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chrisbiss's reviews
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Reach for Infinity by Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan
3.5
I still don't quite know how to review anthologies. Do I talk about each story individually? Do I talk about the ones I liked? Talking about stories I didn't like feels like singling them out in a way that talking about a novel I disliked doesn't. It's a weird thing.
A couple of days ago I read a story in Clarkesworld by Peter Watts called The Things which immediately became one of my favourite things I've read this year. I hadn't read any Watts and I decided to look into his work. In doing so I learned about his 'Sunflower Cycle', a series of linked short stories about the voyage of a ship designed to build jump gates. I decided to read them all, in chronological order rather than publication order, and that lead me to Reach For Infinity.
This anthology contains near-future hard SF stories about humanity's first attempts to extend beyond our solar system and colonise space. Here's the table of contents:
Break My Fall, Greg Egan
The Dust Queen, Aliette de Bodard
The Fifth Dragon, Ian McDonald
Kheldyu, Karl Schroeder
Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars, Pat Cadigan
Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts, Karen Lord
Amicae Aeternum, Ellen Klages
Trademark Bugs: A Legal History, Adam Roberts
Attitude, Linda Nagata
Invisible Planets, Hannu Rajaniemi
Wilder Still, the Stars, Kathleen Ann Goonan
‘The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation, Ken MacLeod
In Babelsberg, Alastair Reynolds
Hotshot, Peter Watts
14 stories is a good amount for an anthology. Any less and it feels a little empty (though you'd obviously hope they're all bangers); any more and you're often into quantity over quality territory. There's a good mixture of shorter pieces and longer here, too, with a couple of novelettes hidden among the shorts.
As with all anthologies this was a bit of a mixed bag for me, though I enjoyed it more than I didn't. I DNFd two of the stories because they just weren't for me. I also found myself a little disappointed by Alastair Reynolds' In Babelsberg. It wasn't bad but it was just a little silly for my tastes. I think it's the first Reynolds story I've read that I haven't enjoyed (though I haven't read much of his short fiction at all, being much more familiar with his novels) and that was a surprise. The Watts story - the reason I picked up the book in the first place - was good, though it's one of the 'harder' stories in the book and I struggled to follow it when it got into more technical aspects. His writing is strong, though, and even if I didn't always understand it I still enjoyed it.
I really enjoyed Aliette de Bodard's The Dust Queen and Ian McDonald's The Fifth Dragon, and I'm going to seek out more work by both of those authors. The Dust Queen isn't the only story here that explores the mental and emotional effect on humans of leaving earth behind, but it's the one that does it best. The Fifth Dragon is a really interesting take on the logistics of colonising the moon under capitalism, and the human impact of that.
Another story that stood out to me was Adam Roberts' Trademark Bugs: A Legal History'. It takes the form of an academic essay recounting the history of lab-grown pathogens and the way pharma companies reshaped global economies and society by releasing them, selling the cure, and wielding the legal system aggressively to pursue their interests. It's a fascinating piece of writing, and I suspect it hits differently now in a landscape where COVID has happened than it did in 2014. I tried to read Roberts' By Light Alone many years ago and bounced off it, but this story makes me think I should revisit him now that I'm older.
This was a good read. It seems that this anthology is the third in a thematically-linked series, and I may have to pick up the others at some point.
A couple of days ago I read a story in Clarkesworld by Peter Watts called The Things which immediately became one of my favourite things I've read this year. I hadn't read any Watts and I decided to look into his work. In doing so I learned about his 'Sunflower Cycle', a series of linked short stories about the voyage of a ship designed to build jump gates. I decided to read them all, in chronological order rather than publication order, and that lead me to Reach For Infinity.
This anthology contains near-future hard SF stories about humanity's first attempts to extend beyond our solar system and colonise space. Here's the table of contents:
Break My Fall, Greg Egan
The Dust Queen, Aliette de Bodard
The Fifth Dragon, Ian McDonald
Kheldyu, Karl Schroeder
Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars, Pat Cadigan
Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts, Karen Lord
Amicae Aeternum, Ellen Klages
Trademark Bugs: A Legal History, Adam Roberts
Attitude, Linda Nagata
Invisible Planets, Hannu Rajaniemi
Wilder Still, the Stars, Kathleen Ann Goonan
‘The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation, Ken MacLeod
In Babelsberg, Alastair Reynolds
Hotshot, Peter Watts
14 stories is a good amount for an anthology. Any less and it feels a little empty (though you'd obviously hope they're all bangers); any more and you're often into quantity over quality territory. There's a good mixture of shorter pieces and longer here, too, with a couple of novelettes hidden among the shorts.
