Book review: Binu and the Great Wall, by Su Tong

The beauty of a series of books based on myth is that the potential for output is enormous, the variety of subject matters nigh-on limitless and the books themselves tend to be an education as well. The latter is certainly true of Binu and the Great Wall.

This book, part of Canongate’s collection, tells the story of Binu and her quest to see her husband who has been conscripted to the Great Wall project. Along the way Binu meets and sees off a plethora of challenges, be they oppression and bigotry, or simply reluctance to aid her due to her gender.

Her mission is rather simple. Wan Qiliang, her husband, does not have winter clothing and she is concerned he will freeze, thus she seeks to deliver appropriate attire to him. Other people in her village, and beyond, mock her but her love and devotion to her husband is boundless and she will not be swayed from her mission.

Binu and the Great Wall is actually based on a well known Chinese fable about the tears of Meng Jiang and is laced with satire and dreamlike images. The frog, the ghosts and the quite wonderful dialogue, all combine to show us a merciless world where one woman’s devotion is the mock-envy of entire regions.

Despite the darkness throughout there is a peculiar strain of hope in this book, and the lack of a fairytale ending makes the story even stronger as a result.

Another enjoyable book from Canongate.

8/10

April DVD Reviews

A bit later than normal at putting the links up to the VideoVista reviews for this month. Two pretty poor films:

• Massacre At My Lai Four: a case of what could have been
• Altitude: erm, a case of what should have been

There are a host of other insightful reviews available at www.videovista.net, including Paranormal Activity 2, Saw: The Final Chapter & Legend Of The Guardians.

Book Review: Red Leech, by Andrew Lane

In his second young Sherlock Holmes offering, Andrew Lane further imagines how the world’s only consulting detective came to be who he was.

Red Leech is the follow up to Death Cloud and this time 14-year-old Holmes is caught up in a tangled affair involving American unionists, confederates and a half mad John Wilkes-Booth. His adventure takes him from sleepy Farnham to New York and beyond.

Lane, a prolific and acclaimed writer, is clearly something of a scholar and Holmesian aficionado. He fuses an American War of the States conspiracy with the developing character of teenage Holmes extremely well. Where Lane can get off message is by trying to shoehorn too much back story revival into the narrative: he hints at things like how Holmes took up the violin, the math applied to speeding trains (telegraph poles), how logic became his only way if thinking, the theory that the mind is like an attic and so on.

Over the course of the book these little vignettes appeared well over a dozen times and it felt like Lane wanted to get everything he could in to reference classic Holmes as possible; almost as if there would be no more young Sherlock books. Whilst Holmes geeks will enjoy this some will find it stifles the flow of the story with no great benefit. Indeed, some parts were borderline expository.

Although a significant gripe, none of above should detract from what was another strong offering from Lane and sets the scene for further growth of his quite interesting take on literature’s most famous character.

The plot of Red Leech is once again strong with an ability to hook the reader throughout. All the while, Lane also develops Holmes’ companions extremely well, in particular the fledgling detective’s kindling love for Virginia, the daughter of Amyus Crowe. Crowe is the man who is teaching Holmes to be, well, Holmes.

Indeed, Red Leech is another fine mess Holmes gets in and then out of.

7/10

 

A Podium Place!

My story ‘Mummy’s Boy‘ was voted into third place by the readers of Whortleberry Press’ Strange Mysteries 2. The anthology features loads of great stories and it is a great honour to have been off stiff competition for this award.

Big thanks to Jean Goldstrom and her team for accepting my story and for producing such a fine collection.

To find out more about WhP go to www.whortleberrypress.com

Book Review: Uprising, by Scott G. Mariani

After reading The Shadow Project I decided to move my eBook reading on to another Scott Mariani – writing as Scott G. Mariani to differentiate this series from the Ben Hope books – offering, this time the first in his vampire series Uprising.

This book tells the story of a world in which vampires secretly exist alongside humans in relative peace. The bloodsucking race is governed by the Vampire Federation, an association brought about by the advent of the modern age of mass media. Vampires needed to live under the radar, in some people’s eyes at least.

