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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Straw Men – Michael Marshall (pages 9520-10015)

(May as well get this out there now too)

After enjoying Killer Move so much I started reading The Straw Men as the next but one book. M. had raved about it to me years ago but I’d always avoided it due to potential gore, violence etc but having read Killer Move I figured I could handle it. Unfortunately it was the book I was reading when I went home to see my dad after his heart attack (he’s still fine btw) and somehow that created bad associations for me so I abandoned it and didn’t start again until a couple of weeks ago.

The Straw Men follows three story lines initially. There’s the latest victim of a serial killer known as The Upright Man, a teenage girl he has abducted and, if true to form, will kill within a few days unless someone can stop him. There’s the story of Ward Hopkins ex-CIA and ex-various other similar careers who returns home to deal with his parents death in a car accident only to find that things are not quite as they had appeared. Finally there’s the shadowy, possibly mythical organisation known as ‘The Straw Men’. Who exactly they are, what their aims are and how they plan to fulfil them ends up connecting the other two story lines.

This is another excellent thriller from Michael Marshall. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Killer Move but it’s still very good. In particular the plot is very clever, the way things join up, the way Hopkins for instance figures out something about his parents by the state they’d left their home in (which to all the world looks normal) was smart and satisfying if you like that kind of thing. Also the plot rattles along as you’d expect but still with enough space for characterisation and relationship. There are some tough moments violence wise, a little worse than Killer Move in my opinion (though still not up to David Peace gruesome). One of the worst was a description of what unedited news footage of a terrorist attack would look like. I think that affected me because I know that such footage exists.

I feel like I have to justify why I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as Killer Move. It’s M.’s favourite Michael Marshall book (her favourite ever book is his Only Forward written as Michael Marshall Smith). Anyway I think the reasons I preferred the later book are as follows:

  • I was slightly spoiled – partly by some indirect remarks of M.’s which I correctly deduced plot points from, but mostly by reading the blurb on the back of the next book in this series. If you plan to read this book stay away from The Lonely Dead (or The Upright Man in the US) as it mentions the big reveal on the back cover.
  • I preferred the hero of Killer Move. Hopkins was fine. He was sympathetic, clever and very competent. But he was also a little bit of a stereotype, the ex-military/cop/security services guy investigating some dangerous mystery. Bill Moore, as I said at the time was an ordinary annoying man thrown into a gradually more complicated and dangerous situation. Also Bill had a wife he loved and Ward was alone (in that sense, he had a friend/colleague).
  • One of the characters disses Buffy in the first few pages – ok mostly kidding about this. (mostly!)

Having said all that if I’d read it first and not known anything about it maybe I’d have preferred it. Either way it’s still a great read.

8/10 – another great crime thriller from MM(S).

One oddity worth mentioning. I read the ebook of this (as I do with most new purchases now) and the story ends, there’s a section of ‘Acknowledgements’ (thanks to …) and then a section which in the table of contents is called “ebook extra”. Thinking this was like a dvd extra, deleted scene if you will, I thought I could see why it wasn’t in the original. This was a kind of coda explaining more clearly what had happened and how various characters ended up – most of which you could infer from what had gone before.

Except that it was in the original. It came immediately after what I had thought of as the final chapter. The acknowledgements came after that. weird.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Wild Abandon – Joe Dunthorne (pages 9216-9519)

With less than two weeks of 2011 left I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m behind on reviews. Which isn’t a problem in some ways (more time to read) but it will delay when I can set out the conditions for the 2012 challenge etc. Anyhow…

I chose Wild Abandon to read by a slightly circuitous route. I’d enjoyed the film Submarine which was from Joe Dunthorne’s earlier novel. Rather than read it – though I was tempted – I thought it might be more fun to read something where I didn’t know the story.

Wild Abandon is the story of a commune and the family that forms the core of it. Both the commune and the family seem to be falling apart. Don and Freya’s marriage is showing signs of strain whilst their daughter Kate just wants to be normal and pass her exams. Albert, the son is pretty well adjusted – apart from his conviction that the world is going to end.

Wild Abandon was an easy and enjoyable read. It’s funny without being laugh-out-loud hilarious – though there were moments when a joke landed particularly well. It’s more the subtle character humour of well-observed small interactions between characters. Particularly the way Don reacts to those around him. He’s somehow turned from an idealistic purposeful leader to a bit of a pompous prat. His relationship with the older commune member Patrick who he patronises mercilessly was very much in this vein.