As with all anthologies this was a bit of a mixed bag for me, though I enjoyed it more than I didn't. I DNFd two of the stories because they just weren't for me. I also found myself a little disappointed by Alastair Reynolds' In Babelsberg. It wasn't bad but it was just a little silly for my tastes. I think it's the first Reynolds story I've read that I haven't enjoyed (though I haven't read much of his short fiction at all, being much more familiar with his novels) and that was a surprise. The Watts story - the reason I picked up the book in the first place - was good, though it's one of the 'harder' stories in the book and I struggled to follow it when it got into more technical aspects. His writing is strong, though, and even if I didn't always understand it I still enjoyed it.
I really enjoyed Aliette de Bodard's The Dust Queen and Ian McDonald's The Fifth Dragon, and I'm going to seek out more work by both of those authors. The Dust Queen isn't the only story here that explores the mental and emotional effect on humans of leaving earth behind, but it's the one that does it best. The Fifth Dragon is a really interesting take on the logistics of colonising the moon under capitalism, and the human impact of that.
Another story that stood out to me was Adam Roberts' Trademark Bugs: A Legal History'. It takes the form of an academic essay recounting the history of lab-grown pathogens and the way pharma companies reshaped global economies and society by releasing them, selling the cure, and wielding the legal system aggressively to pursue their interests. It's a fascinating piece of writing, and I suspect it hits differently now in a landscape where COVID has happened than it did in 2014. I tried to read Roberts' By Light Alone many years ago and bounced off it, but this story makes me think I should revisit him now that I'm older.
This was a good read. It seems that this anthology is the third in a thematically-linked series, and I may have to pick up the others at some point.
Troika by Alastair Reynolds
4.0
Back in June I wrote a little post about alien megastructures in science fiction. It's a subgenre I really enjoy the idea of, and I've been keen to explore more of it (though I haven't made much of an effort to actually do that). Alastair Reynolds still remains my gold standard for this sort of thing, so when I learned about the existence of Troika I knew I was going to have to bump it to the top of my reading list immediately.
This short novella is everything great about Reynolds' writing distilled down to 100 pages. We've got weird far future tech, "hard" science that's still fun to read for someone with no science background and a head that actively resists maths, complex characters, a plot that spans centuries (or possibly millenia), and a surprising ending. Reynolds is really good at describing alien things in a way that emphasises the weirdness but still grounds them in reality, and that's on full display here.
Something I've become increasingly interested in during my Discworld read-through is watching writers try out the same ideas from different angles in subsequent work. Here we see some of the same ideas that he'd used in Pushing Ice a few years earlier, but we also see the seed of some of the stuff that ends up in the Revenger trilogy. The object the protagonists explore - the Matryoshka - bears some resemblence to the baubles from that series, particularly in the idea of the shifting limited time window for accessing them. Without wanting to give any spoilers for either this or Revenger, the ending of that series also seems to echo the end of Troika.
This is a really great entry into the megastructures subgenre that I think deserves more attention.
Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson
3.5
One of the books I was most looking forward to from this year's Booker Prize Longlist was Stone Yard Devotional, and it ended up being a bit of a disappointment for me. I picked up Sinéad Gleason's Hagstone based almost entirely on the strength of the cover and the title, so I didn't have any expectations whatsoever going into it, but I was still surprised to find that it scratched the itch I was hoping for Stone Yard Devotional to scratch.
Hagstone flirts with folk horror in a really interesting way. All the elements are there - an insular almost-cult on a secluded island preparing for a seasonal pagan celebration (in this case, Samhain); a woman who makes strange concoctions out of plants and mosses, who some people call witch; an eerie sound that only some people on the island can hear, that causes strange effects like everyone with a uterus suddenly bleeding at the same time; an outsider, new to the island, who gets caught up in a weird folk ritual and is almost sacrificed to appease a folk god.
