The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Power seems to say more about gender relations than it actually does. The point it seems to make goes very little further than “the gender with the physical strength advantage will also have the advantage in society in general and thusly treat the other gender(s) like utter crap”. Its story simply does the whole “persecution flip” thing and makes women the dominant gender but seems to make no further commentary about this or the dynamic between man and woman. It just shows sexism and changes the target. At times it feels no better than a deranged redditor hurling his way onto any online discussion regarding essentially anything and shrieking “BUT WHAT IF YOU REVERSED THE GENDERS THEN IT WOULDN’T BE OKAY?!?” before collapsing into some vaguely sexist rant that involves the word “SJW” half a million times. 

In its favour, The Power simply does not have time for bullshit, as quite a lot of other books that are trying to “say something” end up doing. It’s clearly written with a story in mind first, and that for the most part it succeeds in. It’s entirely possible to avoid the hackneyed and puddle-deep commentary on gender relations and simply enjoy it for what it is. There are no long pretentious scenes of “symbolism”, no elongated discussions that serve no purpose except to reinforce the book’s themes that are immensely obvious to anyone with half a braincell, no long drawn-out scenes were absolutely nothing happens. Roxy’s story is a well-constructed gangster flick, complete with a genuinely unexpected betrayal need the end. The worldbuilding is, for the most part, consistently good. The last of the book’s chapters is fantastic, a great culmination of everything the book had worked up until that point that ends with a brilliant climax. A rape scene near the end remains one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve read in years.

But even as a story, The Power still has its flaws. Staggering the book out over a decade utterly ruins any momentum. Margot just abruptly seems to leave the narrative near the end. Despite all the constant allegations of Jos’s power being “different”, I was still utterly confused as to what the difference was actually meant to be.

For all the Power’s faults, I ultimately enjoyed reading it.

7/10

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The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

The Loney is the best part of The Loney. A bleak stretch of beach between the mainland and an island, the atmosphere Hurley creates is incredibly vivid and haunting. I can think of no place more desolate to spend your Easter Holidays. The unnamed protagonist and his mute brother Hanny’s attempts to entertain themselves by pretending to be World War Two soldiers and running about aimlessly on the tide is enough for anyone to wish for even Pontin’s.

However, for all the bleak and effective imagery, The Loney suffers primarily in terms of structure and theme. It reads almost like two novels mashed together- much like American Gods last week. To The Loney’s credit, the utter disjunction only becomes apparent in retrospective, and both plots are fairly decent novels on their own anyway.

The first novel is about the death of faith, of the all-consuming desolation that comes with the knowledge that we are alone, that there is no God, that we are born and live and die all without meaning.

The second is about magic powers.

Okay, it’s not as if Harry Potter appears from beneath the waves, does a massive shit on the floor, and promptly vanishes it; the supernatural we see is both perfectly shrouded in mystery and suitably dark for the tone. But the fact remains it completely defeats the purpose of having “magic is dead” as a theme if magic is an explicit plot point. Indeed, towards the end Father Bernard essentially sits down and tries to give the vaguest of justifications as to how the two themes can be reconciled. During which, the priest looks at absolute solid evidence that someone has literally cured their life-long disability and declares that “God didn’t do it,” and everybody who believes so is deluding themselves. Any point on the nature of the religious is lost, because there legitimately aren’t any rational explanations to this and there’s no possible way Father Bernard knew what really happened.

Father Bernard in general seems to function as both the priest and as the reasonable mentor figure who always knows what’s right, which is fairly problematic when you remember “God isn’t real” is perhaps the primary theme of the book. He hardly even bothers with the pretence he believes in God anymore, which might had been an interesting angle to explore his character if anyone except the protagonist’s mother cared at all. Her role is simply the one note crazy religious person.

Everyone else feels vaguely distinct but lacks any real depth. The Belderboss couple have several deep conversations with Father Bernard about the previous priest, the brother of Mr. Belderboss, who died recently, which skirt around being interesting but ultimately go nowhere. Miss Bunce and David are somehow even more pointless, the former there only as a cheap source of conflict with the mother and the latter…I honestly can’t fathom why he’s here, to be honest. The father character is essentially just an non-entity, and there were several times when I honestly wondered if “Father” was actually referring to the priest at times.

The antagonists get the worst of this. Towards the end they terrorise Hanny and the narrator for seemingly no reason, only for them to inexplicably help them while still acting as menacingly as possible.Clement Parry, the odd farmer who eventually turned out to have depths I didn’t expect for such a minor character, is perhaps the only secondary player whose inclusion felt justified.

The atmosphere Hurley creates in The Loney is genuinely fantastic, but almost every other element of the story lets it down. 

Rating: 5/10

Next Week: The Power by Naomi Alderman 

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Shadow.

Might as well end the review there. Because every single problem with American Gods is born from its protagonist.

Shadow has no motivation. Most of the novel is simply him milling aimlessly about a random village doing nothing. Literally nothing. He has no goal, no objective, no momentum.

His personality traits consist of “coin tricks” and…uh…having no discernible personality traits?