If I have a criticism it’s that the plot was a little more complicated than it needed to be. There was perhaps one too many coming or going in the comings and goings of people who’d decided to leave, then stay or vice-versa with the commune.

It does have a very effective and noticeably cinematic final scene which I enjoyed.

7/10 – more a gentle freeing than a wild abandonment.

(Now I’m only one book behind on reviews but hopefully by the time I go to bed tonight I’ll be back up to two!)

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Girlfriend in a Coma – Douglas Coupland (pages 8935-9215)

Here’s a book I haven’t read for a long time, not long after it was published in fact (a year or two). That being the case I’m not going to attempt to keep spoilers out of the review of a book that’s nearing 15 years old. Fair warning.

Girlfriend in a Coma is I suppose a ‘millenial’ novel, whatever that is. OK I know what it is, or what I mean by it. It’s a novel that came out as 2000 loomed and it deals with fears about the state of the world and the possible end of it.

It begins with a couple of 17 year-olds, Richard and Karen, who’ve just made love for the first time and are about to go to a party. It’s 1979 and Karen is about to go to sleep for a very very long time. She is the ‘girlfriend’ of the title.

The book is in three sections. The first deals with Karen going into a coma and it then tracks Richard and her other close friends through their lives for the next 17 years. The second section deals with the period from when Karen wakes up to an apocalypse of sorts. It’s a very gentle, serene apocalypse where people simply fall asleep and fail to wake up until Karen and her friends are the only ones left living. The final section of the book follows this group for a few weeks about a year later seeing how they’ve adapted to the end of the world.

I remember liking this book a lot when I read it in 1999/2000ish. I liked seeing how Richard’s life developed, how he aged during the 17 years of Karen’s coma. I also felt like Karen when she awoke had some interesting insights into how people were – how they were so proud of how efficient technology was but she didn’t feel things were better and that everyone had no time for anything but work. I tired a little of the post-apocalyptic stuff because it was  a bit odd and I didn’t know what to make of it. But – this is how I recall it – it wasn’t overly long compared to the book as a whole.

Memory’s a funny thing. It’s been nearly as long since I read it since the gap between Karen going into her coma and awakening. Like Richard I looked back but wasn’t able to quite put myself into the mind of my former self.

Firstly I was surprised how short the first section was. I had remembered it as going on for most of the book but it’s a third if that. The bits of insight about growing older were there but they were literally the couple of clever sentences that I’d remembered anyway.

The second section also finished sooner than I remembered. The best parts of that were the dynamics of Karen awakening and the logistics of her getting to talk, walk and live again; the insights she had on seeing the new world appear as if, to her, overnight; and the setting up, playing out of the end of the world stuff.

Still when we reached the third section I couldn’t recall enough stuff to fill the 70-odd pages that remain, so this section did feel like it dragged more. I also realised that what I had taken as a basically realistic what-if type story that gets a bit weird towards the end, was always something of a parable and so some of the more sureal, fantastical elements fit into that.

I’m glad I re-read it, I didn’t enjoy it as much this time around but it was still worth the time.

7/10 – interesting and entertaining not to put you, or your girlfriend, into a coma.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea – Ursula K. Le Guin (pages 8490-8703)

Some time around the middle of the year I started reading collections of short stories as a break from lengthier books. I’ve still got a few on the go but this is one I both started and finished this year[1].

I’d never read any Le Guin before but was aware of her reputation and had thought about reading one of her more famous novels. However I decided this would be a better way to discover if I liked her style or not.

There’s a range of stories here, all except one in a SciFi or Fantasy vein. A couple are little more than jokes. There’s one that’s a parable about gender roles. The final three – including the one the collection takes its name from – all take place in a connected universe. This irked me slightly whilst reading the first one. I like things to be self-contained. When the world is already alien and you’re having to learn about new technology, races, cultures and planets it seems to annoy me when some of that is not relevant to the current story. However I do acknowledge that this is a quirk of mine and in other contexts I don’t expect stories stripped down to just the essential for the current narrative.

I enjoyed these stories although it seems my favourites were the ones, according to the introduction that Le Guin was least happy with herself, or saw as less substantial. In particular the parable one, The Rock that Changed Things, she felt was a little too on the nose and preachy. I also enjoyed the jokes. The others contained things that were a little strange. Sometimes strange and beautiful, sometimes just odd.

She’s clearly a gifted writer but I don’t think I’ll go back to her for a while.

