I have a new book out!
Here's the blurb:
“I was enjoying myself—I was twelve years old, stuck on an island
inhabited by mad killer rabbits, furious gannets, and a couple of insane
missionaries. I thought life couldn’t get much better.”
Frances doesn’t believe a word of it, especially as the speaker of
these absurd words is the person who hurt her so badly decades ago, when
they were both in their teens. She never expected to see him again, but
now circumstances have conspired against her and she cannot avoid his
company. Until a week ago, she had hidden the fact of his existence away
in the deepest recesses of her mind, along with far sweeter memories of
a young crofter on the Isle of Skye, and a fat Greek who nearly
drowned.
You can buy the book directly from the publisher here.
Catherine Edmunds art and writing
Friday, 10 April 2020
Tuesday, 5 December 2017
Portraits of the Band
Once upon a time there was a violinist called Cathy who led
a string quartet and played gigs up and down the North-East of England, but
then one day, after playing for a conference of neuro-surgeons in Alnwick
Castle, her health took a nosedive and the violin was put away for twenty
years.
—At which point her health got even worse, so she
thought to herself, this is ridiculous, and after major surgery and radiotherapy
she pulled herself together and re-invented herself as a fiddle player with Irish
band ‘Share the Darkness’.
These things can happen! I know, I was—and am—that
violinist/fiddle player.
Whilst being ill, I hadn’t wasted my time. I’d
worked at portraiture, so it was only natural to do some drawings of the band. Here
they are:
Phil Graham (Lead Vocals) |
Geoff Pickering (Mandolin, Guitar, Vocals) |
Gary Lee (bass) |
Mark 'Hammie' Hammond (vocals, Guitar) |
Cathy Edmunds (Fiddle) |
So where are the drawings of the string
quartet? Nowhere. I played quartets before I was into portraiture, so the
ladies of ‘Cameo Quartet’ were, alas, never immortalised in the same way.
Forthcoming ‘Share the Darkness’ gigs are listed on our
Facebook page here. Come and listen! I’m having terrific fun playing with them,
and the feedback we get is great; many people come time and time again to see
us. And unlike at the quartet gigs, you’re allowed—encouraged—to dance.
Photo: Dan Graham |
Friday, 16 December 2016
"The Promise of the Child" by Tom Toner
The Promise of the Child
by Tom Toner
Gollancz ISBN 978-1-473-21137-7
“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,”
was supposedly said by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola. The
minute I encountered Aaron at the start of this novel I thought ‘Jesuit’! Okay,
maybe that’s just me, but still – this is how Aaron operates. He manipulates.
But he also makes promises.
The Prologue opens in Prague,
1319, though most of the story is set unimaginably far in the future. Aaron
makes the first of his many bargains, this one with a princess who is to bring
him her son when he is seven years old. She has no choice. If she doesn’t hand
him over, he will die, so she loses him either way. So far, so historical novel.
The next section takes a huge leap forward in time. We meet Sotiris, but he’s
dreaming. He understands this is an illusion, he knows what is going on. St
Ignatius Loyola (yes, I’m thinking Jesuits again) also experienced a series of visions
which appeared as “a form in the air near him and this form gave him much
consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful ... He received much delight
and consolation from gazing upon this object ... but when the object vanished
he became disconsolate”. After Sotiris’ dream, we’re flung straight into classic
space opera territory with a fortress under attack, various species mentioned,
names that are clearly sci-fi. There is something called the ‘Shell’ that needs
protecting, but no clues yet as to what that is. At this point the reader who
has noticed there is a glossary at the back of the book will be breathing a
sigh of relief, as the names and races are adding up rapidly.
