. Taken on its own terms, it had pace, dynamism and an unpretentious--if wholly unwarranted--self-confidence.  A guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.

It certainly compared favourably with Ridley Scott's bloated ragbag of cliche and stereotype, Robin Hood.  This, from the man who directed Alien, Bladerunner and Gladiator, was a sad and sorry comedown.  Scott apparently rejected more interesting earlier versions of the script (including Russell Crowe playing both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the Sheriff as "a CSI-style forensic investigator) to make a stolid retelling of an old tale.  No worse, perhaps, than The Tudors, but with the unforgivable sin of being just plain boring.

Cover via Amazon

Holiday Reading

I'm back, refreshed from a week in Tenerife.  It's the first time I've ever been on holiday and not taken a book.  Instead, luggage pared down, it was my Kindle, loaded up with my intended reading.

The experience only reinforced my existing Kindle mania.  Light, easy on the eye and infinitely practical.

First on my reading list was Justin Cronin's weighty modern-day vampire novel, The Passage.  This didn't justify the hype, and would have benefited from being 200 pages shorter, but it was still an absorbing read.  More rewarding was Joe Abercrombie's long-awaited The Heroes.  In publishing terms, Abercrombie is a well-established brand: ultra-violent, blackly comic deconstructions of the fantasy genre, told through mulitple viewpoints and clearly differentiated viewpoints.  Nobody does this niche better but, after five novels, I'm interested to see where he goes next.

My final reading, which I'm still working through, is Antony Beevor's immense history of Hitler's Russian campaign, Stalingrad.  It's a grim and chilling account of an almost unimaginably hellish time.

Revenge of the Killer Nerds

How baseball was revolutionised by mucking about with spreadsheets

My interest in Americana does not extend to its sports.  Of the Big Three, football (sic), basketball and baseball, it is baseball which comes nearest to capturing my interest.  In Britain, we have a girls' game called rounders which it in many ways resembles [ducks from outraged US readers].  Last week I came across an extraordinary book on baseball, Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.

Moneyball explains the process by which the impoverished Oakland Athletics outperformed teams with much more money over an extended period.  Baseball, like cricket, is a game which generates an inordinate raft of statistics.  The A's general manager, Billy Beane, recruited Harvard-educated statisticians to work out which statistics were the best predictors of performance (these tended not to be the headline ones), and which were undervalued.

At the risk of falling into crass error about a sport I don't pretend to understand, the blue riband statistic is batting average--essentially the proportion of times the batter manages to hit the ball.  Beane came to believe that a more important stat was on-base percentage--the frequency with which the batter made it to first base (which a canny player can achieve without the inconvenience of trying to hit the ball).  Batters with a high batting average were overvalued by the market, those with a high on-base percentage undervalued--so given limited resources, it made sense to invest in players who scored highly on the latter. 

If this sounds dry, Lewis writes with a lively tone, and draws the characters behind the stats with engaging economy.  To enjoy the book, you probably need an interest in statistics or baseball, but not necessarily both.  Given my day-job, I did respond to the idea that sensible use of objective data was able to trump the prejudices of the gum-chewing ex-players.  It didn't do any harm either than Oakland is the home of Jack Vance, the hero of this blog.

Long Live the King

In thirty-plus years as a reader of books for adults, including a strong interest in science-fiction and fantasy, by some quirk I've managed never to read a novel by Stephen King.  I'm not sure quite why that is.  I don't particularly care for horror, and I've always seen King as at the horror end of the spectrum.

The magic of the Kindle is that I can download sample chapters of books I'm not really sure about, and wouldn't spend actual cash on.  (There used to be an artefact known as a "library" which performed a similar function, but these seem to have fallen into disuse).  Thus buttressed, I downloaded the openings of The Stand, seemingly King's most popular novel, and The Green Mile, which I knew from the excellent Tom Hanks film.

It is a possible to have a long career as a bestseller without being much cop as a writer, but there's no doubt King can write.  I devoured the opening of The Stand--a killer plague is on the loose: disaster beckons--in about an hour.  This was cracking stuff!  King does all the basics with unobtrusive excellence: inject pace, differentiate interesting characters, nail place and period.  The Stand is unputdownable, so imagine my dismay when I logged on to Amazon only to find the Kindle edition has been withdrawn!  I really don't want another 1,400 page paperback in my house, but the opening is so compelling there's no other option.  £4.99: click here for One-Click Ordering.  Job done.

To keep me going until the postman arrives, I downloaded the whole of The Green Mile, which is similarly impressive.  I know the story from the film--which appears to follow the source closely--but it's still compelling.  King has an uncanny command of voice, and critics who dismiss his work as populist pap have probably never realised how difficult it is to write something engaging and accessible.

I've got a holiday coming up and a long book in the post. What could be better?