Graft, Matt Hill’s second novel, opens with fragmented sentences that perfectly capture the mood and setting of a post-apocalypse world splintered and on the edge of chaos. The novel is told through several points of view including: Y, a modified and damaged sex slave; Roy, a mercenary-like character working for the powerful Reverend; and Solomon, a chop-shop owner and his ex, Mel, the proprietor of The Cat Flap, a seedy brothel. When Sol steals a Lexus, he discovers Y in the boot. She is being trafficked and the traffickers want her back, forcing Sol and Roy to turn to Mel for help.
The novel jumps between present and past tenses, with Y’s horrific history unfolding alongside the Sol narrative. Initially this shifting was something of a distraction but as the novel progressed I found the switch refreshing and well-executed.
Hill’s characters are both likeable (to differing degrees) and strongly differentiated but their journeys—with the exception of Roy’s—were somewhat stagnant.
Solomon and Mel went through some pretty nasty things as a couple, things that would leave most people hating or wanting to kill the other person. However, as they are pulled back into each other’s world the past is only touched on minimally. Their history lacked resolution and this wasted potential was frustrating.
Y’s story, while being the driving force behind the novel, actually detracted from the book as a whole. Firstly, it is hard to empathise with Y. Despite her horrific backstory, her heavy modifications dehumanised her and puts distance between her suffering and the reader. Of more interest is her effect on Sol and Mel. They are the crux of the novel, but their intertwining stories were pushed to the side to focus on Y’s path to retribution.
Graft is a post-apocalyptic noir thriller about shattered lives in a shattered city. Although Hill’s gritty
and dark prose knifes its way into the reader’s subconscious, the multiple perspectives and missed opportunities with Sol and Mel’s stories mean that this novel was ultimately unsatisfying.
Occupy Me
Tricia Sullivan
Gollancz, 272 pages
Review: Noel Chidwick
When at primary school my daughter and her friends went through a phase making folding paper finger games called paper fortune tellers. You remember them: origami models you opened and closed to the rhythm of a chant. The words written on the flaps revealed secrets of the heart, with the answers changing every time. Occupy Me folds and unfolds like a hyper-dimensional paper fortune teller.
We begin with Doctor Sorle, on his way to care for his dying billionaire patient. Doctor Sorle has no memory of why, how or when he took possession of a briefcase. It transpires that his body is borrowed—occupied—from time to time.
Quickly we shift to Pearl. Pearl is an angel. She works for a shadowy organisation called the Resistance, whose agents—the Angels—perform small acts of kindness to nudge humanity onto the right track. The Resistance seem to have foreknowledge and know just which butterfly wing to flap to create a tiny change with the greatest effect. That Pearl actually does have wings is neither here or there. Luckily for her in her undercover role as an air hostess, she can fold her wings out of sight in HD—Higher Dimensions. She knows nothing about herself, and emerged from an old freezer cabinet in a junk yard, making herself useful by repairing broken equipment before joining the Resistance. She meets Doctor Sorle and the briefcase, just before the briefcase punches a hole through the aeroplane fuselage.
Pearl realises that the briefcase is more than an ordinary briefcase and is something to do with who she is. The story folds and unfolds many times as Pearl and Dr Sorle chase each other around the world.
The story moves to Scotland, and we meet Alison, the hard-drinking, unflinching vet. A huge prehistoric creature appears and something nasty is left dead on the kitchen floor of an Edinburgh New Town flat.
Then things turn weird.
Pearl is a lovingly-crafted character, buffeted by circumstance but still retaining an integrity of self as she discovers more about her origins. Sullivan mixes the mundane and the fantastical with ease and aplomb, often in the same sentence. It’s a fast-paced read, and for all its twists, turns and massive jumps we’re drawn in to the book and compelled to stay. As each new phase is revealed it’s easy to think, in Twitter-speak, WTF, but Sullivan deftly unfolds the story again and, in the universe of the book, it all makes perfect sense. As Pearl begins to understand more about herself and her own bizarre origins the nature of time and space are called into question, and we are treated to a beautifully poetic image of multi-dimensionality.
You’ll need your wits about you to follow the story and keep track of all that folding and revealing, but the result is a rewarding and exciting read.
Speak
Louisa Hall
Orbit, 336 pages
Review: Ian Hunter
Speak is Louisa Hall’s second novel and totally unlike her first, The Carriage House, which was a modern re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Speak is very different from The Carriage Clock in structure and storytelling style. Some of the narrative voices are set as far back as the 17th century, while we have imaginary correspondence from a real-life historical figure spread between the 1920s to the 1950s, and more recent correspondence in the latter half of the 20th century before moving into the near future for two distinct strands. There is another voice we hear before these stories, foreshadowing the inter-linked tales that follow, but its “power is fading” and is on the way to a hanger in Texas to endure a long, slow death along with thousands of others of its kind. What is life, what is intelligence, what is memory, what is interaction, these are some of the big themes examined in Speak.
