Reading/Watching Log
In which we discuss my column on Helen Lowe’s blog, reviews for Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Susan Ee’s Angelfall, and some little tidbits from Dates and The Tunnel.
But first tell me, what’s the very last thing you want to see out of your living room window? A fire? A burglar? The paparazzi?
How about THE ARMED DEFENDERS SQUAD?
So basically I woke up, stumbled into my kitchen, looked out the window and saw this happening:
It was the whole shebang: masks, rifles, police dogs, police cars, ambulances - the lot. After a while my sister and I heard a voice over a microphone entreating someone to come to the door (basically: “this is the police, we are not leaving until you come to the door” repeated about twenty times). Then there were two gun-shots and Sis and I dived to the kitchen floor. Yes, dived. It was totally a movie moment. When we looked up again the swat team was heading into the house followed by the ambulance workers, and then a police car raced away down the street, sirens blaring.
And that was all really. We think that the road must have been cordoned off down the other end as after that there was a flood of traffic coming down the street, and a few minutes after that the women who lived in the house returned. We found out afterwards that it was a domestic dispute involving a man with a weapon inside the house, but didn’t really learn much more than that. I’m looking across at the house now from where I’m sitting and it all looks completely normal.
Still, a pretty exciting way to start a Sunday morning!
The rest of this post will pale in comparison; but keep reading anyway.
***
In other news, my biography has gone up on Helen Lowe’s blog, as an introduction to my fortnightly column where I’ll be discussing fantasy and science-fiction in film/television. For a while I’ll be focusing on straightforward reviews (and please, let me know if you want me to talk about something in particular - I’m fully open for suggestions) but will hopefully get to some top-ten lists and comparisons between book/film adaptations soon. Tomorrow Helen will be posting my first proper piece, which is an article on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
PLEASE take a look!
***
Apparently the Katie McGrath/Gemma Chan episode of Dates has aired on British television, though goodness knows when I’ll get the chance to see it. Still, here’s a nice little clip of the two of them and a Behind the Scenes look at the episode as well.
A link to the clip (embedding was disabled).
It would appear that Katie’s character is bi-phobic which is a damn shame, and that the episode will raise a lot of stereotypical issues about Gemma’s conservative family in order to do nothing with them, but I’ll still try to check it out. But one thing I do love about Katie (as seen in the second video) is that she’s always generous with her praise for other actresses. Given how vicious on-line female voices can be about other women, it’s always a relief to have some genuine positivity and praise from one woman to another.
***
New picture of Angel Coulby on the set of The Tunnel. Is that James Frain next to her? Does this mean they’re in a scene together? Argh, lucky girl!
(Does this mean James Frain is in it, though? I haven’t spotted his name on any of the cast lists...)
***
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
So thank to my reviewing contacts with a NZ based publishing house, I was able to get my hands on an advanced copy of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. There was a big sticker on the inside cover stating that no reviews were allowed to be posted before the 18th June (technically the 19th on this side of the world) but having reached that date, I can safely discuss it without fear of being... sued? Seriously, I’ve no idea what they would have done if reviews/spoilers had surfaced before now.
So anyway...
I’m actually not hugely familiar with Neil Gaiman’s work. I’ve read Stardust, I’ve seen the adaptations of Stardust and Coraline, and I’ve watched his two Doctor Who episodes. Having a glimpse around at some other commentators, what’s being brought up a lot is the fact that this is his best novel, something I can’t confirm simply because I haven’t absorbed enough of his work to compare it to. All I know is that I enjoyed what I read.
Our middle-aged protagonist (I don’t think we ever learn his name) recounts to us his movements after a family funeral. Instead of going to the wake he drives through Sussex to his childhood home where vague memories begin to stir. Going down a little country lane he arrives at the Hempstock family farmhouse, certain that he used to play with the family's young daughter Lettie. At the back of the property is a pond that Lettie once claimed was an ocean, though this never made sense to him as a boy. But now, standing there, he begins to remember...
This prologue leads into the story proper. We're taken back to the boy's childhood, on the day when his beloved kitten was run over by an opal miner, learning through his narration that he has few friends, a rather distant relationship with his parents, and spends most of his time reading books. But the suicide of the coal miner begins a domino effect of strange and often frightening supernatural occurrences that throw our young narrator into grave danger, within his home as well as without. He can only be saved from his horror by the three mysterious women living on Hempstock farm.
