cattytrona's reviews
298 reviews

i want to start by saying that i think alasdair gray is unbelievably good. his books remind me why i care about books, write as if youre in the early days of a better canon, etc. 

however. i hated reading this. there was something so upsetting about the way horrible realities poked up through horrible fantasies. of course, of course, that’s testament to how effective the book was, but i’m rating my experience and whether i want to return to it, and i don’t.

i thought the fringe section was really interesting, unexpectedly topical.

everyone in this has such an unpleasant lifestory in a way which feels… untrue. relatedly, this is all very grim. detective fiction, not as in mystery (which would require a plot and also solving, instead of stumbling), but as in crime (horrible things happen in ur backyard!!!)
ultimately am pretty perplexed by the structure of this. maybe that’s exacerbated by the audiobook, but it felt like information was repeated quite often, and especially towards the end it just all got a bit messy and irrelevant.
i also googled, at least twice, ‘jackson brodie daughter’ because there was so much chat about jb’s difficulty with his teen son without reference to her, that i started to think she was made up for the tv show. then, halfway thru, the son disappears and the daughter becomes the actual emotional climax of the book? it felt like atkinson forgot, then suddenly remembered, what brodie's kid sitch was. it stood out as thoughtless, especially in a book which draw attention to itself as part of a series, by requiring you to remember characters and moments from past books (which i dont)

the idea of labour winning a general election feeling like a powerful enough sea change that it can serve as the climax for a unrelated whole book is so nuts. wish politics was more than just a slow slouch towards apathy!

anyway, this was fine. i’m disappointed, but that’s largely an issue of misplaced expectations: i thought this would be a book about working in tourism/tours in edinburgh. that was in there but it felt brief and the arc of it fell a little flat, the characters never coming into relief enough to make their changing impactful. meanwhile, the slight majority of the novel was historic. it’s told in an out of order way, where you know what it’s building to long before you get there, which on the one hand is all very predestined, past-viewed-from-the-present, but on the other hand it can feel superfluous to spend all that time in the 17th century going over events we’ve been told happened. at the same time, it never felt fully established either. things happen, the reader’s told, and so you wait for an explanation of why, but instead you're shown that thing happening, and it becomes justification for itself, without ever really justifying anything.

robertson has a vaguely familiar biography (english phd on scottish literature clubbb), and i can tell he and i have read much of the same thought: occasional moments of historiographic character opinion bubble up didactically. it’s not very carefully done. but it’s nice to see it thought through in fiction, in a more practical, placed way than a thesis. still, i can tell our paths diverge: he clearly has a genuine interest in history as a discipline, and i do not, and am much more interested in a cultural perspective on how that stuff arrives in the present. my version of this book would be all ghost tour, with mitchel weir and co only appearing in excerpt. it’s not that, obviously. if it was, though, it would probably be useful for my thesis.

i think my favourite sections of this book were just folk walking around edinburgh. it’s evoked well, the geography is really clear and familiar and fun to see on the page. i liked this section:

Really exciting and engaging to read throughout. However, difficult to talk about beyond that without the big spoiler censorship block, because I felt this was a story so about who the mole is, and the conclusion, despite that obviously only taking up the final few pages.

It's good, isn't it? The way that ending is written. The ideological justification, so consistent with what everyone knows about Hayden (which massively made me feel the lack of ideology in Transcription), which makes it feel more a fatal flaw than a belief. The way Smiley takes it - almost, I suppose one link away from, a scorned lover. It's personal, it's deeply felt, even as it's public domain and politics and therefore supposed to be impersonal. The actual Hayden-Prideaux thing is such an extraordinarily romantic, tragic event, series of events, relationship. I'm fascinated by the fact Hayden only really appears onscreen once before the end, getting up to oddities, yet he's present all the time, both personally and professionally (foreshadowing). He's an enigma, a shadow, an undoubtable weight in the centre of the canvas. It's an extrodinary bit of writing of absence and influence. I've seen the film, but couldn't remember much beyond Colin Firth being the mole, so without being sure, I was making my predictions based on who seemed the most Firth coded. I ended up being right, and had a moment of disappointment, before realising - before being told by the book - that I was supposed to know, that I would have known anyway, that everyone knows. Again, it's something to write that inevitable answer so satisfyingly. Denial and complacency and disappointment.

Good book.

very fun and easily read. spies are cool! and what a strange time in history. it’s inherently interesting moving thru this period
but occasionally the writing is poor, it’s obvious in an amateurish way, and i think the ending is very oddly delivered. my friend m

iriam

was saying the other day, just before i started this, that atkinson’s not actually a particularly strong plotter, and i felt that here. it’s not that the plot isn’t here, but it’s oddly revealed.

the reveal juliet’s a spy feels like it comes too late in the game to matter, and there’s not much of a hint of any of it. heck, halfway thru i thought ‘it’s weird that she doesnt seem to believe in anything except snark’ and like i guess that was a conspicuous absence. but the fact we don’t know this stuff about her only really works in a book that is more plot than character (like a christie) whereas this feels so focused on juliet and the plot is so murky for so long that there’s no way to read it except as character, except what character. idk maybe i should have been more clued in by the fact we’re doing spying in the 50s. but it felt all a bit out of nowhere.

