Ultima by Stephen Baxter

First published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Roc on August 4, 2015

Ultima sounds like a sports drink but it is actually the sequel to Stephen Baxter's Proxima. You should read Proxima before reading Ultima if you want to understand all of the novel's references to past events, but enough of those are summarized that Ultima can be read as a stand-alone novel.

Ultima is a novel of big ideas -- or, more precisely, it is an exploration of one big idea. It won't appeal to science fiction fans who think that sf should always include Wookiees or Vulcans. It won't appeal to fans who crave action. It might not appeal to sf fans who think that an "idea" novel should consist of ideas piled on top of ideas (the kind of novel that usually treats plot and characterization as unimportant).

I give Baxter credit for creating the Dreamers, a Machiavellian alien race that differs from other science fiction aliens in imaginative ways. Saying more about them would spoil the fun. I will say, however, that while the enigmatic Dreamers are at the novel's core, the novel focuses upon the consequences of the Dreamers' actions rather than the Dreamers themselves.

Proxima introduced an old idea, portals (or "hatches" in this incarnation) that take people to different places in the universe, or different universes, or different times. Hatches are coupled with transitional events that change the nature of the universes that key characters inhabit. In one alternate history/universe/timeline, there are three space-faring Terran powers: the Romans, the Xin (Chinese), and the Brikanti (Brits allied with Scandinavians). The civilizations have mastered a crude form of interstellar travel (combining power sources known as kernels left by the Hatch builders with "point and shoot" navigation) despite their failure to develop computers.

War is brewing and one of the ships has undertaken the mission of saving Earthshine, an AI that serves as a repository of information designed to allow human civilization to survive, or to rebuild it if necessary. Earthshine has its own agenda. It is, in its own way, as Machiavellian as the Dreamers. Earthshine "hatches" a plan of itsown that bears fruit in another universe/alternate history, one in which Incas dominate. That plan puts Earthshine, another AI, and several human characters in a position to understand what the Dreamers have been up to and what purpose all the Hatches serve. It is, as I said, a pretty cool idea.

The rest of the story fills up space with (alternate) historical and political developments and character building. I didn't think any of that was bad or boring (although that might be the reaction of readers who lack interest in history and politics), but I did think those parts of the book could have been profitably shortened. To the extent that Ultima is read as a mystery novel -- with Earthshine serving as the detective who unravels the mystery of the Dreamers -- everything else comes across as padding that keeps the story from delivering the suspense that a mystery should have. On the other hand, I liked the characters and I enjoyed Baxter's speculation about what alternative histories might be like, so I had no difficulty hanging in until the end. Readers who suffer from ADD or wookiee-mania might have a different experience.

The best part of this novel of the future takes place in the far far far distant future. It is wonderfully descriptive and even a little enthralling. Even if it takes quite a long time for the reader to get there, the destination is worth the effort of the journey.

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Taking Pity by David Mark

Published by Blue Rider Press on July 7, 2015

As series fans know, DS Aector McAvoy has been through hell. McAvoy is living apart from his wife and daughter to assure their protection from the criminal gang known as the Headhunters, which is fighting a turf war in Hull. McAvoy should be on sick leave, perhaps for the rest of his life, but politicians with clout want him (with the able assistance of his boss, DSI Trish Pharaoh) to investigate the murders of four family members that occurred fifty years earlier. The alleged murderer -- Peter "Daft Pete" Coles -- is finally being released from the mental health institution to which he was committed and the Home Office wants to make sure the case was investigated properly and the right man accused. Or (more likely) they want McAvoy to say that too much time has gone by to secure a conviction so that the case can quietly disappear.

Daft Pete, found near the bodies cradling a shotgun and muttering something about how he didn't mean it, is the obvious suspect. Of course, the reader knows that makes him the least likely culprit.

Meanwhile, DCI Colin Ray takes a break from drinking his way through his own misery to help another series regular, DC Helen Tremberg, who is recovering from injuries sustained when McAvoy's house was bombed in an earlier novel. Like McAvoy and apparently everyone in Hull, Tremberg is having her own problems with the Headhunters. She can't reveal that problem to Ray but she would like to see him put the criminal organization out of business.

Taking Pity is highly dependent on events that occurred in earlier novels. It can be read as a stand-alone, but some of the characters' actions and interactions might be puzzling to readers who are unfamiliar with the first three books in the series. Taking Pity only partially resolves plot threads that have been building throughout the series, leaving room for additional character development in novels to come.