Mary Prime is a young woman called Mary Bradford, barely a girl, really, but already given away in marriage to a pock-marked hero that she doesn’t care for. She only cares for her beloved sheepdog, with the slightly anachronistic name of Ralph, who is going to be left behind in England as she and her family get ready to set sail to a new life in America. She doesn’t want this life, doesn’t want this future and doesn’t want to leave Ralph behind. She confides in her diary, while her parents express disquiet about the way she interacts more easily with her dog than people, a theme that will be echoed throughout the book.
Cut to the 1960s and the Dettman’s—Karl and Ruth—a married Jewish couple who fled from the Nazis but are now drifting apart. Karl is a computer scientist (and based on real-life scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the conversational programme known as ‘Eliza’) while his wife is a historian. She has edited Mary Bradford’s diaries and is feeding Mary’s ‘voice’ and memories into the MARY computer programme Karl has created. All the time his wife is begging him to give MARY more memory which he refuses to do. So they become further and further estranged, almost managing to communicate through the letters he writes to her, expressing his side of things, while she writes letters that give her very different viewpoint.
It would be wrong to suggest that Hall has weaved a novel together through a series of novellas with a framing opening and closing narrative. For Karl is inspired by the work of code breaker, and ‘father of AI’, Alan Turing, who was trying to imprint a human’s personality into a machine, and the particular personality he has in mind is revealed in a series of awkward, heartbreaking letters that Turing sends to the mother of his best school friend, Christopher Morcom, between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Enough of the past, because Mary’s diaries, Turing’s work and the MARY programme lead to the creation of the Baby Bots by Stephen Chinn who languishes in jail in 2045, a world where the environment is wrecked, and society isn’t far behind. In jail, Chinn recounts the story of his undoing, from being a Turing-like genius, an unlikely babe magnet, and creator of the latest MARY algorithm which allows him to make the first of the Baby Bots as a companion for his little girl. Soon his creations are beloved of little girls everywhere but they are possibly the cause of a paralysing illness that afflicts them once the dolls are removed by the government. One such little girl is Gaby, whom we meet in the last of the major narrative strands, through the haunting transcripts of conversations between her and her Baby Bot used at Chinn’s trial.
With its multiple strands, Speak can obviously be compared to Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and perhaps more recently Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself where the main story of two research scientists is interrupted by scenes set in the past and the future adding up to a complete whole. Speak is very much a complete novel.
Given her two totally different works to date, I’m reminded of the novels of Adam Thorpe and of one of my favourite writers, William Kotzwinkle, whose books are also very different from each other.
I’m sure whatever Hall does next will be worth looking out for, but what it will be about, and how it will be told, is anyone’s guess. In the meantime Speak is very much recommended.
If Then
Matthew de Abaitua
Angry Robot, 416 pages
Review: Elsa Bouet
When I picked up If Then by Matthew de Abaitua, I found the summary interesting but was prepared for disappointment, predicting it would end up being a boring combination of things that have been done before. If Then however is a clever, well-accomplished blend of dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction, post-humanism, cyberpunk, a non-corny realistic love story, and even uses realist description of war. De Abaitua writes with skill and originality.
The novel is set after the events of the Seizure, in the small English town of Lewes; survivors seem to have recovered from a financial apocalypse, rather than a nuclear or environmental disaster. Inhabitants have handed control of their lives over to the Process, an algorithm which calculates the utopian optimum for the population to thrive. It allocates people their jobs, monitors and controls production, but also determines who can stay in Lewes or who has to be evicted. The Process monitors people’s thoughts and feelings through an implant. James, the bailiff of the town, is the only one to have a two-way implant. During the evictions, the Process merges with him and dictates his actions. James, after the evictions, is left to ponder the ethics of his actions, not all of which he can account for.
James also patrols the outskirts of the town, and one day discovers Hector, an artificial man created by the Process, a reproduction of a First World War stretcher bearer. For some reason, the Process is recreating the war on the outskirts of Lewes. James takes him back to the town, but as they have no indication that this was what the Process wanted, the townsfolk question whether this was the right thing to do. James and the Lewesians have little control over their lives and feel powerless to make decisions for themselves.
As the story progresses, the war creeps ever closer to Lewes. James decides to join the war effort with Hector. Their journey to war is an attempt to save the town but also a journey to solve the mystery of why the Process is recreating the battle of the Dardanelles on their doorstep.
The story’s multiple plot lines are compelling, as the reader wants answers to the questions facing the protagonists. The novel skilfully moves from one episode to the next using a variety of writing styles. It creates an interesting paradox by describing a seemingly idyllic community while offering hints of dystopian control. The characters are relatable and fascinating, and we get a good level of introspection so that we have a clear picture of how they feel, think and understand their lives under the Process. As they reflect more and more about the Process’s actions, their views and personalities change, which also drives the story forward. The novel convincingly shifts to realism. The horrors of war are tense and grim, the high level of suspense is gripping.
