For book number 14, I was given the choice between:

‘Titus Groan’ by Mervyn Peake

‘Children of Time’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘Anno Dracula’ by Kim Newman

Within these three are two books I had already started to read but given up on – ‘Titus Groan’ and ‘Children of Time’. Fancying a read of a book that won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction, it was Tchaikovsky’s novel that won out in the end.

Goodreads summary:

A race for survival among the stars… Humanity’s last survivors escaped earth’s ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

The last humans in the galaxy are desperate. Having left a dying Earth, to stumble across a perfectly terra-formed planet seems too good to be true – and it is. On its surface, evolving and developing for millennia, is a species that won’t be so willing to give up their planet, even to the humans that feel it rightfully belongs to them. This collision course, played out over many years, is the central narrative of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘Children of Time’, yet it manages to explore ideas about society, religion and what truly is out there with aplomb.

In the opening chapter, an act of terrorism sabotages a human experiment designed to terraform a planet. Within the spaceship were monkeys as well as a virus designed to allow the primates to develop and evolve on their new planet. A plan developed by Avrana Kern, the explosion caused by the terrorist kills the monkeys and sends the virus out into the atmosphere. A last ditch attempt by Kern to escape sees her upload her image into her escape ship’s computer, essentially forming a computer/human symbiote, one that would eventually be reunited with the planet which her plan had helped to form.

What works really well throughout the novel is that the story is told through two different narrative threads. The Gilgamesh, the ship which carries the hopes of a planet, and its story are seen through the eyes of Holsten Mason, a classicist. Down on Kern’s planet, it isn’t the primates that she had hoped for who benefitted from the virus, but spiders. Whilst the human struggles of trying to find a place in the galaxy play out on the Gilgamesh, the evolution of the spiders and their world adds another layer to the engaging storyline as each generation builds upon the experience of the last.

Tchaikovsky uses some clever narrative techniques to allow the narrative to last the thousands of years that we see play out over six hundred pages. Rather than overwhelm the reader with names, the focus is only ever on three spiders (Portia, Bianca and Fabian), each of which is the name also bestowed on the next generation. As for the humans, stasis sleep and cryo-chambers mean that Mason, as well as Isa Lain (the main secondary character) and other key figures on the ship, can be frozen and woken as the narrative requires it. Whilst this might otherwise feel a little bit forced, Tchaikovsky works the story in such a manner that it never feels too knowing.

Though the human arc is fascinating, including mutinies, in-fighting and a love story, it is definitely the spiders’ story that is more interesting. Presumably chosen for the phobias they engender in many people, the spiders create a society, fight off potential enemies, develop what effectively amounts to religions and conduct experiments. The intelligent way that they are presented, all the way through to the end collision between the two species that serves as the ending to the book, makes them a consistently empathetic group, especially when contrasted with some of the more egomaniacal characters that are involved with the running of the Gilgamesh.

‘Children of Time’ is the very definition of a page turner – its six hundred pages fly past as Tchaikovsky effortlessly takes us through a tale that lasts many thousands of years with verve and panache.

For book number 13, I was given the choice between:

‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante

Though this was the second time that ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ had been chosen at random, I again passed over it to go with ‘My Brilliant Friend’. Primarily, this is due to the numerous plaudits the Neapolitan Novels have garnered in recent years, though it is also due to a work friend of mine waxing lyrical over the series at the end of last year.

Goodreads summary: A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.

Growing up is hard. It isn’t exactly a deep philosophical statement, but it is a truism that is at least explored with verve by Elena Ferrante in ‘My Brilliant Friend’. In the novel, we see the world through the eyes of Elena “Lenù” Greco, a young Italian girl coming of age in a time of upheaval as the traditions of the past give way to the material desires of the modern world. More importantly, we see her relationship with Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, a firebrand of a youth who both serves as the inspiration and chief sparring partner of Elena.

The book is split into three sections: one that is set in the current as an aged Elena heard about the disappearance of Lila; one exploring their initial relationship; the latter part looking at adolescence with all of the boy troubles and acne that comes along with it. The framing of the story as one that has Elena seeking to establish the type of person Lila is to justify her disappearance is one that is interesting, but never returned to. It isn’t to be held against Ferrante as it seems to serve as the overarching narrative for the series as a whole. Within the other two sections of the story, Ferrante brilliantly explores what brought them together in the first instance, before charting the occasionally meandering nature of their relationship amidst a backdrop of physical and emotional change for Elena.

What Ferrante gets so accurately in the narrative is the competing emotions that can be created by juvenile friendships. Elena is as much inspired by Lila as she seeks to engender jealousy. What initially sparks competitiveness is the desire for academic success that appears to drive both girls on, even if Lila takes to things with an ease that often feels beyond Elena. In time, it even becomes a question of who had their first period, or which of them had received a declaration of love first. Fundamentally, however, there is a feeling of the necessity of the relationship, especially going the route from Elena to Lila, though there is a tender moment late on in the novel which not only gives the book its name, but implies that it works both ways.