6/10 – Probably most enjoyable if you’re already a fan.

[1]Which leads to a dilemma about whether I ‘count’ the others if I finish them next year.
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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (pages 7365 – 7636)

There’s a phenomenon that occurs when someone experiences for the first time an incredibly influential piece of culture having already consumed many many examples of things that were influenced by it – you can be a little underwhelmed and feel that it appears derivative when in fact it’s the inspiration of things that seem more original. My experience of The Big Sleep was a little like that. Worse I have second hand parody versions in another medium playing in my head as I read. What I’m recognising as similar is probably the dialogue from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Play it Again Sam or even Who Killed Roger Rabbit. I don’t think I can imagine never having heard all those echoes but I’ll try to not judge the book on them in this review.

The Big Sleep is a crime novel in which a private detective Phillip Marlowe is employed by a dying rich old man to look into the apparent blackmail of one of his two adult daughters. The case starts off seeming simple but a couple of dead bodies later and things become more complicated. How much you like this book will probably depend on how much you like Marlowe. Fortunately I found him tougher but sympathetic, more so than perhaps the snippets pf movie portrayals might have led me to believe. I think that’s partly because you have that inner monologue and because he’s cheeky and funny and ultimately humane. How can you not love someone who can come out with this, for instance?

…there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

I did enjoy this book although the plot got a little too convoluted for my failing short-term memory at one point but fortunately it was just a few pages after that that Chandler put in a big exposition scene that explained everything so far. Unfortunately one of the parodies I’ve mentioned above contains a scene with enough superficial similarity to this story that I guessed the ending, however that was not a major problem and I might well have guessed it any way. It was relatively short (I’m currently reading a Stephen King!) but it packed a lot into that and didn’t outstay its welcome. I read it in an edition that includes two other Marlowe novels – The Long Goodbye and Farewell My Lovely and I will probably read them at some point.

7/10 – enjoy the original and try to ignore the many copies.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Falling Sideways – Tom Holt (pages 6590-6960)

Frogs eh? Frogs are hilarious aren’t they? I mean you’re probably giggling already because I’ve written the word ‘frogs’ in the first two (now three!) sentences. Plus look! there’s one in the picture.

No?

OK. Let’s start again and I’ll try to restrain the sarcasm.

After enjoying Expecting Someone Taller again I thought about the possibility of reading another Tom Holt. As I said I read Taller back when it came out and the next two after that. I didn’t enjoy those as much and decided he was not for me and stuck with Pratchett. I was vaguely aware that he was still steadily producing books but was a little aghast to discover quite how many – 30 in fact. So I was spoilt for choice.

Browsing through Goodreads and Amazon at the reviews and descriptions I came across Falling Sideways from 2002 which seemed quirky and obviously had a romantic element which is probably the main thing I enjoyed about Taller. So frog on the cover notwithstanding I took a chance.

(btw in case you’re wondering I didn’t decide to read two Tom Holts in a row. After Taller I started another book, which I stalled on so I switched to Falling Sideways as a lighter read. I will go back to that book after I finish the book I started after Falling.)

It’s funny that I started reading this book during what should have been Nanowrimo (I mean it still is but not for me, not any more) because it reads like a bad cliche of what a Nano novel is like – like someone sat down and just wrote and every time they ran out of ideas or hit a plot wall they just wrote themselves out of it by inventing something strange and bizarre no matter how inconsistent or convoluted.

Of course it can’t have been a Nano novel because a) I don’t think it was going in 2002 (if it was it wasn’t an internet phenomenon yet) and b) Holt was a published author with a dozen and a half books under his belt already. So maybe he had a deadline, or maybe he just wanted to try freewheeling or maybe he really really thought it was a different and better way to go. (For all I know this is typical of his later books and his fans love it).

I’m getting ahead of myself, what’s it about?

David Perkins is a single, early 30s computer nerd who lives alone and works from home. And he is head over heels in unrequited love with a beautiful woman. The only problem is she died 400 years ago and he’s actually in love with a painting. However, never fear because after purchasing a lock of her hair for a ridiculous sum at an auction he pays a visit to “Honest John’s House of Clones”… and a madcap adventure ensues involving clones, gods, intergalactic space travel and frogs, lots of frogs.