The Vampire Federation has developed drugs like Vambloc to negate the effects of feedings, Solazol to allow vampires the ability to go out in the sun and Nosferol to kill vampires. In other words, many of the traditional vampire weaknesses and strengths are negated or exploited by modern pharmacology.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the seeming subjugation of the ‘superior’ vampire race to their cattle. The Trads (those who embrace vampire traditions and pre-eminence) are unhappy and are about to wage war with the Feds. It’s not as West Side Story as it sounds.

However, the Trads, led by the evil Gabriel Stone are uprising and only Alex Bishop, a Federal vampire agent, with a little help from the human Joel Solomon can save the day. The cross of Ardaich is their greatest hope.

Like The Shadow Project, Uprising is a fast-paced thriller. Mariani, unapologetically, riffs on many of the legends brought to life by Stoker and he creates the Trads in a, well, traditional image. Fanged teeth, ghouls, fiendishly beautiful women and remote Romanian settings all appear as Mariani draws the reader in to a dark underworld of power, politics and a bloodthirsty appetite for restoration of vampire supremacy.

It is hard not to be, ahem, sucked in to Uprising as the plot races along the three or four lines it is going down. The dialogue is snappy and the narrative fat free. However, if I had one criticism of Uprising it is the amount of coincidence and ‘just-in-time’ moments in the book. I saw the end coming about halfway through.

Mariani done well to avoid too much cliché whilst trying to remain true to the original concept of Stoker’s greatest creation. As such, perhaps I am being hypercritical when calling out some of the inevitability of the outcome.

Uprising finished, as you would expect, perfectly set for the next installment. Let’s see if Mariani can keep the pace as high whilst stamping his own mark on the characters and the genre. I am off to download another book methinks.

7.5/10

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: The Shadow Project, by Scott Mariani

Another eBook read. I’ve deen doing a lot of travelling recently and find that reading an eBook on the iPhone when at airports, waiting on trains or popping to the loo is a great way to kill some time.

The latest conquest is Scott Mariani’s The Shadow Project, an international thriller spanning half of Europe and with so much action that it is enjoyably hard to put down. The beauty of the eBook is that a page is no more than two or three average length paragraphs and so it appears easy to read another page, then another, then… ach, you get the point.

In The Shadow Project Ben Hope, ex-SAS, is hunting down kidnappers, neo-Nazis and shadowy megalomaniacs with deadly agendas. The ultimate prize is the Kammler project, a secret Nazi machine that could save or destroy humanity, depending on whose hands it ends up in.

Mariani is Scots author, to my surprise given the name, and this is the first book I have read of his. So far as thrilling action delivered at a breathless pace goes this is an absolute winner. And whilst it is unlikely that Mariani will be preparing a speech for the Man Booker prize for The Shadow Project he can be absolutely delighted in creating a thrill-a-minute book with engaging characters and a plot with more twists and turns than Jimmy Johnstone in his prime. A perfect book for reading on the go.

For more information about Scott Mariani go to www.scottmariani.com

8/10

Film Review: Fair Game

Cast: Senn Penn, Naomi Watts, Brooke Smith, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly

Doug Liman (Bourne trilogy) treads on familiar territory here in this riveting and fast-paced thriller based on true events that threatened to cause embarrassment to George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq following 9/11. That is until we realized G. W. was simply a full-time embarrassment.

Naomi Watts stars as the power-blonde CIA operative Valerie Plame who is responsible for assessing the weapons capability of Saddam’s Iraq. Her husband, ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), is sent to Niger to investigate whether there has been the capability to move 500 tons of uranium and ship it to hostile governments. His conclusion is no, No, NO!

Despite this, Bush proclaims that the British Government has found evidence of African states aiding Middle Eastern countries in developing weapons grade plutonium and a single CIA agent in a quorum of twelve is convinced that aluminum tubes found in transit to Iraq would be used to create a nuclear bomb. They were in fact glorified peashooters.

In essence, Wilson and Plame are saying well before any invasion that there is no WMD capability in Iraq, which we all know was the primary argument for invasion. This is not helpful to Dick Cheney’s agenda and Wilson’s willingness to go public with his views threatens to tear the family apart.