In a more traditional folk horror narrative we'd see this from the point of view of the sacrificial outsider - and we have, many times, in films like The Wicker Man and Apostle. Instead, Hagstone puts us in the shoes of the "witch", a woman who turns out to be a working artist struggling with the reality of having that sort of job on a remote island. Or of having that sort of job at all. The horror element takes a back seat to an exploration of what a life spent making art means, of the sacrifices and costs required, of the negotiations between making the art you want to make and making the work people are willing to pay for. It asks whether art made for art's sake has any inherent value, or if the value is in the impact on the audience; does are demand and audience? And is the cost of making it, the isolation and sacrifice, actually worth it?
I really enjoyed this. It's not a perfect book: there are issues with the pacing caused by occasional head-hopping between characters in chapters that are too short and infrequent to provide any meaningful new perspective but simultaneously so frequent that they break the flow of the book in a jarring way, but those issues are minor and more than made up for by wonderful writing that knows exactly what it's doing at all times. The island feels alive and real, like I could go there tomorrow. I was gripped from the first words ("Wave-fucked") and as the book drew to a close I found that I didn't want to leave the island. Definitely worth picking up.
Hagstone flirts with folk horror in a really interesting way. All the elements are there - an insular almost-cult on a secluded island preparing for a seasonal pagan celebration (in this case, Samhain); a woman who makes strange concoctions out of plants and mosses, who some people call witch; an eerie sound that only some people on the island can hear, that causes strange effects like everyone with a uterus suddenly bleeding at the same time; an outsider, new to the island, who gets caught up in a weird folk ritual and is almost sacrificed to appease a folk god.
In a more traditional folk horror narrative we'd see this from the point of view of the sacrificial outsider - and we have, many times, in films like The Wicker Man and Apostle. Instead, Hagstone puts us in the shoes of the "witch", a woman who turns out to be a working artist struggling with the reality of having that sort of job on a remote island. Or of having that sort of job at all. The horror element takes a back seat to an exploration of what a life spent making art means, of the sacrifices and costs required, of the negotiations between making the art you want to make and making the work people are willing to pay for. It asks whether art made for art's sake has any inherent value, or if the value is in the impact on the audience; does are demand and audience? And is the cost of making it, the isolation and sacrifice, actually worth it?
I really enjoyed this. It's not a perfect book: there are issues with the pacing caused by occasional head-hopping between characters in chapters that are too short and infrequent to provide any meaningful new perspective but simultaneously so frequent that they break the flow of the book in a jarring way, but those issues are minor and more than made up for by wonderful writing that knows exactly what it's doing at all times. The island feels alive and real, like I could go there tomorrow. I was gripped from the first words ("Wave-fucked") and as the book drew to a close I found that I didn't want to leave the island. Definitely worth picking up.
The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
I wanted to like this and was excited to receive an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley but I'm DNFing at around 15%. No rating because I didn't read it all. Spoilers ahead.
I went into this expecting a murder mystery set in the world of The Great Gatsby, that revisited locations and places from the original novel. I was curious to see how it would integrate itself into the events of the original novel and how the timelines would overlap.
Unfortunately the answer is that they don't. The author has basically thrown out any idea of 'canon' here, so that this really has very little to do with The Great Gatsby at all other than using the names of the characters. The guest of Gatsby who dies at the beginning of this novel is Tom Buchanan, a fairly important character in The Great Gatsby who survives to the end and outlives Jay. If we're killing off major characters from the novel and in the process ignoring the actual events of the novel then I'm not really sure what we're doing here, because it has very little to do with The Great Gatsby itself.
Once it became clear that this was basically just 'AU' fanfiction I lost interest entirely, and I won't be finishing it. I would much rather have read a jazz era murder mystery that had nothing at all to do with The Great Gatsby.
Also, a minor nitpick to end things: at one point Greta buys "that new Agatha Christie novel" and wonders if Christie must be well-traveled, because her stories take place in "such exotic locations". If this takes place in 1922 (which it must do, because Jay Gatsby is alive and has just fired all his staff) then Christie had only published two novels at that point, and they're both set in England.
I went into this expecting a murder mystery set in the world of The Great Gatsby, that revisited locations and places from the original novel. I was curious to see how it would integrate itself into the events of the original novel and how the timelines would overlap.
Unfortunately the answer is that they don't. The author has basically thrown out any idea of 'canon' here, so that this really has very little to do with The Great Gatsby at all other than using the names of the characters. The guest of Gatsby who dies at the beginning of this novel is Tom Buchanan, a fairly important character in The Great Gatsby who survives to the end and outlives Jay. If we're killing off major characters from the novel and in the process ignoring the actual events of the novel then I'm not really sure what we're doing here, because it has very little to do with The Great Gatsby itself.