The big problem with Falling Sideways is that the basic structure is this – a little bit of setup, some running around with people being chased and fearing for their life/safety/freedom then a pause with a long expository conversation explaining how everything you know so far fits together THEN repeat but when you get to the next exposition reveal how most of the earlier explanation wasn’t what you thought it was because it was a) not real and b) an attempt to manipulate the characters into a particular position or frame of mind (as in “you had to think you were on a spaceship and in danger of alien vivisection so that you’d do so-and-so”). Once or twice this would be fine. When this has happened four or five times and you’re only 2/3rds of the way through the book you realise that this is the book’s thing, its theme or motif if I were being charitable.

Normally when I start to feel I’m losing the plot with a book I worry because I feel it’s up to me to keep up. I’ll check back to earlier sections and try to figure it out. Here I knew it was all just part of the ride and in any case trying to understand the current situation was pointless when some major part of it would turn out to have been unreal or not what it appeared to be.

So yes it had plausibility issues down in the details of the story – the idea that a clone would inherit the memories of its progenitor for example – but you know me, these sorts of things don’t usually worry me, though a little techno-babble explanation to cover it would have been nice. However it’s at the grand scale that it lost me. I didn’t really care enough about the characters – didn’t really get a chance to know them that well – and there were amusing lines but I didn’t find most of the running around sections funny. It was an easy read and so it added to my page count relatively painlessly, that’s a plus I guess.

Actually I will just mention one plausibility detail thing. David’s attitude and behaviour towards computers is wrong. I speak as a real-life Tech Support person of many years standing. David comes across as a non-technical computer user’s view of a computer expert. Yes we are just as frustrated and annoyed by these things when they go wrong, but what looks like random thrashing around and changing things til it works actually isn’t. We narrow down the problem – not printing? is the cable plugged in? is it all applications or just this one that won’t print? has it never actually worked or did it only start happening after you installed that new toolbar? – so even if we can’t tell you precisely why it went wrong every time we know why we did what we did at each stage.

It’s like on House or one of those other Doctor shows – you look at the evidence, come up with a theory and treat based on that, if it doesn’t work you take the outcome as further evidence, run tests maybe and make a new theory. Of course being computers and not human bodies it’s usually less messy. But the principle is very similar. In particular things like if the patient has a fever then you know treatments that will reduce a fever even if you don’t know yet what caused it.

OK, sorry, that rant got away from me a bit. To be fair David’s no worse than a lot of computer people portrayals in fiction, and better than a lot. Still it’s a sign of how disengaged I was that I was able to worry about this stuff.

5/10 – a fun read IF you find frogs inherently funny.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Expecting Someone Taller – Tom Holt (pages 6366- 6589)

I was ill this week, had a cold, which involved spending the best part of two days in bed. As such I didn’t do much other than sleep, eat and read. Also I wanted to re-read something I knew I’d enjoy.

So, Expecting Someone Taller, is comfort food reading for me.

I first read it when it came out which was whilst I was a student. I’ve re-read it a few times since, once in the last few years (but before the blogging of every book modern obsession). I have to say that the first time I loved it, at mostly because of the ending. Subsequent reads I enjoyed it but certain flaws jumped out at me. It’s thoroughly in the category of guilty pleasure.

Expecting Someone Taller is the story of Malcolm Fisher who hits a badger with his car one evening. As he watches it die he discovers that it’s not just a badge but a shape-shifting giant. The giant gives Malcolm a helmet that allows him to become any person he wishes and a very special Ring. This sets off a series of events where a catalog of mythical characters, apparently real, are after Malcolm and more especially the Ring.

This is very much a comic fantasy in the Terry Pratchett mould. It does for Wagner’s Ring Cycle what Discworld does for fantasy in general.

It’s basically a rom-com with the fantasy elements thrown in. Malcolm, a nobody who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend, is suddenly in possession of the most powerful magical item of all. How will he cope and will it help or hinder his (theoretical) love-life?

I’m not sure I ever found this laugh-out-loud funny but it’s definitely amusing and light and warm-hearted. The main character is likeable, most of the time. As a younger man I enjoyed the rom- part of it and the associated happy ending. I guess I still do though with a slightly more cynical eye – except when I’m ill in bed and wanting a comforting view of the world.

8/10 – mythical nonsense and jolly good fun.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Magicians – Lev Grossman (pages 5965-6365)

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a tricky book to review, at least in as much as it’s hard to know how much to reveal. One of the things that I have most to say on is something that is based on a turn of events about 2/3rds of the way through. On the other hand it’s mentioned (briefly) on the back cover.