Now then, if you don’t customarily read fantasy or sci-fi, you
will probably give up at this point, fling the book down saying, too many races,
too many characters, too many weird names, too much unexplained, too much
chopping and changing between places and scenarios. If you persevere, however, you’ll
realise you’ve got to the end of the prologue, and Part One is about to begin. The
various strands will now start to be woven together, though it will be several
hundred pages before you’re sure how everything relates. You’re about to meet
Lycaste, and he’s going to be your guide through pretty much everything that
happens from now on, which is useful because he doesn’t understand it either so
we’re all in the same boat.
I’m not going to give away any more of the story, because
I’m trying to tell you what it’s about, not what happens, and that’s an entirely
different thing. For me, this first volume of the trilogy is about the
corruption of innocence, but other readers will see different themes. There are
echoes of Faust,
Kierkegaard, Jonathan Swift, even the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I’ll come back to
them. The whole thing is wildly weird until you start seeing it in its own
terms. It is undoubtedly a great piece of complex world-building, in the grand
tradition started by ‘Dune’, a book which knocked me sideways when I first read
it all those years ago. The book is similarly high concept, though its world is
entirely different. I’m glad it avoids the extremes of the modern steam-punk
trend, while still giving a healthy nod in that direction with its rusting and patched
up space ships. There’s nothing glossy and futuristic here, no clean lines; this
is baroque, this is mannerist, this is as far from the anodyne sparseness of
old-style futuristic sci-fi as you can get. It’s also a very long way from
being hard sci-fi, and aficionados of that genre are regrettably not going to
be gripped. They’ll dismiss it as soft fantasy, which is a shame. Sci-fi does
not necessarily need to be bristling with hard science to be effective.
If it’s not sci-fi exactly, should we file it under fantasy?
It certainly comes under that umbrella through its use of its own mythology, but
it’s not sword and sorcery fantasy by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m
pleased to report there are no bearded wizards in tall hats.
What we do have is intricate plotting. A large number of
promises and bargains are made and broken as the story moves from the tiniest
details of a young man on a beach, to a vast breakdown of society at a cosmic
level. The strength of the telling is in the fact that the fate of the young
man matters to the reader, more and more, and the ‘great events’ that are going
on may be vitally important and inform everything that happens to Lycaste, but
it’s the man himself whom we grow to care about, on a personal level.
Kierkegaard said, “...every historical era will have its own
Faust.” I’m not saying our era has an exact equivalent in this novel, but some
striking parallels are undoubtedly there, which I will leave you to discover.
Ditto the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its long and perilous journey to discover the
secret of eternal life. Gilgamesh learns that “Life, which you look for, you
will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share,
and life withheld in their own hands”. If people don’t die though – what then? Jonathan
Swift was the first writer in the modern era to fictionalise this concept. In
Gulliver’s travels, eternal life is a curse, as the extremely elderly become
more and more decrepit as the years go by. Very few film versions of the story
include this nightmarish section of the book. We prefer little people and
giants – and they happen to turn up in ‘The Promise of the Child’ too. In the
Epic of Gilgamesh, only two humans have ever been granted immortality, and when
seeking these immortals, Gilgamesh enters a paradise full of jewel-laden trees;
and ‘The Promise of the Child’ is also full of paradises, of Utopias – but
these are where the incredibly old go because they have become insane.
There are people in this book who are effectively immortal;
they are ‘perennial’, and while there are enough of them, the old contracts hold,
there is peace – but even perennials can be killed, and their numbers are
falling. Old age won’t get them, they are relatively safe from that, though
they will go quietly insane eventually. But anyone can have a fatal accident,
often in the most banal circumstances. Throughout the novel, vast wars are
being waged and old alliances are being destroyed. Aaron sees it all and knows precisely
what he wants from the outcome. He is getting close. Sotiris knows what he
wants too. As readers, we start rooting for Sotiris, but even he will use
people, sometimes cruelly if he has to. The critical point is this: Sotiris has
– or had – a sister. Aaron knows this, and uses the knowledge.
But we also know, and have known all along, that there’s
something downright odd about Aaron’s shadow.