To be honest, I don't really want to go into too much detail regarding the plot for fear of ruining some of the surprises in store. I read it with no foreknowledge whatsoever about what it was about and enjoyed the story all the more for it. It's better to talk about how the book made me feel.
More than any other book I’ve read in recent memory, The Ocean at the End of the Lane really recaptured what it was like to be a child. Gaiman expertly encapsulates the wonder, the terror, the powerlessness of what it is to be a seven year old; how adults can be care-givers but also jail-wardens, how things that we take for granted as an adult make absolutely no sense to a child, and how anything bizarre can be taken in a child’s stride but everyday things such as relationships and careers and finances can be utterly terrifying.
It actually brought back memories of my own childhood: the way food seemed to taste so much better, the joy of being warm and dry after being cold and wet, the absurdity of taking the main road to get somewhere when I knew a dozen short-cuts, and of course the wisdom and knowledge and comfort that could be gleaned from books. This really is a book written from a child's perspective, for we are shown things through the boy's eyes that make no sense to him, though we understand exactly what they are. Alternately, the framing device of the adult narrator also means that he can provide plenty of insight into the way children think. For example: "small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things" or "my parents were a unit, inviolate" or "she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh; she was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win."
Why You Should Read This Book: I expect that if you’re already a fan of Neil Gaiman, nothing I write here will convince or prevent you from reading this book in any way, and if this book is anything like his others, you’ll probably be more than satisfied.
Gaiman isn't afraid to portray the dark side of childhood as well as its delights, and the supernatural qualities of the storyline emphasis this theme. The villain is terrifying; a creature that invades the boy’s home, turns his parents against him, and makes threats that made my blood run cold. She embodies adult sexuality and authority (the boy catches her and his father together, though doesn’t fully understand what he’s seeing) and that primal fear that I think we all carry: of people not believing us when we tell a vitally important truth.
There are several scenes that invoke the oldest types of fairytales: one chapter in which the boy has been instructed to stay inside the safety of a circle, only for his enemies to try and coax/tempt him out through various means, and another in which he tries to use what he knows about the villain against her in a desperate attempt to escape her control.
I loved most about the plot was the way that several bizarre occurrences and arrivals took place without any immediate explanation. It really hooks the reader and gives the entire story a sense of depth and mystery and terror (after all, the most frightening thing in the world is the unknown). Like peeling back layers, only with each layer being more expansive than the one before, we learn more about the source of all the trouble only gradually. It reminded very much of the way Diana Wynne Jones writes her stories (Black Maria in particular) and of Hayao Miyazaki's ability to instil the portrayal of an ordinary childhood rife with unexplained creatures and diminishing boundaries between us and another world. In this case, it’s not simply the worlds of the mundane and the supernatural that are opposed, but that of the child and the adult as well.
It's definitely recommended by me, and will no doubt spur me into checking out more of Gaiman's work.
Angelfall by Susan Ee
Another new release; another book I read with few preconceptions. Having no foreknowledge whatsoever as to what it was about or where it was heading, I was completely caught up in the story and its surprises, staying up well past a reasonable hour in order to get to its conclusion.
I would tentatively describe this as a melding of the supernatural romance of Twilight with the dystopian setting of The Hunger Games. Now, before you write it off simply because I’ve namedropped Twilight into the equation, be aware that the similarity lies solely in the fact that it involves a relationship between an ordinary human teenager and a beautiful/powerful supernatural creature (in this case, an angel). And ironically, this aspect was the weakest part of the book - but I’ll get to that.
The story revolves around Penryn, a seventeen year old girl who struggles for survival in the wake of an angel invasion. These angels aren't the wise, benevolent angels of New Age pop culture, but the Old Testament-style warriors who leave mass destruction and chaos in their wake. Earth's population has no idea why they've invaded the planet or what they're hoping to achieve; they only know that they've already lost the war against them. Now humanity lives in scattered communities, hoping to defend what little territory they have left and scrounge for supplies in the wastelands that remain.
Penryn is trying to move her mother and wheelchair-bound sister Paige to a safer location when a melee of angels crashes to earth right in front of her. It's a five-against-one confrontation that ends with Penryn helping out the angel set upon by the others, hoping to provide enough of a distraction for her mother and sister to escape. It all ends with Paige getting kidnapped and Penryn taking the injured angel hostage, desperate to learn where her sister is being taken. Dependent on each other for safety, girl and angel come to a tentative truce: together they'll journey to the aerie in San Francisco so that Penryn can search for her sister and Raffe (short for Raphael) can get his destroyed wings reattached. Neither one is particularly optimistic about their success rate.
