SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

DAVID BARRETT ROUNDS UP THE LATEST TITLES FROM THE WORLD OF SPECULATIVE AND FANTASTIC FICTION

The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild

John Ironmonger

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2020

Hb, 276pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780297608233

Heloise was born in 1759, when Halley’s comet was in the sky; her father, a French nobleman and astronomer, named her after the god of the Sun. Her family are caught up in the horrors of the French Revolution. Katya was born in 1952 in Czechoslovakia. In her dreams she has detailed memories of her multiple-greatgrandmother Heloise’s life, and of all her matrilineal line in between. The present day of much of John Ironmonger’s The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild is Katya’s story, from her childhood, through the brutal suppression of 1968, and her eventual escape from Czechoslovakia to go in search of the treasure that she has clear memories of Heloise’s family burying before their arrest. We also follow Heloise’s short life, and her daughter Marianne’s mission to avenge her mother’s execution, and fragments of other lives in many countries between Heloise and Katya – and beyond. This is a beautifully told version of history, seen through the eyes of young women who can all remember vibrant details of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives.

False Value

Ben Aaronovitch

Gollancz 2020

Hb, 404pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781473207851

I criticised Ben Aaronovitch’s last Rivers of London novel, Lies Sleeping, for being too much of an instalment in an overall narrative, too much a police procedural and too slow to get going. I’m delighted to say that his latest has none of those faults. Detective Constable Peter Grant is working in security for a hitech company; it takes a couple of chapters to discover he’s undercover. Someone has stolen a folding punched-card program for a fairground organ; Peter is searching not just for the cards but for the powerfully magical Mary Engine, designed by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and powered by ghosts trapped in glass jars. It’s an intriguing adventure, with a good balance between Peter’s magical police work and his equally supernatural home life with his river goddess partner.

Green Tea and Other Weird Stories

Sheridan Le Fanu

Oxford University Press 2020

Pb, 498pp, £8.99, ISBN 9780198835882

There is a Graveyard that Dwells in Man

ed. David Tibet

Strange Attractor 2020

Pb, 440pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781907222610

Two collections of supernatural tales, one by the Victorian writer Sheridan Le Fanu and another edited by esoteric writer, artist and Current 93 musician David Tibet. It’s fascinating to follow the evolution of horror, supernatural and weird fiction from Le Fanu through the late 19th- and early 20th-century writers featured in Graveyard: Machen, Blackwood and others, including the three Benson brothers, AC, EF and RH, who became Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, author of the wonderfully sharp Mapp and Lucia books, and a Catholic priest, respectively. In both books the pace of the stories is much slower than we’re used to today, but that allows for a gradual build-up of unease, which is often missing in today’s equivalent. If you like leisurely but scary supernatural stories at Christmas, both of these collections will satisfy.

She’s My Witch

Stewart Home

London Books 2020

Pb, 331pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780995721746

Sometimes a book just doesn’t live up to its publicity. Stewart Home’s She’s My Witch is about a London fitness instructor and a Spanish witch and drug addict falling in lust in their 40s. The blurb talks about their past lives (including a gay relationship in the 12th-century Knights Templar) and sexual mysticism, and “the occult and kink”. Heady stuff – but it disappoints on all counts.

There’s no plot. In chapter after chapter they meet in London cafés and pubs, where they lecture each other about different Tarot packs, old punk bands and obscure foreign language horror movies while having clandestine public sex. And each time we’re told in detail what they eat and drink. Dullsville. Avoid.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

M John Harrison

Gollancz 2020

Hb, 254pp, £20, ISBN 9780575096356

M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is an odd, unsettling story of another couple of middle-aged inadequates – but this time it works. Shaw lives in a succession of single rooms in south-west London; his occasional lover Victoria has moved into her late mother’s house in a small town in Shropshire. Neither seems to have much connection with the “normal” world. Both are reactive: events and other people happen to them. When they meet, they seem out of synch with each other. They hear voices through the walls or echoing along the street at night; they see disturbing sights, like an acquaintance vanishing into a pool, or a house full of crazy people. The landscape itself often seems more real than the characters. The title is from Charles Kingsley, and his Water Babies is one of many recurring watery memes in the novel. It’s not a conventional story, and the plot is often opaque – but then, Harrison seems to be saying, so is life.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Bloomsbury 2020

Hb, 245pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781526622426

Piranesi, the viewpoint character in Susanna Clarke’s novel, lives in the House, a huge building with many hundreds of rooms full of statues – think of every museum in the country crashed together. The lower floors are flooded, the upper floors in the clouds. His only companion, who he sees for a short time twice a week, he calls the Other; he is the one who called him Piranesi. There’s a clue in the name: the 18th-century Piranesi was an Italian architect and artist who created etchings of imaginary prisons. As the novel progresses we learn more of the true nature of the House, and of who Piranesi and the Other might be, and of the mutability of time and memory. A beautifully written, complex and convoluted tale which blurs the lines between the real and the imagined.

The Evidence

Christopher Priest

Gollancz 2020

Hb, 312pp, £20, ISBN 9781473231375

There’s more mutability in The Evidence, where Christopher Priest returns to his most intriguing creation, the Dream Archipelago, where people and places and time, history and geography, events and stories vary and overlap, where there is not one simple narrative, where everything is subject to change. Mutability is at the heart of this novel. When crime novelist Todd Fremde goes to speak at a conference in a distant country, his long train journey stops suddenly; the gauge of the track has changed, so the train can’t continue. A few hours later, without explanation, his journey resumes. “Mutability makes physical changes,” a senior detective explains to him. “You can see the changes, be affected by them, but afterwards you can’t be sure they happened.” Mutability “is both real and unreal, it happens or it is only thought to happen”. As a writer there are three types of crime story Todd avoids: locked room, identical twins and “the perfect murder”; now he finds himself drawn into exploring a real-life murder mystery that is all three, and where no version of events can be relied on as fixed. This is a novel about the writer’s life and its many annoyances

(“I know a great story… you can write it into your next book”), the creation and recreation of story, and – similar to, but very different from, both Clarke’s and Harrison’s novels – the blurring between reality (whatever that is) and the imagination. Classic Priest.