Once it became clear that this was basically just 'AU' fanfiction I lost interest entirely, and I won't be finishing it. I would much rather have read a jazz era murder mystery that had nothing at all to do with The Great Gatsby.
Also, a minor nitpick to end things: at one point Greta buys "that new Agatha Christie novel" and wonders if Christie must be well-traveled, because her stories take place in "such exotic locations". If this takes place in 1922 (which it must do, because Jay Gatsby is alive and has just fired all his staff) then Christie had only published two novels at that point, and they're both set in England.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
3.5
I've never felt so completely nailed to the ground by a novel as I did by this short tale of a pair of elder millennials who accidentally fall into their careers simply by being of exactly the right age to take advantage of the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, only to have to deal with the fact that their bubble is bursting in their late 30s and they have no idea how to adapt to that change.
There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.
What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.
This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.
Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.
There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.
What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.
This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.
Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Let's not bury the lede here. This is one of the best books I've read this year, and if a better SF novel is published in 2025 we're in for a good time. I can't remember the last time I was this impressed - or this moved - by a sci-fi book.
The best first contact stories invariably have something to say about what it means to be human. Putting us next to another sapient species means we inevitably begin to draw comparisons. How do we define "alien" if not by pointing at it and saying "not human"? In defining what makes something alien we inevitably are forced to reckon with what makes us human.
Shroud puts humanity on full display, peeling us apart piece by piece and looking at the resulting mess. It's a novel of both the best parts of human nature - ingenuity, curiosity, empathy, resilience - and the worst - violence, the endless cycle of colonisation and extraction, the reduction of people to little more than cogs in a machine. The arrogance to think that we're uniquely special.
Tchaikovsky's writing here is, I think, the best in his career. I've never read a book of his that I didn't at least enjoy, but in the past - specifically in the Shadows Of The Apt series - I've sometimes got a bit lost in his action scenes and the way he describes "weird" things. Shadows... was over a decade ago, though (The Empire In Black And Gold, terrifyingly, 16 years ago), and he's had plenty of time to improve his craft. Shroud is the evidence that he's put the work in. The frozen moon of Shroud is a truly weird, alien place, populated by some of the strangest aliens I've ever seen in fiction, but the prose is crystal clear. I can picture this world, and the awful things that happen to our main characters during their journey across it, like I was right there with them. The pacing, too, is great. This rattles along like the best of thrillers. There isn't a single wasted moment here. It's a proper gripping page turner, evidenced by the fact that I write this after having stayed up until 2AM against all my better judgement to finish reading it.
Over the past few years I've been really drawn to moody sci-fi horror. In 2020 I wrote The Wretched, a solo journalling game about being really stressed and having a terrible time on your own in space. Some of my favourite SF of recent years has had very similar themes. The Wretched was absolutely a response to the unique isolation of COVID lockdowns, and I suspect that's also true of much of the fiction along similar lines that's emerged since then.
Shroud is also a novel about having a terrible time in space, but it's specifically a novel about having a terrible time in space and leaning on shared bonds and our connections with other humans to help us endure and survive. Even in its most bleak moments, even when our worst impulses as a species are on display, it's still a novel that has some hope for the future. As I was reading it I couldn't help feeling like it feels like a novel about healing and rebuilding. As with a lot of recent SF I think this is a book that was forged in the aftermath of lockdowns, but it's a book that's able to imagine a coming together of people in the aftermath of catastrophe rather than one that wallows in isolation.
Shroud is released in February 2025, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'm very grateful to Tor and Pan Macmillan for furnishing me with an ARC. Don't sleep on this on when it lands.
5.0
Let me put this into words you can understand.
Let's not bury the lede here. This is one of the best books I've read this year, and if a better SF novel is published in 2025 we're in for a good time. I can't remember the last time I was this impressed - or this moved - by a sci-fi book.
The best first contact stories invariably have something to say about what it means to be human. Putting us next to another sapient species means we inevitably begin to draw comparisons. How do we define "alien" if not by pointing at it and saying "not human"? In defining what makes something alien we inevitably are forced to reckon with what makes us human.