Why You Should Read This Book: Though I wouldn’t call it “a fun, light read”, it’s certainly quick, suspenseful reading. To continue with the Twilight/Hunger Games comparison, Penryn has a strong narrative voice, a no-nonsense, self-deprecating tone that's mercifully more reminiscent of Katniss Everdeen than Bella Swan. This is a young woman whose first impulse leans toward personal safety and the wellbeing of her family; any growing feelings she has for Raffe are entirely incidental to her survivalist instincts. Her main objective remains her sister; this is a heroine that's not trying to save the world, just her own little world: her mother and sister.
These days romances between humans and supernatural creatures (be they vampires, werewolves, fairies or angels) are a dime a dozen, and though the budding connection between Penryn and Raffe feels more obligatory than organic, it doesn't take up much of the page count or intrude too much into Penryn's internal narrative. There are plenty of intriguing supporting characters that Penryn and Raffe encounter along the way, including an anarchic human resistance and plenty of angels with agendas of their own. A particular treat is Penryn's mother, a woman who seems to be a paranoid schizophrenic and who weaves in and out of the story almost at random. She actually reminded me of Will Parry's mother in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, a mother who suffers from an undiagnosed mental affliction, but whose erratic behaviour begins to make an unsettling and unexpected amount of sense in this terrifying new world.
In the book's final chapters there is so much gore and blood that even I got a little queasy, so it's important not to understate the book's darkness. This is a dangerous and violent post-apocalyptic world where death is cheap and people are forced to do desperate things to survive - and that's not even getting into what the angels are up to...
There of plenty of material left over for the intended sequels, and because of the book's unique style (first-person narrative told in present tense) it is both fast-paced and riveting. Told strictly from Penryn's point-of-view, we're privy to the same amount of information she is as she gradually begins to piece together Raffe's backstory and the reasons behind the angel invasion, whilst simultaneously getting hints as to her mother's condition, their family history and how it connects to her sister's paralysis. Even by the end there are still plenty of questions left unanswered, and Susan Ee leaves herself a lot of room in which to further explore her characters and storylines.
Honestly though, this is one book that I really didn't know what to make of. In parts horrifying and funny, suspenseful and scary, weird and heart-warming, it's a difficult book to pin down. All I know for sure is that I'll be checking out the sequel.
But first tell me, what’s the very last thing you want to see out of your living room window? A fire? A burglar? The paparazzi?
How about THE ARMED DEFENDERS SQUAD?
So basically I woke up, stumbled into my kitchen, looked out the window and saw this happening:
It was the whole shebang: masks, rifles, police dogs, police cars, ambulances - the lot. After a while my sister and I heard a voice over a microphone entreating someone to come to the door (basically: “this is the police, we are not leaving until you come to the door” repeated about twenty times). Then there were two gun-shots and Sis and I dived to the kitchen floor. Yes, dived. It was totally a movie moment. When we looked up again the swat team was heading into the house followed by the ambulance workers, and then a police car raced away down the street, sirens blaring.
And that was all really. We think that the road must have been cordoned off down the other end as after that there was a flood of traffic coming down the street, and a few minutes after that the women who lived in the house returned. We found out afterwards that it was a domestic dispute involving a man with a weapon inside the house, but didn’t really learn much more than that. I’m looking across at the house now from where I’m sitting and it all looks completely normal.
Still, a pretty exciting way to start a Sunday morning!
The rest of this post will pale in comparison; but keep reading anyway.
***
In other news, my biography has gone up on Helen Lowe’s blog, as an introduction to my fortnightly column where I’ll be discussing fantasy and science-fiction in film/television. For a while I’ll be focusing on straightforward reviews (and please, let me know if you want me to talk about something in particular - I’m fully open for suggestions) but will hopefully get to some top-ten lists and comparisons between book/film adaptations soon. Tomorrow Helen will be posting my first proper piece, which is an article on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
PLEASE take a look!
***
Apparently the Katie McGrath/Gemma Chan episode of Dates has aired on British television, though goodness knows when I’ll get the chance to see it. Still, here’s a nice little clip of the two of them and a Behind the Scenes look at the episode as well.
A link to the clip (embedding was disabled).
Click to viewIt would appear that Katie’s character is bi-phobic which is a damn shame, and that the episode will raise a lot of stereotypical issues about Gemma’s conservative family in order to do nothing with them, but I’ll still try to check it out. But one thing I do love about Katie (as seen in the second video) is that she’s always generous with her praise for other actresses. Given how vicious on-line female voices can be about other women, it’s always a relief to have some genuine positivity and praise from one woman to another.