OK so if you consider back cover blurb spoiler then don’t continue reading this review. Otherwise…

The Magicians has been called a grown-up Harry Potter and you can see why – the first section of the book concerns the hero, Quentin Coldwater, being selected for and training at a magical school, Brakebills. However he’s college age not pre-pubescent and the book doesn’t shy away from descriptions of sex, and drug-taking which you wouldn’t find in even the later HP books. Also, whilst graduating from Brakebills takes 5 years (a little less for Quentin as he gets put forward a year) we’re taken through it all in this book rather than the book-per-year of the Potter novels.

Having said that it being a magical school with exams, practical lessons and even a magical sport (Welters) it’s hard not to compare with HP. This is done knowingly and when one of the characters drunkenly refers to Welters as Quidditch and talks about Owl mail you know Grossman’s not unaware of the parallels.

So I think the HP comparisons are superficial and come almost automatically from having the very idea of a school for magic. Magic in this book by the way is another difference from the Potterverse. Performing a spell is a matter of mastering complicated and precise hand movements coupled with particular incantations (in one of several languages) and possibly strange ingredients. It’s also something where the exact manner of casting depends on the conditions – pointing your wand and shouting ‘Expelliamus’ might work in New York on a still day on a Tuesday in June but not on a windy Friday in London in December for example. So whilst it’s not a science, it’s a very finicky art-form that requires lots of practice, hard work and memorising of exceptions.

But the main difference is that because the characters are already more mature it deals with a more psychologically realistic view of the world. What it might feel like to be in this scenario. Not as an exciting schoolboy adventure but as something you’re doing because you can’t really find meaning in normal life. Well that’s true for Quentin any how. The other characters have different motivations and aspirations and distractions.

One of the ways in which Quentin’s inner life is demonstrated is through the Fillory books. These are the series of magical stories that he read as a child about a land called Fillory that a family of English children go to and have various adventures in. Whilst in the world of The Magicians nearly everyone reads the Fillory novels as children, Quentin never grew out of them and will re-read them as a kind of comfort food equivalent.

And it turns out Fillory is real and Quentin and his friends go there.

And it’s this section of the book that gave me most pause for thought. Because Fillory is quite obviously and deliberately a parallel to Narnia and so the time spent there can be read as either a parody, or a fairly scathing critique of those books. I guess it was wondering whether Grossman wanted me to take some kind of a message away about this that gave me some trouble.

In the end what I decided was that he was just taking a kind of Narnia-like world seriously and how that would play out with his characters and his rules about magic and the story he wanted to tell. So I stopped worrying about whether the books I loved as a child were being made fun of[*] and enjoyed the book.

There’s a couple of other sections to the book and an interesting ending that I won’t go into. What I will say is that again I went back and forth between two opinions – that the book was uneven in tone and that was a weakness or that yes it was but because different tones were appropriate to the different sections.

I’ve read other reviews which found Quentin himself too downbeat or melancholic a character. Personally I empathised with his struggles, with life, magic and relationships and it was him (and the other characters) that kept me interested through some of the ups and downs.

Finally all I will say because it’s probably not clear is that I did enjoy this book and will read the sequel (eventually).

8/10 – It’s Magic Harry but not as we know it!

[*]which is not to say I have a rosy-eyed view of those books now. I have a number of problems with them from varying degrees of subtle racism to “The Problem of Susan”. However I still, on balance, enjoy them.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Anya’s Ghost – Vera Brosgol (pages 5910-5964)

If you recall I’m not really supposed to go on to a new book when I haven’t written up the previous two. Well I’ve completed three since the last 6000 pages update, and NaNoWriMo’s going ot be taking a lot of my time, so in order not to get too far behind I’m catching up:

Anya’s Ghost is another graphic novel, this time an actual graphic novel i.e. written and conceived as a single story rather than issues of a comic book. It’s relatively short (though remember I use the metric 4 comic pages = 1 regular page). I bought this book because it popped up in my Amazon recommendations, the ‘see inside’ preview looked interesting and it has a Neil Gaiman quote on the cover.

I say all this only to justify myself and mitigate my review because I’m not really the target audience for this.

Anya is a high school girl in an American private school. She comes from a Russian immigrant family and is painfully aware of her differences and wants to fit in. She also has the usual teenage hopes and dreams such as whether the cute boy in her class likes her.

