A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A random group of people are trapped in a Swiss hotel when most of the world is destroyed in a nuclear war. While everyone struggles to survive and stay more-or-less sane, Jon, an American historian who was there with a conference, keeps a journal and investigates the murder of an unknown child.

The child's body is found inside a locked hotel water tank. The one doctor on the premises does an autopsy with the tools she has available, which doesn't reveal much but does show that she was probably killed around the time when the world got nuked. A lot of people left at that point, so her murderer could no longer be present. But Jon starts doggedly investigating, mostly as a distraction from, well, everything but particularly his probably-dead wife and children back in America, and soon starts getting the impression that someone still present in the hotel doesn't want him to learn the truth.

I saw this on a list of modern mysteries riffing off And Then There Were None, and was intrigued by its premise. I like mysteries in which the usual trappings of detection are either unknown or unavailable.

I had WILDLY mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it's extremely page-turning. I read the entire thing before bed, staying up too late to finish it.

It does function as a murder mystery, and a reasonably fair one in that I was able to guess the murderer and several key aspects. (The main thing I missed was the motive.) However, as a murder mystery and particularly as a riff on And Then There Were None, it misses one of the key things that makes the genre enjoyable, and while not technically a cheat is still annoying.

( Extremely spoilery )

The post-apocalyptic aspects are pretty well-done. It does not fall into the typical cannibalism rapefest tropes, but is plausibly about a set of devastated, shocked people struggling to survive under very difficult circumstances. It uses modern technology and social media, and how people use it and miss it, very plausibly and well.

What I did not like, apart from the spoiler above:

The main character. He was literally the least interesting person in the entire book. He's such a stereotype of both the main character of a literary novel about a white guy and an example of "he's the main character because he's a white guy."

He's a historian but his actual field is mentioned literally once. He has an affair with the only other American in the hotel, an annoying woman who's clearly a Trump voter though the name Trump isn't used and is obsessed with guns, and gets unsurprisingly defensive when people point out that Unnamed Trump caused the end of the world.

There's a supposedly shocking revelation late in the book that he had a loveless marriage and he and his wife were both cheating, and I literally hadn't realized this was supposed to be a surprise because I'd assumed that all along.

The hotel inhabitants isolate themselves a lot, and Jon isn't friends with the ones who are more social. They never really feel like a society, which is really missing one of the most interesting aspects of the premise. If you read literally any Agatha Christie book with a bunch of strangers stuck in a house, you'll know what everyone thinks of everyone and how they function as a group. This book is missing that.

There's a bunch of eerie/spooky elements that are set up but then nothing comes of them, including...

The hotel is huge and it's repeatedly mentioned that people could be living in it without any of the other residents knowing! Nothing ever comes of this.

One of the characters might be haunted by a creepy little boy! Nothing ever comes of this.

The hotel has been the site of multiple bizarre deaths and a serial killer! Nothing ever comes of this.

And then there's the climax. I actually really liked the climax... right up until the aggravating final page.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Things you'd expect given the premise that aren't actually in the book: No nuclear-specific horrors like radiation sickness, as everyone's too far away for that. It does centrally involve child death, but there's no on-page child harm. There's an attempted rape, but it's off-page. Cannibalism is discussed as something that's probably happening elsewhere, but does not appear on-page.

Things that do appear on-page: violence, drugs, and suicide.

I usually like Marsden a lot but The Journey really didn’t play to his strengths. It’s an attempt to teach a lot of life lessons wrapped up in a story about a boy in a rather vague country with a tradition of adolescents going on a solo journey to become an adult. Argus’s journey is full of insights that do feel revelatory when you actually experience them, but fall flat when he just tells them.

He walks a lot, works for food, joins a traveling circus, has a first love, encounters birth and death, and returns home an adult, and it’s all remarkably boring. I think I would have liked it better if I’d read it when I was eleven or so, but I’m not sure I would have liked it a lot better.

The Journey



Out of Time is better-written and less preachy, but more frustrating. A boy named James who doesn’t speak due to some trauma gets hold of a time machine and uses it to make several journeys into the past, concluding with his own.

This story is interspersed with a whole bunch of others about other people in different time periods. As far as I could tell, only one of them intersects with James’ story in any direct manner. They mostly involve missing, mysterious, or displaced people. I could not for the life of me tell whether the other stories were supposed to have purely thematic resemblances to James’, or whether the people in them had also been switched around in time. James has a brief fantasy in the beginning of the book in which the latter happens, so maybe that but if so, I have no idea how or why. Maybe every time he uses his time machine, it displaces someone else??? (Wild guess, there’s nothing in the book to suggest this.) I was pretty baffled by the structure, and while James’ story has a resolution, most of the others don’t.

His final use of the time machine was also odd—( Read more... )

If anyone understood the book better than me, please explain it to me.

These are early books of his which seem fairly obscure, and I can see why. I’ve liked everything else I’ve read by him way better.

Out of Time

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say.

About anything.

"Need a poo, Todd."

"Shut up, Manchee."

"Poo. Poo, Todd."

"I said shut it."

We're walking across the wild fields south-east of town, those ones that slope down to the river and head on towards the swamp. Ben's sent me to pick him some swamp apples and he's made me take Manchee with me, even tho we all know Cillian only bought him to stay on Mayor Prentiss's good side and so suddenly here's this brand new dog as a present for my birthday last year when I never said I wanted any dog, that what I said I wanted was for Cillian to finally fix the fissionbike so I wouldn't have to walk every forsaken place in this stupid town, but oh, no, happy birthday, Todd, here's a brand new puppy, Todd, and even tho you don't want him, even tho you never asked for him, guess who has to feed him and train him and wash him and take him for walks and listen to him jabber now he's got old enough for the talking germ to set his mouth moving? Guess who?