Characters are the strength of these novels but David Mark is no slouch at plotting. The story is complex, believable, and reasonably surprising. This one is darker than the first three and McAvoy is less the center of attention, but Mark's ability to juggle the different plot threads and to bring them to a satisfying conclusion is impressive. British crime novels are always a pleasant departure from American thrillers, largely because so many American authors spend more time describing guns than characters. This is turning into one of my favorite series.

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The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi

Published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Scribner on March 10, 2015

Witty observations about human nature are Hanif Kureishi's specialty. In The Last Word, he turns his attention to the dying craft of writing literature at a time when there are "more writers than readers. ... The only books people read were diet books, cookbooks, or exercise books. People didn't want to improve the world, they only wanted better bodies." There isn't much of a story in The Last Word, but Kureishi improves the world by adding a few laughs. While there is more wit than substance in The Last Word, I found the novel worth reading for its ample supply of amusing sentences.

Harry Johnson has been commissioned to write a biography of Mamoon Azam. Mamoon, one of the first dark-skinned Indians to make a splash in the literary world, is Rushdie-like in his stature and opinions. The publisher envisions a controversial biography with a "hot, moody photo" of Mamoon on the cover that will stimulate sales of his books -- "long family novels set in colonial India" -- which are critically acclaimed but mostly ignored by a general reading public that views them as too intellectual.

Mamoon's current wife, Liana Luccioni, insists that the biography must not damage Mamoon's reputation, exactly the opposite of the book Harry's publisher wants him to write. To an extent, The Last Word is a biting commentary on celebrity biographies, which dish dirt to titillate rather than illuminate. Contrary to Liana's belief that readers want "upliftment, to learn the path of greatness so they can follow down it," Harry's publisher believes that readers want icons to be trashed so they can consider themselves the icon's equal.

Mamoon, on the other hand, has no desire to be peeled "as you would an onion." Serious writers are out of fashion, says Mamoon. Now, "no sooner has someone been sodomized by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir." Although Harry believes readers will understand that "sexuality makes fools of everyone," Mamoon resists being made fashionable through the exposure of a past that (if the gossip is to be believed) was exciting and provocative if selfish and cruel. While Mamoon accuses biographers of envying the sex lives of the subjects they trash, he also denies that his life was filled with sexual escapades ("even Philip Larkin had more sex"). Mamoon does, however, appreciate the idea of biography as fiction, since fiction often yields truths that haphazard reality cannot so easily convey.

Although written as a comedy, The Last Word contains some serious thoughts. It is ultimately a novel about the meaning and making of art. Should art stand alone, divorced from its context or creator, freed from "banal and simplistic correlations" between art and the artist's experiences? Is art merely a seduction? To be taken seriously, must artists display passion by crossing boundaries that are denied to most of us? The notion of how love should fit into one's life provides a related theme (for what is love if not art?) that becomes more prominent toward the novel's end. The novel has broad elements of a love story but doesn't try to be one (or perhaps it tries and fails). The assessment of a life in the final years (art as the continuous rewriting of memory) also gives Kureishi a chance to express serious thoughts about reflection and atonement. Still, The Last Word is too fluffy to be regarded as a serious novel.

I suspect that many readers will dislike the novel because they dislike nearly every character but, in a comedy that exposes the weaknesses and foibles of the human spirit, likability seems unimportant. The Last Word is not a long novel but it suffers from a surprising amount of redundancy. Some of that results from seeing Mamoon through various eyes but some of it is repetition that serves no apparent end. To the extent that there is a plot involving Harry and the various women in his life, it's silly and insubstantial. To the extent that the plot focuses on a writer writing about a writer, the story's best moment is a clever plot twist near the end. The Last Word is not as profound as Kureishi wanted it to be, but it gave me enough chuckles to be satisfying.

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J by Howard Jacobson

First published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Hogarth on October 14, 2014

J is accurately marketed as a "philosophical work of fiction." It is, unfortunately, strong on philosophy and weak on fiction. To his credit, Howard Jacobson raises important questions and avoids glib answers. He just doesn't do a very good job of storytelling.

The novel's beginning sets a promising scene. J takes place in a future of shared conventional thinking. Spontaneity and unpredictability are scorned. Jazz, wit, and other forms of improvisation have fallen out of favor. Art is a "primordial celebration of the natural world." It is meant to provoke feelings of tranquility and harmony, not anxiety or despair.

Prevailing sentiment in Jacobson's future is that we must forget the past. Conversations about the seminal event of the relatively recent past begin with "what happened, if it happened." The "twin itches" of recollection and penance are no longer scratched. People apologize without reference to any offense for which an apology might be due because random apologies eradicate and anesthetize guilt. Walls and monuments that commemorate war and suffering are gone, the "recriminatory past" replaced with an "unimpeachable future." Access to books (and therefore ideas) is restricted. Even "hoarding heirlooms" is an offense, although one the authorities will overlook if it is not carried to excess.