Then one day she meets a ghost, a girl of a similar age who died nearly 90 years ago. She befriends the ghost and together they navigate some of the trials of high school. Only maybe her new best friend is not quite all she seems…

As I said above, I am really not the target for this book. So when I say that whilst I thought it was well-drawn and competently told the story was a little too straightforward and predictable, and the issues it dealt with (self-acceptance, peer pressure etc) a little cliche, then I am aware that I’m being unfair. On its own terms and for the market it’s aimed at it works well. For me it was enjoyable but just ok.

6/10 A fun halloween read for a younger person than I.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Y: The Last Man – Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra (pages 5535-5909)


Y: The Last Man is a comic book series. Note it’s not a graphic novel IMHO because although you can buy it in different collected forms it was written as a series of 60 comics over about 6 years and it definitely follows a episodic serial narrative.

It’s probably worth mentioning something about the comic book form here. It’s something I only really came to as an adult – yes I read the Beano and 2000AD but not beyond about 13-14 and both of those were weekly comics. I never had the experience of buying monthly comics under what I think of as the US model. Which are aimed more at adolescents and which come out less frequently. They feature on-going stories but also have ‘arcs’ that typically last 4-6 issues. So the “full” story of Y: The Last Man takes 60 issues and 6 years to play out but is comprised of maybe 10-12 story arcs within that. This feels like an odd, slow way to consume a story to me but I guess real comic book fans have several series on the go at once.

There’s another oddity (to me) which is the timing. It takes maybe 5-10mins to read an issue. So if like me you sit down after the fact and read them in long 1-2 hour stretches like you would a novel, then you get a lot of story, a lot of setup-conflict-resolution or whatever in that time. It’s also true that Although it may take 10mins to read there’s often a lot of visual information on the page that’s adding to the story so it sometimes feels like a much more ‘dense’ experience.

I guess for me it’s most similar to watching serialised TV like Buffy – on-going seasonal arc but with shorter episode–length stories. You get the same sense for example of building up to an ‘act break’ which on TV is an ad break and in comics the end of an issue. However the comic book form feels so much more condensed that these occur relatively more frequently.

Anyway, with that in mind, how was Y: The Last Man?

It’s the story of a man, Yorick, who appears to be the last male human left alive on earth after a mysterious plague wiped out all the other men. I’ve explained the premise to people and the usual reaction is “so it’s basically porn, then?”. Well it’s not, but fair comment I suppose. Actually, possibly in reaction to this there’s almost no sex in the first third of the story. This at first is ostensibly because Yorick is on his way to find his girlfriend who was in Australia just before the plague hit. A little later we find out he has “issues” relating to sex which may explain why he’s not taking advantage of his unique position.

In the mean time we get a sort of standard post-apocalyptic survival tale with a twist. Society hasn’t completely broken down but it has significantly changed. Because certain professions have a very high level of men in them (e.g. airline pilots) this has an effect in how the post-plague world operates. Even without a large gender disparity, all the male car drivers suddenly dying (the plague hits quickly and takes effect in minutes) makes a mess of the roads in a way that takes months to sort out.

The book tries to explore what a female only world would look like. What happens in politics, art, commerce, religion, warfare, law enforcement – all these are touched on. It’s quite interesting although at time it borders on preachy/exposition-dumpy to do this. It also tries to have its feminist cake and eat it. Whilst its heart appears to be in the right place it can’t quite avoid the wider comic book traditions of female depiction (ridiculously attractive with gravity-defying boobs). To be fair different artists[1] vary in this respect and the main comic is usually more balanced than the covers.

It’s not just the physical characteristics of the women either. I don’t think it’s entirely unproblematic that we get lots of violence in this book. It’s a very violent book and there is a certain section of the population that just enjoys seeing women laying into one another, whether with weapons or hand-to-hand. On the one hand in a world of only women, women are inevitably taking up all the positions of the moral compass, on the other it can feel at times fetishistic. Overall my feeling was: heart in the right place, occasional uneasiness in specific depictions.

That aside I will say that I enjoyed it. The story lines develop in interesting and unexpected ways. The dialogue had a wit and knowingness that reminded me of Buffy. The ending was not quite what I might have hoped for but not entirely unsatisfying. (I think I read that some were very disappointed. I wonder if I’d have felt more strongly about it after following the characters for 6 years.)

8/10 – Y? Y not? (sorry!)

[1]another comic-book-ism – when different directors shoot a particular episode of the TV show they rarely change the complete look of the show. You almost certainly won’t fail to recognise particular characters because of it.