"Poo," Manchee barks quietly to himself. "Poo, poo, poo."

If that doesn't make you want to read the book, I feel for you as I do for the sad people who do not like molten chocolate cake.

This is a novel best read knowing nothing about it beyond what is revealed in the first chapter: on a planet where germ warfare with the now-extinct indigenous species wiped out the female human settlers, and made the men and animals involuntary projecting telepaths, the last boy in the last settlement, 13-year-old Todd Hewitt, is about to legally become a man. In a maelstrom of telepathic Noise, Todd is about to discover something amazing: silence.

The Knife of Never Letting Go, in addition to its distinctive but easily read voice and clever take on telepathy, is most notable for incredible narrative drive. It is genuinely difficult to put down, once picked up. I suggest that you don't start reading it late at night.

Though my overall impression was genius! oh hell it's a series! dammit, I have to wait a year for the next one! I do have some caveats.

1. It ends on a truly impressive cliffhanger.

2. While major themes of the book are the difficulty of knowing the truth even in a world of telepaths, the secrets adults keep from children, and the painful courage it takes to break through denial and lies that are more comforting than the truth... Ness still overuses the device of having characters know information they don't tell the other characters, the narrator knowing things he doesn't tell the reader, and important information that doesn't get revealed because someone suddenly attacks at the crucial moment.

3. The shocking reveals would have actually been more shocking if they'd been put earlier. They were put off so long and so artificially that I accurately figured out all of them, and even the details of all but one, by the time they were revealed. (I guessed the general outline of how boys become men in Prentisstown, but not the specifics.)

4. Aaron seemed to have wandered in from Friday the Thirteenth.

That being said, this was one of the best and probably the most gripping book I've read all year. It's funny, it's dark, it's a lesson in suspense. I came to love all the main characters, even Manchee the poo-obsessed dog. Maybe especially Manchee.

Feel free to put spoilers in comments.

There's a longer extract from the first chapter here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/06/childrensprize.patrickness

I had originally planned to write about these novels in the same entry merely because I read them in quick succession, and also because they're both utterly obscure novels by writers who are better-known for other books, so most likely no one but me has read them. But as I began to write, I realized that they do have some interesting parallels and anti-parallels.

John Christopher is best known for the TRIPODS trilogy, an effectively terse YA series in which three-legged aliens have taken over the world and mind-controlled most of the inhabitants, and only a handful of guerillas (including our boy protagonist) can fight back. I liked those as a kid, but was frustrated by the lack of female characters who did anything but look pretty.

(In a lapse from his generally thoughtful portrayal of the aliens, he has them take strong boys as slaves and beautiful girls as museum exhibits. Why would giant green tentacled three-legged aliens think _any_ kind of girl is pretty, let alone have the same standards of human beauty that humans do?)

His other post-disaster YA trilogy, THE SWORD OF THE SPIRITS, is memorably grim, and also has no women who do anything but look pretty.

SWEENEY'S ISLAND could also be considered a post-disaster novel, but it's really in the "people stranded on an island" genre. There are two ways that story goes: either it's JONATHAN CRUSOE and they build things, or it's LORD OF THE FLIES and they kill things. If the latter, they generally begin by setting up a fascistic social order headed by a strong man who crushes intelligent but physically weak members of the society, and end by worshipping some creepy pagan god they make up right before launching into a sexualized, ritualistic, cannibalistic killing orgy. I'm not sure why making up a god is so commonly seen as the last step before people make a complete reversion to savagery, but so it goes.

SWEENEY'S ISLAND is a pretty standard example of the "kill things" genre, livened up with some sf elements (mutant animals on the island). The women are a selection of embarrassing stereotypes: one good but weak woman who needs a male protector, one woman who almost becomes evil because she so desperately wants a baby and her caddish husband won't let her fulfill her natural instincts, one evil woman who enjoys sex and immediately attaches herself to the strong man. (Before the obligatory cannibalistic ritualistic killing orgy.) Ick.

The key difference the outcomes of these books is why the authors wanted to write an island book in the first place. Either they want to write about exploration and survival, in which case they pick an isolated area as a kind of sandbox for their heroes to play around in; or else they want to prove that the rule of law is all that keeps us from savagery, and so they pick a place where there is no law.

(Alternate title):



THE PEOPLE OF THE AX, by Jay Williams, is also about people struggling to survive in a harsh world, and cooperation vs. might makes right. But this one is good.

Jay Williams is best known for the charming Danny Dunn books, and the even more charming fantasy THE HERO FROM OTHERWHERE, which really ought to be reprinted.

I think THE PEOPLE OF THE AX was published as adult sf, but it reads YA-ish to me. Arne (a boy) and Frey (a girl) are tribal teenagers who have just been initiated as Human Beings, in a ceremony where they gain a limited power of empathy. Because of this, their people may count coup on other tribes and squabble within their own, but they don't kill each other. But another race of people, the crom, may be killed at will, for they have no empathy and thus, to Arne's people, no souls.

But when Arne discovers a crom with an iron club-- a weapon no crom should have the knowledge to make-- he and Frey are sent on a quest to find out what happened. And then a lot of cool, cleverly thought-out, and surprising stuff happens. This is quite a good book, and one which is actually thought-provoking rather than merely preachy. But good luck finding a copy-- I've only ever seen one.