***
New picture of Angel Coulby on the set of The Tunnel. Is that James Frain next to her? Does this mean they’re in a scene together? Argh, lucky girl!
(Does this mean James Frain is in it, though? I haven’t spotted his name on any of the cast lists...)
***
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
So thank to my reviewing contacts with a NZ based publishing house, I was able to get my hands on an advanced copy of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. There was a big sticker on the inside cover stating that no reviews were allowed to be posted before the 18th June (technically the 19th on this side of the world) but having reached that date, I can safely discuss it without fear of being... sued? Seriously, I’ve no idea what they would have done if reviews/spoilers had surfaced before now.
So anyway...
I’m actually not hugely familiar with Neil Gaiman’s work. I’ve read Stardust, I’ve seen the adaptations of Stardust and Coraline, and I’ve watched his two Doctor Who episodes. Having a glimpse around at some other commentators, what’s being brought up a lot is the fact that this is his best novel, something I can’t confirm simply because I haven’t absorbed enough of his work to compare it to. All I know is that I enjoyed what I read.
Our middle-aged protagonist (I don’t think we ever learn his name) recounts to us his movements after a family funeral. Instead of going to the wake he drives through Sussex to his childhood home where vague memories begin to stir. Going down a little country lane he arrives at the Hempstock family farmhouse, certain that he used to play with the family's young daughter Lettie. At the back of the property is a pond that Lettie once claimed was an ocean, though this never made sense to him as a boy. But now, standing there, he begins to remember...
This prologue leads into the story proper. We're taken back to the boy's childhood, on the day when his beloved kitten was run over by an opal miner, learning through his narration that he has few friends, a rather distant relationship with his parents, and spends most of his time reading books. But the suicide of the coal miner begins a domino effect of strange and often frightening supernatural occurrences that throw our young narrator into grave danger, within his home as well as without. He can only be saved from his horror by the three mysterious women living on Hempstock farm.
To be honest, I don't really want to go into too much detail regarding the plot for fear of ruining some of the surprises in store. I read it with no foreknowledge whatsoever about what it was about and enjoyed the story all the more for it. It's better to talk about how the book made me feel.
More than any other book I’ve read in recent memory, The Ocean at the End of the Lane really recaptured what it was like to be a child. Gaiman expertly encapsulates the wonder, the terror, the powerlessness of what it is to be a seven year old; how adults can be care-givers but also jail-wardens, how things that we take for granted as an adult make absolutely no sense to a child, and how anything bizarre can be taken in a child’s stride but everyday things such as relationships and careers and finances can be utterly terrifying.
It actually brought back memories of my own childhood: the way food seemed to taste so much better, the joy of being warm and dry after being cold and wet, the absurdity of taking the main road to get somewhere when I knew a dozen short-cuts, and of course the wisdom and knowledge and comfort that could be gleaned from books. This really is a book written from a child's perspective, for we are shown things through the boy's eyes that make no sense to him, though we understand exactly what they are. Alternately, the framing device of the adult narrator also means that he can provide plenty of insight into the way children think. For example: "small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things" or "my parents were a unit, inviolate" or "she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh; she was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win."
Why You Should Read This Book: I expect that if you’re already a fan of Neil Gaiman, nothing I write here will convince or prevent you from reading this book in any way, and if this book is anything like his others, you’ll probably be more than satisfied.
Gaiman isn't afraid to portray the dark side of childhood as well as its delights, and the supernatural qualities of the storyline emphasis this theme. The villain is terrifying; a creature that invades the boy’s home, turns his parents against him, and makes threats that made my blood run cold. She embodies adult sexuality and authority (the boy catches her and his father together, though doesn’t fully understand what he’s seeing) and that primal fear that I think we all carry: of people not believing us when we tell a vitally important truth.
There are several scenes that invoke the oldest types of fairytales: one chapter in which the boy has been instructed to stay inside the safety of a circle, only for his enemies to try and coax/tempt him out through various means, and another in which he tries to use what he knows about the villain against her in a desperate attempt to escape her control.