From the quite outstanding opening sequence, when Plame leads a counter-proliferation mission in Kuala Lumpur, to the political intrigue perpetrated by Scooter Libby, Fair Game does not give you a moment to take breath. The fusing of real news reports with the acting of the excellent Penn and Watts gives a real sense of just how far the US Government was willing to go to cover up the truth; the truth being the first victim of war as a US senator once remarked poignantly.

There can be criticisms aimed at the objectivity of this movie but the same could be said of the original news reporting form CNN and Fox, and the screenplay is based on the published accounts of Plame and Wilson. This is not a new story, but a harrowing reminder of how true the land of the free isn’t.

9/10

Book review: Caledonication, by John K. V. Eunson

The psyche of a nation is a contested in sociological terms; you know the old argument about how your sense of right and wrong, your attitude and your personality can be shaped by something as malleable as the lines on a map.

It is also well known that we Scots are a self-deprecating lot who spend most of our time with furrowed brows thinking of something sarcastic to say. It’s just the way is. In John F. V. Eunson’s brilliant Caledonication these humour and quip traits are there aplenty.

Essentially this is a book that looks at the history of Scotland with an emphasis on the light-hearted and believe me given the history of this great nation generally involves blood and battles, it is a pip to turn something as gruesome as the Scottish history in to a laugh-a-page offering, which is exactly what Eunson achieves.

He describes the 1890 opening of the Forth Road Bridge as being ‘Good news for local painters’ and suggests that the Old Firm have turned the religious divide ‘into a highly lucrative business model.’

But it is not just modern history he looks at and the book reads in pretty much a chronological order at the outset. In an early observation he tackles the standing stones which are prevalent in the Western Isles and the Orkneys but laments the fact that the locals will probably stop making architectural discoveries as they no longer have to cut peat for heating.

Caledonication is laced with satire, observational humour and some downbeat takes on the last 9,000 years of Scottish history. If you want to know more about the country which gave the world the telephone, television, steam engine, modern economic theory, deep fried chocolate and the KKK, but don’t want to be bored to the point of narcolepsy, then get your hands on this as soon as you can.

9/10

March DVD Reviews

A whopping three efforts for you to enjoy this month at VideoVista.

• Sinbad and the Minotaur: A truly awful take on great mythological figures
• Aggravated Assault: An edgy Aussie thriller about racial tension
• The Boy With Green Hair: An 1940′s film about the impact of war and individuality

As always, there are more great reviews over at www.videovista.net this month, including 22 Bullets, Primal & Buried

Book Review: Moriarty, by John Gardner

Well, technically it is not a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, even though the great detective is referenced in it. Moriarty is more like an offshoot of the Conan Doyle stories, centring as it is does on the return of Professor James Moriarty from Reichenbach (see His Last Bow) and his desire to resuscitate his criminal organisation in order to bring his ‘family’ back together.

John Gardner’s refreshing take on the Holmesian world makes for compelling reading at times as he endeavours to get underneath the skin of the criminal mastermind who so nearly drove Holmes to his destruction. He imagines a complex character, troubled but determined.

Gardner’s yarn gives us his view on just how Moriarty was created and just how wide his criminal reach was, and remains as so in the timeline of the book. He treats us to a character study of the Victorian criminal and intertwines some historical fact with poetic licence to create a very real turn of the 20^th century underworld.

But yet, I wasn’t bowled over. I wasn’t rushing to Amazon to get the other Moriarty books. Which is strange because this is a well written, compulsively plotted book. So why did I feel this way?

Then it hit me: I have no empathy with James Moriarty and as the lead character it was really difficult to root for him to win in his war with Jack Idle. I didn’t care. I was carried on the wave of interest in how Gardner would treat the lead character more than I was bothered about his [Moriarty’s] well being.

Put mildly, I couldn’t connect with the book’s pivotal character.

So there you have it. Moriarty is an interesting read and one most fans of Sherlock would connect with, I enjoyed reading it and am glad I did. Gardner has attempted a really brave  thing by reversing the perspective one would normally have on Conan Doyle’s characters. In the end, however, Moriarty himself is a sideshow to the main event.

6.5/10