Alongside the girls and their own concerns growing up are all the other layers that add to a boiling pot of adolescent confusion. Set in a country that is known for its deep family ties, displays of passions and outpourings of emotion, the girls find the need to navigate the travails of Italian life. We are rarely more than a few pages from an angry word or a harsh blow, whilst there is some early blood spilled as the violence escalates into cold blooded murder. In particular, the men are often represented as liable to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation; that, or declare their undying love for you and promise you the world.

The ending also does a brilliant job of making you want to read the next novel. Though things are left unresolved, I didn’t feel at all cheated by what occurred. Having had so many pages invested in the comings and goings of Elana and Lila, the final denouement got a genuine emotive response and a desire to find out what happened after – if that isn’t the mark of a good story, I don’t know what is.

Believe the hype – ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante is a genuine modern classic and well worth investing time in.

For book twelve, I was offered the choice of:

‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

‘The Prestige’ by Christopher Priest

‘The Forever War’ by Joe Haldeman

Having been one of the last books I brought pre this project, as well as her oeuvre getting a lot of plaudits from Andy Miller at the tail end of last year, I chose ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald as my next book.

Goodreads summary: On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.

It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns.

Several years ago, a friend of mine bought a boat to live on. Always someone who was happy to get along outside the more conventional tropes of life at the best of times, it wasn’t the most surprising thing he could have told us. He fit…well, whatever you might expect someone who owned a boat to be like. It is this that Penelope Fitzgerald primarily seeks to find out in ‘Offshore’, a story about a collection of people who live on the Battersea Reach section of the Thames. Whether wedded to the water, or lost and in a state of flux, it is the relationships that spring up around a group of outsiders who exist in the very heart of the capital that creates such a captivating story.

It is the cast of characters that Fitzgerald so deftly creates that carries the narrative along apace. Seen primarily through the eyes of Nenna, a woman whose marriage is on the rocks over her choice to buy a houseboat during her husband’s absence, her confused state of mind over her relationship, her strange yet uplifting friendships with others on the river, and her two relatively carefree daughters add together to create a tangled web of emotions and desires. Nenna feels somewhat like the boats on the Thames that are written about so evocatively: at the whim of the tide that at once keeps her afloat whilst at the same time an encroaching danger.

The narrative itself is simplistic, yet every description and piece of information about a character, major or minor, helps to build a world that feels fully lived in. No better is this seen during the time spent by Nenna’s daughters searching for treasures on the banks, before attempting to sell their wares in one of the antique shops nearby. The interactions between a couple of strong headed girls and the wary shopkeepers brim with life, as the two cultures clash in a battle of wits over the question of value.

There is a sadness about Nenna that is hard to deny as she initially voices the concerns over her marriage as being the one reason she doesn’t want to visit her husband; if she doesn’t see him, it can’t end. Whilst somewhat true if logically a bit of a stretch, her eventual decision to see Edward does create one of the more humorous set pieces of the novel as Nenna’s expectations of a romantic reuniting of the couple fall several feet short of what she gets. The hint of romance between herself and Richard at least offers some sense of a happy ending for her, though even that is not for certain.

To some, the openness of the ending may be somewhat off-putting, as well as the relatively thrift of the tale itself. However, it works for me as a slice of a lifestyle that is alien to many, giving us a chance to sample the whys and wherefores of a choice that is outside of the realms of convention for whole swathes of society. We meet, we briefly explore, we disappear. It is almost Coen Brothers-esque in that it gives us a notion of what is occurring at a very specific place and time, yet not necessarily giving us the beginning or the end. From that, you are allowed to make your mind up as to what has happened and that is part of the charm.

For book eleven, I was given the choice between:

‘Anno Dracula’ by Kim Newman

‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing

‘Look Who’s Back’ by Timur Vermes

Having sat on my (electronic) book shelf for a long time, as well as being a favourite film of my stepdad (he doesn’t read books), I choose ‘Look Who’s Back’, a book that I believed would be too competently satirical to encapsulate a lot of what is wrong with modern society.

Goodreads summary: Berlin, Summer 2011. Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and fumes celebrity obsession; immigration has produced multicultural neighborhoods bringing together people of varying race, ethnicity, and religion; and the most powerful person in government is a woman. Hitler is immediately recognized . . . as an impersonator of uncommon skill. The public assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a performer who is always in character, and soon his inevitable viral appeal begets YouTube stardom, begets television celebrity on a Turkish-born comedian’s show. His bigoted rants are mistaken for a theatrical satire–exposing prejudice and misrepresentation–and his media success emboldens Hitler to start his own political party and set the country he finds a shambles back to rights. With daring and dark humor, Look Who’s Back skewers the absurdity and depravity of the cult of personality in modern media culture.

‘Look Who’s Back’ is somewhat of a thought experiment – what would happen if Hitler came back to life in 2011, a Hitler that still maintained all his Hitler-y notions of the German Volk, Lebensraum and massacring millions of people who didn’t fit his ideal of the Aryan race. The answer? He’d become a successful media star who commanded millions of views both on television and on the internet. What this suggests about modern society, the cult of celebrity and the value of shock is concerning in its all too scarily accurate representation by Timur Vermes.