I loved most about the plot was the way that several bizarre occurrences and arrivals took place without any immediate explanation. It really hooks the reader and gives the entire story a sense of depth and mystery and terror (after all, the most frightening thing in the world is the unknown). Like peeling back layers, only with each layer being more expansive than the one before, we learn more about the source of all the trouble only gradually. It reminded very much of the way Diana Wynne Jones writes her stories (Black Maria in particular) and of Hayao Miyazaki's ability to instil the portrayal of an ordinary childhood rife with unexplained creatures and diminishing boundaries between us and another world. In this case, it’s not simply the worlds of the mundane and the supernatural that are opposed, but that of the child and the adult as well.
It's definitely recommended by me, and will no doubt spur me into checking out more of Gaiman's work.
Angelfall by Susan Ee
Another new release; another book I read with few preconceptions. Having no foreknowledge whatsoever as to what it was about or where it was heading, I was completely caught up in the story and its surprises, staying up well past a reasonable hour in order to get to its conclusion.
I would tentatively describe this as a melding of the supernatural romance of Twilight with the dystopian setting of The Hunger Games. Now, before you write it off simply because I’ve namedropped Twilight into the equation, be aware that the similarity lies solely in the fact that it involves a relationship between an ordinary human teenager and a beautiful/powerful supernatural creature (in this case, an angel). And ironically, this aspect was the weakest part of the book - but I’ll get to that.
The story revolves around Penryn, a seventeen year old girl who struggles for survival in the wake of an angel invasion. These angels aren't the wise, benevolent angels of New Age pop culture, but the Old Testament-style warriors who leave mass destruction and chaos in their wake. Earth's population has no idea why they've invaded the planet or what they're hoping to achieve; they only know that they've already lost the war against them. Now humanity lives in scattered communities, hoping to defend what little territory they have left and scrounge for supplies in the wastelands that remain.
Penryn is trying to move her mother and wheelchair-bound sister Paige to a safer location when a melee of angels crashes to earth right in front of her. It's a five-against-one confrontation that ends with Penryn helping out the angel set upon by the others, hoping to provide enough of a distraction for her mother and sister to escape. It all ends with Paige getting kidnapped and Penryn taking the injured angel hostage, desperate to learn where her sister is being taken. Dependent on each other for safety, girl and angel come to a tentative truce: together they'll journey to the aerie in San Francisco so that Penryn can search for her sister and Raffe (short for Raphael) can get his destroyed wings reattached. Neither one is particularly optimistic about their success rate.
Why You Should Read This Book: Though I wouldn’t call it “a fun, light read”, it’s certainly quick, suspenseful reading. To continue with the Twilight/Hunger Games comparison, Penryn has a strong narrative voice, a no-nonsense, self-deprecating tone that's mercifully more reminiscent of Katniss Everdeen than Bella Swan. This is a young woman whose first impulse leans toward personal safety and the wellbeing of her family; any growing feelings she has for Raffe are entirely incidental to her survivalist instincts. Her main objective remains her sister; this is a heroine that's not trying to save the world, just her own little world: her mother and sister.
These days romances between humans and supernatural creatures (be they vampires, werewolves, fairies or angels) are a dime a dozen, and though the budding connection between Penryn and Raffe feels more obligatory than organic, it doesn't take up much of the page count or intrude too much into Penryn's internal narrative. There are plenty of intriguing supporting characters that Penryn and Raffe encounter along the way, including an anarchic human resistance and plenty of angels with agendas of their own. A particular treat is Penryn's mother, a woman who seems to be a paranoid schizophrenic and who weaves in and out of the story almost at random. She actually reminded me of Will Parry's mother in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, a mother who suffers from an undiagnosed mental affliction, but whose erratic behaviour begins to make an unsettling and unexpected amount of sense in this terrifying new world.
In the book's final chapters there is so much gore and blood that even I got a little queasy, so it's important not to understate the book's darkness. This is a dangerous and violent post-apocalyptic world where death is cheap and people are forced to do desperate things to survive - and that's not even getting into what the angels are up to...
There of plenty of material left over for the intended sequels, and because of the book's unique style (first-person narrative told in present tense) it is both fast-paced and riveting. Told strictly from Penryn's point-of-view, we're privy to the same amount of information she is as she gradually begins to piece together Raffe's backstory and the reasons behind the angel invasion, whilst simultaneously getting hints as to her mother's condition, their family history and how it connects to her sister's paralysis. Even by the end there are still plenty of questions left unanswered, and Susan Ee leaves herself a lot of room in which to further explore her characters and storylines.
Honestly though, this is one book that I really didn't know what to make of. In parts horrifying and funny, suspenseful and scary, weird and heart-warming, it's a difficult book to pin down. All I know for sure is that I'll be checking out the sequel.