2008 books

65) Nancy Kress, Dogs, 2008
A straightforward thriller about a canine plague that arrives in Maryland from Africa, but with aspects that alert the FBI's suspicions about this being a work of domestic terrorism. Dogs hits the ground running with some rather good, user-friendly characterisation, even if perhaps the actual roles of those characters are delineated along fairly standard lines. What Kress does do particularly well is to show how a bigger and more irrational danger than infected dogs are the people with an agenda who are caught up in the situation, whether they be dog lovers or haters. It's a decent page-turner, undoubtedly, but I have two minor complaints: 1) I do wish authors (note the plural) would first run it past someone who actually knows when they put their characters on international flights, and 2) Dogs would have been rendered considerably more cliché-free without several unnecessary variations of "somewhere in the distance, a dog barked", but when it's a book actually about dogs it probably ought to be expected and the cliché forgiven. Thanks for the free book, Nancy, I enjoyed it.

2008 books

66) John Clute, The Disinheriting Party, 1973

Gregory Smythe, powerful shipowning tycoon, manipulates and represses his children – the fruits of various adulterous liaisons – hating them obsessively in his insane need to remain young. All his offspring bear in some form or other the stigmata of Smythe's refusal of humanness; and it is mainly through the bizarre fantasies of one of them, the monstrous albino Jocelyn Zuken, that the plot is revealed, in an atmosphere of incest and androgyny and foreboding...

This is a novel that understandably defeats many people, with the rejoinder that it is just too remote in its storytelling method to make much, if any, coherent sense on an everyday level. Clute has said elsewhere that The Disinheriting Party is partially a novel about impotence, which is in turn only a partially useful lens through which to view it: it explains a little, though a large remainder still lies obscure beneath layers of complex and non-sequential dialogue, points of reference revealed then just as quickly hidden, interactions laden with intent that may or may not find explanation elsewhere in the story, forward or back. In Clute's approach characterisation was not the point and clearly neither was plot, which then makes me look for evidence of some story: yes, there's story here, though it's layered, fractured and opaque to any easy access. After a fairly straightforward beginning, in which ciphered characters interact in the most remote way even while in each other's presence, Clute then puts up obstacles – but not necessarily barriers – to further understanding which will give any reader problems when trying to read this novel as a story. The book's blurb (part of which is above) is actually the only useful fixed point of reference in providing awareness as to what's going on, because beyond what it tells us the novel is about Clute has written that rare thing, a book about which it is impossible to provide any spoilers, and the blurb also must explain that several of the novel's characters are in fact aspects of one person – something that would be very hard indeed to figure out without that vital giveaway clue. As a whole, the novel feels like a highly idiosyncratic, almost baroque New Wave experiment, without the SF element but with some other necessary pointers provided. Perhaps John has already been pinned down and asked to explain in print just what was going through his head (and maybe in what order) when it all came tumbling out, and if so I would very much like to read that, but I suspect without extra clues on how to tackle this singular book it will probably remain a self-contained enigma to all but the most insightful deconstructors of untempered prose. Colour me baffled, but I am pleased to have actually read this.