It is against this wonderfully detailed background that a plot fails to emerge. Instead, Jacobson gives the reader a jumble of loosely connected storylines. It is as if Jacobson put all of his effort into creating the story's background and failed to find a story that would fit within it.

One plot thread involves a romance between Kevern "Coco" Cohen, the child of parents who hid their past from him while they are still alive, and his lover Ailinn, who thinks that memories are best forgotten since memories are mostly bad. Kevern slowly uncovers his past as the story slowly moves forward. The path he travels is full of dull digressions.

Another thread is something like a murder mystery as a detective investigates a series of deaths. That story goes nowhere. Another involves a woman who had an affair with her teacher who seems to have been added to the story only because someone needed to provide an explanation of what happened, if it happened. Then there's an art historian who exists to reinforce the book's central conceit while adding little of substance to the novel.

While I was unimpressed with Jacobson's story (or failure to tell a story), I found the novel worth reading for its thoughtful exploration of ideas. One set of characters, for example, wars over the dichotomy of "never forget" and "don't live in the past." Having conquered oppression, a character suggests, "there is no need for all the morbid remembering and re-remembering. I don't say we should forget, I say we have been given the chance to progress and we should take it." Through its characters, the novel allows competing philosophies to spar: acknowledging that the past is past should not bring "automatic absolution" for past atrocities versus the sense that people of the present should not be made to bear the burden of guilt for things done by earlier generations. Jacobson also has some insightful things to say about cultural identity as a "shapely, long-ingested, cultural antagonism, in which everything, from who we worship to what we eat, is accounted for and made clear. We are who we are because we are not them."

Jacobson is a clever prose stylist -- sometimes too clever, he conveys the sense of a writer being clever for the sake of being clever -- but the cleverness kept me reading even when I had doubts about the content. There are some lengthy dead spots, including a woman in a coma whose search for words might have made a strong creative writing essay but added little to Jacobson's effort. The characters are haphazard constructs of beautiful prose; I wish Jacobson had made them worthy of the language he expended on them. For ideas and style, I would recommend J; for plot and storytelling, I cannot. My Recommended With Reservations is a compromise verdict.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Pantheon on April 15, 2014

At the start of All the Birds, Singing we know little about Jake Whyte. We know that Jake is a woman of a certain age who speaks with an Australian accent, that she lives alone on a small island in Great Britain, that someone has sliced open and gutted two of her sheep, and that she feels like she's being watched. The novel changes its time frame repeatedly and we soon learn that this is one of three eras in Jake's life that the novel will spotlight. In the second she is part of a sheep shearing team. In the third she is a companion/helper for a creepy sheep farmer named Otto. On the island she tends her own sheep and a strange man named Lloyd drifts into her life. Occasionally we are given glimpses of Jake's difficult childhood but the important event of Jake's formative years is saved for the final chapters.

The story jumps from one stage of Jake's life to another and for much of the novel it is difficult to place the chapters in sequence. At an early point, it is clear that Jake has joined the sheep shearing team to hide from her past, but only later do we learn why she is hiding. The novel's structure forces the reader to engage in mental gymnastics by reordering the chapters to make sense of the story, a technique that helps the reader understand how the components of Jake's life fit together while building suspense. It is clear that at least two stages of Jake's life will end with an eventful climax. The story of one stage works backwards from the climax while the other two move toward it. Again, the novel's unusual and somewhat challenging structure -- it is impossible to understand the story without reading to the end -- contribute to its interest.

The kind of person Jake is, the hard choices she has made (or not made) in her life, are revealed in increments as the story unfolds. The reader has a very different understanding of Jake by the novel's end. Evie Wyld made me feel sympathy for a number of characters who are not particularly sympathetic and a good bit of compassion for Jake, who is not necessarily a bad person but not particularly likable. In the end, it isn't necessary to like Jake to understand the forces that shaped her and to appreciate her pain.

On the other hand, the key formative event in Jake's adolescence, revealed late in the novel, is undeveloped in relation to the details we learn about more recent stages of Jake's life. Her motivation for acting as she does is unconvincing, largely because we know Jake well as an adult but little effort is made to make the reader understand her in her youth. The incident's sketchy presentation at the novel's end deprives it of its power and the reinterpretation of the novel's events that it inspires seems forced. The abrupt and ambiguous and downright strange ending also makes the story feel unfinished. Despite my qualms about the novel's ending, I enjoyed the story's intensity, its air of atmospheric mystery, and its portrait of a damaged human being trying to make the best of a difficult life.

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