Ignacio Padilla, Shadow Without a Name, 2000

On a train heading for the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s eastern front in 1916, two soldiers play a game of chess, the stakes being an exchange of identities. The winner lives out the war in safety, the loser heads on towards almost certain death. Later in 1943 another bigger game is being played, but this time for the identity of Adolf Eichemann. Who is moving the pieces? Padilla is playing his own tough game of chess with the reader, but not one in which the reader gets much of a chance of keeping up, always being left several steps behind and given little opportunity to understand quite what is going on. The four linked stories are narrated with the same style of dense paragraphing, and Padilla provides the barest minimum of dialogue to dilute even a little this puzzling series of metaphysical whodunnits. It’s simply too schematic, reading like an essay, not a novel. Two words adorn the cover of Shadow Without a Name: ‘Ingenious’ and ‘Dazzling’ – Ingenious in the concept, I’ll agree, and dazzling too, but not in any illuminating sense, making this a hard book for me to like.  PY

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Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim, 1939, 1975

The fictional Austrian town of Badenheim’s new ‘Sanitation Department’ wants the town’s Jewish residents to register, promising a better life for them in Poland, while these same people are more concerned with blaming each other for the failure of that year’s summer arts festival. I started Badenheim, 1939 thinking that it was straightforward fiction, but by the halfway mark some characters were behaving in such an unlikely manner towards each other that I finally figured the story must be allegorical. The way the characters are obsessed with irrelevant details of their lives and infighting while something big and nasty is hinted at in the background is good, but the two threads are never really juxtaposed and the reader has to make all the inferences. This is tell-not-show writing for a story that really needed more clarity as to its intentions as well as its slightly unrealistic nature.  PY

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Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods, 1995

Depending on whether a mainstream fiction reader also reads any fantasy at all, that reader could either agree that Astonishing the Gods is “a modern day classic” or, if not fooled by pull-quotes so easily, astonishingly bad. I certainly defer to the latter; what starts out as a quest for an understanding of invisibility set on an invisible island in an invisible city (which is somehow also made of stone, or fire, or is it water?) then immediately descends into a clichéd fantasy of bridges and riddles, randomly altered states, know-it-all spirit guides and universal laws. Formless, vague, boring, pedantic and ultimately completely pointless, there must be mountains of this kind of thing deservedly sitting unread in slush piles the world over, but this is by Ben Okri so it gets published, although I honestly can't see why. I shall inevitably give him another chance with one of his slightly-more-down-to-earth works, but this was absolutely not the best place to begin reading Ben Okri.  PY

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M. John Harrison, Nova Swing, 2006

A loosely connected sequel to Harrison’s Light, the 2002 novel which won him the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In a retro future couched in the 1950s, some weird technologies, diseases and even weirder people are appearing on the streets of Saudade, where the unpredictable physics of the Kefahuchi Tract have intersected with the planet, creating a forbidden zone that is monitored for the dangerous and illegal trade in alien artifacts. Vic Seratonin is a corrupt tour operator secretly leading tourists over the event horizon, and the police are onto him but there are also stranger crimes to solve and some peculiarly warped destinies to be uncovered. Like plenty of ‘noir’ Nova Swing begins with a classy dame walking into a seedy joint; on a superficial level this is clearly Roadside Picnic meets Mickey Spillane, but on any deeper level it could only be compared with Light – that was a journey around Mike Harrison’s psyche and Nova Swing is no different, as there are again some very internal things going on in these pages. But although the two books are connected they do resonate differently: Light’s canvas was pretty broad and far-reaching across time and space, whereas Nova Swing’s characters all inhabit their own sad, microcosmic, intersecting lives, centred around one street on a far-off world, their motives, dreams and fears sensitively revealed. As an analogy, if Light was the wave then Nova Swing is the particle: both are equally illuminating on Mike Harrison’s preoccupations yet are equally difficult to pin down, challenging the reader to figure out just how this peculiar story took shape. The way their anachronistic ’50s world actually fits into the far future I’m at a loss to explain but somehow it does, because with Harrison’s uniquely gifted prose that’s only to be expected. ‘New Weird’? An appropriate enough label for sure, but don’t let that put you off.  PY

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