Before exploring the social and moral message of the narrative, it is worth mentioning that the book is genuinely funny. Your mileage may vary depending on whether you feel a book involving Hitler as the main protagonist should allow to exist at all, not least in the realms of comedic fiction. Naturally, this is not something that necessarily perturbs me, especially as his role is to shine a light on wider issues about celebrity and the media rather than to champion anything he was involved in within real life. However, if that is not something that concerns you, the confusions caused by a near-seventy year hiatus from the world are legitimately funny and for the most part, Hitler is often played as somewhat of an idiot; it is the media at large who are what gives him power beyond that which his old fashioned world view deserve.

The nature of this book also makes me wonder as to whether my views would be altered if I was German, rather than English. Some of the political and social references probably passed me by, but the narrative also gave a feeling that an underlying racial tension stills exists in Germany, as it does in many a country. Hitler’s rise to prominence in the novel is a combination of being perceived to having a nationalist view that speaks to some, as well as being edgy enough to get traction in a world of soundbites and streaming video.

Without wanting to spoil the ending, there is a moment as the novel draws to its conclusion that spoke volumes about the world of politics in the world of modern media. One incident that occurs to Hitler is suddenly claimed as being representative of every ideas promoted by each individual political party, no matter the ideals that Hitler meant to embody. That popularity triumphed moral values feels all too on the nose today and is all too indicative of a broken system.

‘Look Who’s Back’ is a thought provoking read if nothing else, whilst those who can get past the perhaps questionable choice of topic should also find a genuinely funny book that is also worrying in how very little of this seems out of the ordinary or impossible. Well, apart from Hitler coming back from the dead…I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.

Book ten was a choice between any of these three:

‘The Famished Road’ by Ben Okri

‘Alone in Berlin’ by Hans Fallada

‘Ancillary Justice’ by Ann J. Leckie

Having already been an option for book eight and a hangover from a time when I desired to read all of the Booker Prize winning novels, ‘The Famished Road’ ended up being the next book in my attempt to drastically reduce my TBR pile.

Goodreads summary:

In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri’s Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro’s loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus’s story.

In recent years, some of my most favourite novels have been written by authors born in Africa. From the vivid imagery of different cultures (all too often plagued by violence and war), to protagonists that struggle to find meaning within forever changing circumstances, they’ve felt like a fresh perspective and an urgent voice that I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to explore.

This exploration of a markedly different culture to my own is one that means I won’t outright pan ‘The Famished Road’ by Ben Okri as there are many pages of wonderful description, brutal aggression and a hint of dark humour that are worthy of mention. Unfortunately, the magical realism that at times brings the most evocative moments also leads to a feeling that the book is often spiralling around a central point more so than making narrative progress. To some, this wouldn’t be an issue, but to me, it felt that the novel only got going in fits and starts, though the second and third Book (with the story being split into three) do go some way to build towards an effective conclusion.

Azaro is the main protagonist and he is an abiku, or spirit child. Having chosen a life on Earth that is manifestly predicted to be one of sorrow over time in the spirit world, we primarily follow Azaro, his parents and local bar owner Madame Koto as increasing modernisation and politics begin to impact upon the lives they lead. As was suggested from the get go, Azaro’s family’s life is rarely one of great triumph, though it almost feels somewhat repetitive the eventual outcomes of many of the chapters. Things spiral out of control; violence occurs; Azaro witnesses something magical; he is told off by his parents – all of these things seem to happen on a loop that offer fairly diminishing returns.

Whilst the spirit world and moments within reality are described in very poetic fashion, a lot of the workaday elements of the novel are presented fairly staidly. It begins to feel like a list of events that are being narrated rather than an engaging narrative at times. Charitably, it could be suggested that this aims to mimic the drudgery of the lives of these characters, especially when transposed against the world that Azaro could have chosen, but it doesn’t entirely work for me.

That is not to say that ‘The Famished Road’ doesn’t have its positives. As aforementioned, the final Books in the story finally feel like the story is moving forward, as well as leading to some of the better set pieces as Azaro’s Dad trains to be a boxer and gets involved in several high profile fights. With his new found popularity, a desire to make a real change to the lives of others follows, leading to a feeling that maybe things might make an upturn for the better.

The cast of characters outside of Azaro’s family also help to carry a prolonged story that inches forward in places. Madame Koto in particular casts a significant shadow over the narrative, a formidable woman who is also seduced by the power and money inherent within the political sphere. A photographer and a blind old man recur alongside several others, each with their eccentricities adding a healthy dose of flavour to support the occasionally dreary storyline.

‘The Famished Road’ is a book that I can see why people loved at the time and will still hold in high esteem today. However, all too often the flights of fancy that the genre can entail felt forced and confusing more than magical, whilst the narrative thrust came a little too late for me.