Shroud puts humanity on full display, peeling us apart piece by piece and looking at the resulting mess. It's a novel of both the best parts of human nature - ingenuity, curiosity, empathy, resilience - and the worst - violence, the endless cycle of colonisation and extraction, the reduction of people to little more than cogs in a machine. The arrogance to think that we're uniquely special.
Tchaikovsky's writing here is, I think, the best in his career. I've never read a book of his that I didn't at least enjoy, but in the past - specifically in the Shadows Of The Apt series - I've sometimes got a bit lost in his action scenes and the way he describes "weird" things. Shadows... was over a decade ago, though (The Empire In Black And Gold, terrifyingly, 16 years ago), and he's had plenty of time to improve his craft. Shroud is the evidence that he's put the work in. The frozen moon of Shroud is a truly weird, alien place, populated by some of the strangest aliens I've ever seen in fiction, but the prose is crystal clear. I can picture this world, and the awful things that happen to our main characters during their journey across it, like I was right there with them. The pacing, too, is great. This rattles along like the best of thrillers. There isn't a single wasted moment here. It's a proper gripping page turner, evidenced by the fact that I write this after having stayed up until 2AM against all my better judgement to finish reading it.
Over the past few years I've been really drawn to moody sci-fi horror. In 2020 I wrote The Wretched, a solo journalling game about being really stressed and having a terrible time on your own in space. Some of my favourite SF of recent years has had very similar themes. The Wretched was absolutely a response to the unique isolation of COVID lockdowns, and I suspect that's also true of much of the fiction along similar lines that's emerged since then.
Shroud is also a novel about having a terrible time in space, but it's specifically a novel about having a terrible time in space and leaning on shared bonds and our connections with other humans to help us endure and survive. Even in its most bleak moments, even when our worst impulses as a species are on display, it's still a novel that has some hope for the future. As I was reading it I couldn't help feeling like it feels like a novel about healing and rebuilding. As with a lot of recent SF I think this is a book that was forged in the aftermath of lockdowns, but it's a book that's able to imagine a coming together of people in the aftermath of catastrophe rather than one that wallows in isolation.
Shroud is released in February 2025, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'm very grateful to Tor and Pan Macmillan for furnishing me with an ARC. Don't sleep on this on when it lands.
The Day of the Roaring by Nina Bhadreshwar
This book really appealed to me and I was really happy to receive a copy through NetGalley. Gritty northern crime novels are right up my street, and I desperately wanted to love this. And initially I thought I was going to.
The Day of The Roaring starts strong. We have a grisly crime that doesn't make any sense and a compelling lead character in DI Diana Walker, a Black woman working in the police in the late 00s, who's moved away from Sheffield due to some events we aren't fully privy to at the start of the novel and is having to juggle her career and all the politics of race and gender that come with it at the same time as a complicated family life. Tie this together with some strong writing and a fairly authentic regional dialect on the page and I thought I was going to be in for a good time.
Unfortunately it falls off fairly quickly. The Sheffield dialect that works so well in the opening chapters starts to feel more like a bad parody of what northeners sound like (and I say this as a northerner, albeit from the other side of the Pennines). Half the time Bhadreshwar seems to forget that her characters are meant to speak in this way, and it's completely abandoned by the final act. And some of the decisions about how to render this speech are simply annoying; I never want to read "fk" in place of "fuck" ever again.
This is a shame because there are moments of brilliance on display in the writing. At times the prose slips into a really stunning cadence that reminds me of the best literary fiction, but the rest of the time it's a bit of a mess.
The biggest problem for me is that it doesn't really work as a mystery. It becomes obvious who the perpetrator is very early on, but none of the police who we're following pick up on this or connect the dots. This can work when it's done deliberately but here it was just frustrating, as I spent more than 300 pages wondering when the investigators were going to connect the very obvious dots. And when they do work out what's going on - right at the end, with barely 20 pages of the book left - it happens off screen, so that we're denied that "Aha!" moment that this genre thrives on. We jump from a fairly unrelated event to the arrest with no connective tissue to show us how DI Walker came to her conclusion and - crucially - how she convinced her colleagues to go along with it. This seems like a particular oversight, since so much of the narrative is concerned with how little they respect her and how they keep denying her instincts and holding back the investigation as a result. I really wanted her to get that moment of "I told you so" and it never happens.