When American Gods isn’t wrist-slittingly bad, it’s actually good. This, paradoxically, makes me detest Shadow- and by extension the book- even more, simply because it’s the equivalent of trying to watch a movie past the folds of a fat bloke on the row in front of you. Everything not related to Shadow has a simple yet brilliant premise, all of which we’re hardly shown because Shadow hurls his ugly gurn across the pages every time the book veers anywhere close to interesting.

Its story is brilliantly simple: a war between the old gods and the new. Odin and Anubis and Anansi team up against the Internet, Media, and…uh, actually I don’t think we get much more than that. Yes, despite the immense possibilities Gaiman could have developed, most of the Gods lack any real substance to their characters; Odin, Anansi, Easter and Czernobog (and perhaps Anubis and Ibis) are the only Gods who feel even marginally interesting, a fact dampened even further with the climax essentially confirming that only two of these have any real relevance to the so-called plot. Sure, there’s no lack of vaguely interesting personality traits- Easter essentially cheating the system and getting power from people celebrating the totally unconnected holiday is an interesting concept- but they all have about as much depth as a puddle of congealed piss.

Not content with one, American Gods hurls three plot twists at us, all at once; the one regarding Shadow’s parentage is so obvious you’ve probably figured it out from the title alone, the second attempts to give the flaccid “Shadow dicking around a random village” subplot the slightest semblance of a point and is literally the only thing in the entire arc worth even an iota of your time, and the third is genuinely good. This is undone by the subsequent climax consisting of the protagonist just politely asking everybody to stop fighting. Every time American Gods builds up the slightest amount of narrative momentum, it hurls it away so we can focus more on the world’s most boring man.

The worst sin of American Gods is that is seems to have genuine contempt for its readers’ time. The long, boring scenes of Shadow in the town not only go nowhere, but Gaiman does not even bother with the pretense that it will, eventually, go somewhere. There simply is not a plot for vast swathes of pages.

American Gods is, at its core, a mediocre novel surgically grafted onto a terrible one. Had a harsh editor sat down with Gaiman and forced him at gunpoint to remove the tumorous growth of the small town subplot, American Gods may very well have stumbled into “all right” territory. Its story is still filled with shallow characters, lazy contrivances, and a protagonist with so little agency that a rock falling down a mountain displays more initiative, but at the very least what remains is vaguely formed into a functioning narrative. In its finished form, American Gods cannot even claim that.

Oh, and any remaining vestige of goodwill is instantly obliterated the moment the reader comes across the incredibly pretentious “reading group discussion questions”, in which Shadow is proclaimed as a “deep and engaging character”. I honestly think I knocked the rating down from a two to a one solely because of that.

Overall rating: 1/10

Next Week: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley 

The Dry by Jane Harper

The message of The Dry is a simple one, reinforced by virtually every single character interaction within: small towns in the Australian Outback are shit. Whether it's endless harassment from mentalist neighbors, the utter lack of any financial support, there being absolutely nothing to do, or the risk that someone will murder you and your entire family and frame it as a murder-suicide.

The Dry's portrayal of small-town Australia as some dysfunctional tenth level of Hell is reinforced with the protagonist,  Aaron Falk, having moved from the town as a child after being wildly suspected of murdering a friend, now returning for the funeral of the freshly killed and potentially familicidal Luke Hadler. Unfortunately, despite this solid premise for both an interesting backstory and chance to examine the contrast between the city and the outback, the title could just as easily describe Aaron as the setting; his motivation for investigating the crime is, rather than "clear the name of his childhood friend", a simple "somebody asks him to".

A triple murder (or potential murder-suicide) of the Hadler family is the investigation in question, and Aaron teams up with local cop Greg Raco to see if Luke is just as much as a victim as his wife and child.

The supporting cast are, for the most part, fairly two-dimensional, and they're all familiar faces for anyone invested in the whodunit genre: the sidekick (who is always either the least or most interesting character, and here it's, unfortunately, the former), the unrepentant dickhead who has all the evidence point his way and is NEVER the actual murderer, (except here there's inexplicably two of them), the witness who lies to hide a minor crime of his own... that said, they're all executed fairly well, and I did find myself genuinely hating the designated asshole characters, and finding the bland sidekick somewhat endearing. The setting, rather, is perhaps the best

To say the best element of a book is its pacing sounds like I'm damning it by faint praise, yet I can honestly say that it's probably the main reason I enjoyed the Dry as much as I did. Few, if any, scenes have dead weight in them; it keeps its momentum up throughout and never feels the need to bore us with tedious scenes of absolutely no plot advancement.

The plot and subsequent reveal of the killer is mostly satisfying, with the sole exception of a clunky and contrived fire that exists solely to contradict the testimony of the aforementioned lying witness. It becomes especially and almost infuriatingly pointless when, later on, Aaron discovers that he's lying from an entirely separate source in a manner that's infinitely less awkward. There's also a moment where the killer tells Aaron evidence that implicates him for absolutely no reason. Other than that, any coincidences are such weaved into the story you won't notice them until you think back on it days after you've finished reading.

Overall, The Dry is a solidly enjoyable whodunit that never wastes a moment of the reader's time, with an excellent setting and atmosphere. Its numerous flaws are forgivable simply because it's so easy and fun to read you'll have finished it before you can twig onto them.

Rating: 8/10
Next week: American Gods by Neil Gaiman