Ian Rankin, Midnight And Blue

 

- This exquisitely boring and tedious new novel from Ian Rankin is only for rusted on John Rebus fans. I've long been one, so can say with confidence that even for them it would be barely sufferable. 

- There are far too many characters in the saga. The whole cast over his previous twenty-four novels are included - detective colleagues, bosses, prison officers, gang leaders and criminal lowlifes of all sorts. It's way too clotted and goes on and on - name after name after name. The reader can't help but get totally flummoxed. 

- We're in Her Majesty's Prison in Edinburgh, and Rebus has been a prisoner for six months having been convicted of attempted murder of a notorious career criminal. One morning a prisoner is found dead, the victim of a stabbing. 

- There is a subplot too, thankfully far more navigable and interesting, featuring the immensely likeable Siobhan Clarke, Rebus's long term close colleague. 

- The drama is propelled by dialogue, always witty and smart. That's the best part of the novel. 

- Read one of Rankin's earlier Rebus novels and avoid this one. (But don't read under any circumstances his two Detective Malcolm Fox novels. Fox is a cold, fastidious, bureaucratic, untrustworthy, knob).  

Richard Flanagan, Question 7

 

- This is a fascinating book. It's not just a memoir, it's a highly emotional mixture of passion, anger and reflection. I found it utterly absorbing. We're taken to Hiroshima and the atom bomb, the novels of H.G.Wells, the scientific geniuses Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, Flanagan's mother and his former Prisoner of War father, and the colonial extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. 

- There are echoes of Flanagan's previous novels throughout, mainly Death of a River Guide and brilliant The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

- Over the course of his life certain events have become seared in his mind, and his telling of them incites immense anger which the reader can feel and share. 

- Like this one: At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, said 'Bomb away!, and forty-three seconds later 60,000 people died while eighty miles to the south my father, a near-naked slave labourer in his fourth year of captivity as a prisoner of war, continued with his gruelling work pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels that ran under the Inland Sea.

- And this one: a war of extermination, a war the Tasmanian Aboriginal people finally lost... Exiled to slums and an island reserve and silence, renamed and reviled as islanders and abos and boongs and half-castes and troublemakers, they could be called any vile humiliation imaginable but what they were: the original human inhabitants of the island. 

- We're taken back to the origin of nuclear physics and the splitting of the atom. The scientist Leo Szilard was terrified the world could be destroyed. He was inspired by the futuristic novels of H.G.Wells, and it seemed obvious that Nazi Germany would become the first country in the world to develop nuclear weapons. That was horrific. 

- Humanity was likely to be extinguished. 

- And as for bomber Thomas Ferebee, look at the precision aerial bombing of France during the war, and the carpet bombing of Vietnam twenty years later. Many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima. Ferebee was involved in both. Our American hero. 

- Flanagan takes us to his awakening as a young student in Oxford. The world there was grey… dreary and dispirited… where mediocrity was a virtue called tradition...The English were Martians. ‘Dirty little East End Jew. Go home to the colonies, convict. Women smell of slime, don’t you think? Hey, Paki - oi! Fif-faf-fuddle!' That was the true language of Oxford, its necessary language of hate.

- The final chapter is an exquisite telling of his near drowning in a kayak in the Franklin River. He was only twenty one and came very close to death. But, miraculously, he survived through the help of a courageous friend. He wasn't extinguished. As the world itself has so far survived. 

- And, by the way, his father lived until he was ninety-four. 

- Flanagan has written a thoroughly inspiring work. Brilliant. 

Inga Simpson, The Thinning

 

- It took me a while to comprehend what on earth Inga Simpson was on about in this new novel. There are some very strange and seemingly meaningless elements, and I was tempted to bail. Thankfully, I didn't. I started over again and read it twice. And was captivated. 

- It's set in the future, and the earth has been wrecked by climate change, ecological destruction, authoritarian regimentation, and abusive control of citizens and their lives. 

- A new subspecies of humans has emerged, called the Incompletes. They are infertile, but have higher levels of sensory perception. And they are disliked by other people. 

- The main character is Fin, a young woman whose father was a celebrated astronomer, and whose mother an astrophotographer. They join a small band of colleagues and become outliers, living off the grid. 

- Simpson keeps us in the dark on so many details, which I found frustrating. What year is it? How’s the earth’s population faring? Where did these Incompletes come from? And why? 

- But as the novel progresses in the second half, it gets far more dramatic and interesting, and in fact spellbinding. A full eclipse of the sun looms, and crowds of people gather in parks and ranges, determined to get the best viewing positions. What they don't know is that the astronomer outliers have a plan that will impact planet earth radically. They are determined to liberate humanity, whatever it takes - destroy space junk, power stations, gas wells, destructive mining operations, and reclaim the land by returning it to an inland sea. 

- As Fin reflects prior to the eclipse: What if the thresholds I long to cross are not portals to another dimension, but the capacity to fully inhabit our own? A way of circling back, into ourselves. Our best selves. What if we could see a way to make a new world, where all beings, no matter how fragile, could thrive?

- So take it slowly at first and relish Simpson's beautiful prose and love of the natural world. You will become absorbed. 

Iain Ryan, The Dream

 

- This new novel from Iain Ryan, the second in his promised four part series on Gold Coast corruption in the 1980's, is, unfortunately, a total disaster - unlike the first in the series, The Strip, which was brilliant in every way. 

- It's full of very unlikable characters, known at the time as the 'white shoe brigade'. They were ugly abusive thugs and criminals who dominated business development and the underworld. The police higher-ups were also involved. The Minister overseeing every aspect of it was Russ Hinze, a mover and shaker in the Bjelke-Petersen government. 

- In Ryan's novel they are financing and constructing Fantasyland, a huge theme park (presumably Dreamworld). There is cocaine, weed, and speed everywhere. And porn, whores and constant drinking. 

- Ryan immerses us in this ugliness. The story slowly gets richer and richer but there are so many characters who constantly pop up that you can't help but lose the thread. (A 'Cast of Characters' would have helped). As Bruno, the detective constable investigating the case reflects at one point: ‘Too many grim details circle this case. There’s a lot of blood and bad energy. The chain of events are fucking disastrous: a dead family, dead bank tellers, dirty cops, illicit porn, a motel room beheading. What is this?’.

- The storyline is way too complex. Baddies in every nook and cranny, all linked in mysterious ways. Some are gay, but homosexuality was a crime in the eighties. A few old men have authority over it all but they're obnoxious in the extreme. 

- I was hoping for a resolution that was emotionally satisfying, but it didn't emerge. It just got sillier. Dead bodies everywhere. 

- At least Ryan has documented how vulgar and corrupt the Gold Coast entrepreneurs, the police and the Queensland government were at the time.