Much like my frustrations with the writing - moments of brilliance hidden in a mess of clunky prose that feels like it needs a second draft - it's frustrating that the convoluted plot and poor research (the Bullring is in Birmingham, not Sheffield; MDMA has been a Class A drug since the 1970s; nobody has ever been in a mosh pit at a Def Leppard concert; the age of consent in the UK is 16, not 18) detract from the fact that Bhadreshwar is writing about some pretty serious issues that I don't think I've ever seen tackled in fiction. Her Afterword makes it clear that she's put a lot of time into researching FGM and speaking to people who have actually been impacted by it. I wish the final product of that work was better, because this feels like an important conversation to be having and fiction feels like a good place for it to start.
I've spent a lot of time criticising this. It's not terrible, but it feels half-baked - especially in the back end, which is demonstrably less polished than the opening. I suspect that were this not a review copy I would have DNFd somewhere around 60% as I felt things starting to unravel and the plot seemed to just be spinning in circles and never going anywhere. There's some bloat here, particularly involving sections from the point of view of a secondary character called Bruno that don't add anything and simply bog down the pacing. When it's good it's clear that it had the potential to be great, and that makes it incredibly disappointing that it's largely a failure to launch.
2.0
This book really appealed to me and I was really happy to receive a copy through NetGalley. Gritty northern crime novels are right up my street, and I desperately wanted to love this. And initially I thought I was going to.
The Day of The Roaring starts strong. We have a grisly crime that doesn't make any sense and a compelling lead character in DI Diana Walker, a Black woman working in the police in the late 00s, who's moved away from Sheffield due to some events we aren't fully privy to at the start of the novel and is having to juggle her career and all the politics of race and gender that come with it at the same time as a complicated family life. Tie this together with some strong writing and a fairly authentic regional dialect on the page and I thought I was going to be in for a good time.
Unfortunately it falls off fairly quickly. The Sheffield dialect that works so well in the opening chapters starts to feel more like a bad parody of what northeners sound like (and I say this as a northerner, albeit from the other side of the Pennines). Half the time Bhadreshwar seems to forget that her characters are meant to speak in this way, and it's completely abandoned by the final act. And some of the decisions about how to render this speech are simply annoying; I never want to read "fk" in place of "fuck" ever again.
This is a shame because there are moments of brilliance on display in the writing. At times the prose slips into a really stunning cadence that reminds me of the best literary fiction, but the rest of the time it's a bit of a mess.
The biggest problem for me is that it doesn't really work as a mystery. It becomes obvious who the perpetrator is very early on, but none of the police who we're following pick up on this or connect the dots. This can work when it's done deliberately but here it was just frustrating, as I spent more than 300 pages wondering when the investigators were going to connect the very obvious dots. And when they do work out what's going on - right at the end, with barely 20 pages of the book left - it happens off screen, so that we're denied that "Aha!" moment that this genre thrives on. We jump from a fairly unrelated event to the arrest with no connective tissue to show us how DI Walker came to her conclusion and - crucially - how she convinced her colleagues to go along with it. This seems like a particular oversight, since so much of the narrative is concerned with how little they respect her and how they keep denying her instincts and holding back the investigation as a result. I really wanted her to get that moment of "I told you so" and it never happens.
Much like my frustrations with the writing - moments of brilliance hidden in a mess of clunky prose that feels like it needs a second draft - it's frustrating that the convoluted plot and poor research (the Bullring is in Birmingham, not Sheffield; MDMA has been a Class A drug since the 1970s; nobody has ever been in a mosh pit at a Def Leppard concert; the age of consent in the UK is 16, not 18) detract from the fact that Bhadreshwar is writing about some pretty serious issues that I don't think I've ever seen tackled in fiction. Her Afterword makes it clear that she's put a lot of time into researching FGM and speaking to people who have actually been impacted by it. I wish the final product of that work was better, because this feels like an important conversation to be having and fiction feels like a good place for it to start.
I've spent a lot of time criticising this. It's not terrible, but it feels half-baked - especially in the back end, which is demonstrably less polished than the opening. I suspect that were this not a review copy I would have DNFd somewhere around 60% as I felt things starting to unravel and the plot seemed to just be spinning in circles and never going anywhere. There's some bloat here, particularly involving sections from the point of view of a secondary character called Bruno that don't add anything and simply bog down the pacing. When it's good it's clear that it had the potential to be great, and that makes it incredibly disappointing that it's largely a failure to launch.