still, i enjoyed it, which has been a major hesitation with kate atkinson since slogging thru life after life so maybe i will catch up with jackson brodie again one day

glad i, without really meaning to, heeded the forum advice wrt this, which is 1) to not expect much, 2) read player of games first. i had forgotten how much i liked player of games until a moment in the many epilogues of this, where we’re told a drone has retired and gotten into model trains, at which point i remembered how much that player of games robot slays – how good banks clearly is at writing machines when he actually goes for it.
player of games is also, notably, a quick, focused book. consider phlebas is focused, but not quick, spending a lot of words on a handful of things and characters in a way that just feels inefficient and unengaging.
at its worst, and for big chunks, it’s boring. which isn’t to say the writing’s dry or nothing happens. lots happens, but the action is overwritten and tiring, and is all in service of a plot and character i lacked investment in. the plot is notably simple: it’s a novel full of spies which lacks intrigue, and compensates with brute force.
it is also a novel with a ringworld and shapeshifting and do-anything spacesuits and future trains (shuttling about in what i can only imagine as a future glagow subway), and by the end all i wanted was

for the trains to crash already. and i love trains! and the future!

but those worldbuilding bits never feels much more than perfunctory, if convincing, and to the service of thin ideas. banks gestures to themes and ideological conflicts, but they’re inconsistently dealt with, and often at odds with the action of the moment, giving them a tangental feeling, despite also being central to the world.
the whole book is underscored by the kind of nasty, decedent violence and grim view of human nature which is honestly a reason i don’t go back to his iain bankses very often. it’s rough to read! it’s a little scary, in a, what’s this guy gonna force me thru next way! in this novel, some of that violence is alright, makes sense, is very occasionally almost fun, but bits like the island episode are just unpleasant.

i also found the glut of deaths towards the end, and particularly the epilogue one, sort of perplexingly cruel.

i did like the ironic note of the final page, which i thinks comes from this being banks’ way, but i also think it would have hit harder in a sharper book, which was doing less thematically and had characters with more to them.

i’m out here trying to write this stupid thesis on literary commemoration, reflect on extra-literary activity, articulate how people exist in respect to authors both academically and thru my own observations of what it means to enjoy good things rn, using up so many of my hours and words, and then it turns out henry james has already done it!! every damn time.

the best writer for writing about writing and writers from the outside. 

a really consistently strong collection. the standouts are ‘it takes a village some say’ by ngwah-mbo nana nkweti, for its language, and ‘skinned’ by lesley  nneka arimah, which is a really excellent piece of worldbuilding, and is a both fresh and clear feminist dystopia

broad thoughts: i love when fantasy is actually science fiction sososo much. i also think this is a really great collection of stories, that do benefit from being put together. not only do they compliment each other, with their sff approach, it’s just so rewarding when the links between the novels start emerging, in a way which wouldn’t hit as well if i read them separately with other books in between … it made me really excited, not just about the stories, but about big shared universes as a way to do scifi storytelling. if i log a culture novel in the next week it will be a direct result of this.

rocannon’s world: was the most interested in this one after reading ‘the necklace’ as a short story in the wind’s twelve quarters, and thinking it was amazing - it becomes the prologue here. i still think it’s an extraordinary short story, a perfect, efficient manifesto for bringing fantasy and science fiction together, for making magic technology. but it almost works better out of context. it’s not that the rest of the book drags it down, but it doesn’t do much else that isn’t embodied in those first pages, except lay out some rudiments of the league/universe — which do come to feel more worthwhile in the later novels here. the story’s good but a little slim, never much expands on the fairytale tone of the prologue, and so could be more convincingly real, and perhaps deserves to be bc the concept’s so excellent. although i did find the angels affectingly gross as an alien concept.

planet of exiles: i had fun with this, although again i wonder if it could have gone further with its work. the characters are more convincing but the pace is quick and the world feels a little brief. but i liked what it did do, the whole, aliens to your own home thing. i think the novel as a whole is a better argument for how giving a scifi backdrop to your fantasy story furthers it, and allows you to justify and easily explain impossible relations and situations, which take what human beings are and do to extremes, which is already the thing what slays about fantasy, where fighting isn’t a metaphor, it’s war. here, alienation is aliens.

city of illusions: one for the hayt fans, although that’s possibly only me. dune messiah made me crazy 70% because i found that one character/move so compelling, and this does the same thing!! i was so excited and interested, even though neither this — nor dune messiah tbf — have fully done what i want them to do with it. what that is, i’m not sure! but more! anyway i still liked this and found it tricky and compelling, even though again, i think it could have done more to inspect and dig into the situation it’s built, and how its non-rational, non-plot movement impact the characters.

i wonder if it’s a part of the time it was written in. i don’t usually expect depth and character work from scifi of this period, i’m more than happy with cool space stations and big cat aliens, and it’s perhaps unfair that i’m expecting more here, especially because le guin doesn’t ever really become a full on character study writer. but i think the situations she sets up for her characters are interesting specifically because they are so psychological, particularly in the latter two texts, but even in the first, when it’s considered as a response to tolkien, and what lotr becomes towards its end, and so it seems a waste to just. be so efficient and conceptual. to only spend time in people’s minds to problem solve,  not to feel. does that make sense? i also don’t love a one guy is special and solves it all narrative, which two of these stories basically are. that approach means there’s basically no lastingly meaningful people beyond the main characters, and i think that lack of relationships, webbed, also makes the world feel significantly slighter. the exception is planet of exiles (because it has a romance) and i think that was my favourite.

there’s still much to like. le guin’s a lovely writer, sharp and beautiful and really well observed. i knew where i was. and, again, i think the concepts powering all of these are really good. the difference between a 3 and 4 star rating for me, on here, is whether i’d go out of my way to reread it in the future, and because of that, even with all my hesitations, this is an easy, instant 4 star. these are just such good ideas! i want to bask in them!

already too of its time after a century and a half to feel convincing, or much more than a novelty: none of the grounding grit (?) of war of the worlds. banging on the book’s metaphorical door like nooo that’s surely not how museums will age!! however, i do always love a victorian framing device and specifically the final paragraph that leads into, which is really good.
skipped the other short story because i read it a couple of months ago in a different anthology