Ultimately, perhaps what this book is asking is the
perennial question of what it means to be human – and its corollary: what does
it mean to be something else entirely?
Labels:
book review,
debut novel,
fantasy,
Gollancz,
novel,
Sci-fi,
science fiction,
The Promise of the Child,
Tom Toner
Wednesday, 23 November 2016
"Contracts" by P J Walters
Publisher: Waggledance Press; 1 edition (30 Oct. 2016)
ISBN-13: 978-0956966827
The blurb to this book tells the reader that everything in
this story is fake, even the name of the main character – it talks about being
on the run, being washed up, doing one last job. Blurbs are there to get you to
pick up the book, to think, yeah, that sounds like a decent thriller; to make
you put your hand in your pocket and dig out the cash. The cover is dark.
Bleak. You think you know what you’re getting. You think this is going to be straightforward
genre fiction.
But is it? Is this really just a standard crime thriller,
read it once, forget it? I don’t think so. I think it’s far, far subtler than
the blurb would lead you to believe. True, it’s full of ‘stuff’ happening. Scene
after scene winds up the tension ready for the explosive and shocking finale
which incidentally, is foreshadowed brilliantly halfway through novel. It’s not
so much what happens at that point, but what John, the narrator, says in
one of his occasional soliloquies that punctuate the action where he talks about the
lack of imagination he sees in the ‘easy-going criminals’ who make up his
circle. The emptiness of their thought processes means they cannot see how
their actions are going to have real, devastating and horrifying consequences
that are beyond their wildest imaginings – the point being that they are
incapable of having those imaginings in the first place. There are disasters,
tragedies, waiting to happen, and they’ll never see them coming until it’s too
late. They simply don’t think.
John, on the other hand is a thinker. He tries
to switch his thinking off, along with his emotions, but that high-functioning brain
of his is there in the background all the time, even when he’s numbing it with
drink or the excessive workouts with which he abuses his body in his search for
oblivion. His life is a downward spiral. He can see this. He has imagination.
But even he can’t see the ending.
PJ Walters has produced a hilariously self-deprecating
biography for the purposes of this publication. In it, he says: PJ Walters is
an academic and writer with the most lacklustre CV in modern British history.
He once won an Arts Council award for his writing, but it’s now worn off. The
best thing that can be said about him is that he owns a nice hat. Yes, the hat
is very nice. I’ve seen photos. But Walters is far more than an academic with a
hat. Much of ‘Contracts’ is filmic, much of it very noir, and it’s clear that
this is an area which Walters understands intimately. Each scene is perfectly
choreographed – it’s ready to be filmed. This is the book of the film that is
yet to be made. Walters directs it with exemplary skill, but he bypasses the
need for the expense of production – he projects the story directly into his
readers’ brains. The language he uses is an object lesson in invisible
excellence. You stop noticing you’re reading at all. That’s how it should be.
It’s not all darkness. There is some humour, though it’s
pretty bleak. I particularly enjoyed the excruciating journey John takes when
Euan is driving for a change, and he has his CD on auto-play, continually
repeating a mind-numbing thumping beat at unbearably high volume. We’ve all had
vehicles like that drive past us – it makes a change to be inside one, but this
is precisely what this book does so well. Walters takes us inside every aspect
of the underworld that his anti-hero inhabits.
The novel is called ‘Contracts’, and it’s a great title,
multi-layered, many possible interpretations, but it’s left to the reader to
decide precisely what they think it means, beyond the obvious.
So it’s a thriller, yes, and a very good one at that. But it
also crosses over into literary fiction because it never spoonfeeds the reader,
it never explains. This is not airport fiction. This is a thought provoking and
disturbing novel that will get under the reader’s skin in a way which many
throwaway thrillers can only dream about, if they have the imagination. But
that’s just the point. They don’t.
Labels:
Contracts,
crime fiction,
film,
literary fiction,
noir,
novel,
P J Walters,
review,
thriller
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