The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 60

A 4 Saturday December 13 1997 arts books The Daily Telegraph BOOK REVIEWS SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: Ian Watson recommends the best of 1997 When our world is in dire straits Paperbacks JASON THOMPSON and FIONA HOOK ir -4- 4 Bernard Manning: a Biography by Jonathan Margolis (Orion £6-99) How did it come to this? Something must be wrong with language logic publishing possibly the cosmos when a racist comedian can be defended as Jonathan Margolis believes Manning is a Of a 1995 incident when Manning racially abused the only black person in the audience Margolis suggests the performer was an arcane way taking the mickey-out of The author clearly warmed to his subject and has produced a lame apologia which makes for an unenlightening unenlightened read The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion (Flamingo £6-99) Elena McMahon a Californian reporter finds herself in mid-80s Central America and a tangled web of Contras and illicit arms-dealing Issues of identity are fraught amid the subterfuge persona of does not attract Joan Didion's narrator complains am I comfortable around the literary Similar qualms may explain why this is Didion's first book for 12 years But concision is a virtue and she is a spare acutely economical stylist: her artful classy thriller is one of the most exciting novels of the year Desert Queen by Janet Wallach (Phoenix £9-99) Born to a prosperous Victorian industrial family Gertrude Bell went East exploring and won the trust of Arab rulers When the First World War broke out her contacts proved crucial in the campaign of Lawrence Afterwards she became perhaps the most powerful woman in the British Empire playing a key role in creating the modern Middle East Janet scrupulous biography reveals a woman extraordinary not just for her own but for any time The God Child by Paul Sayer (Bloomsbury £6-99) Hiding from the world trying to forget his bankruptcy and failed marriage Harold Broome has his repose shattered by the arrival of Maisie Harold cannot ignore her she was a a miracle baby born to his dead ife after a car accident Now- grownup she has a corpse in tow Paul Saver's intricate psychological yarn examines an intriguing moral dilemma But the narrative is overwrought and unfocused so that most of the potential tension is disappointingly diffuse JT Sons Mothers ed by Matthew Glendinning and Victoria Glendinning (Virago £7-99) The Glendinnings mother and son have persuaded a cross-section of literary and other figures to write about parent or offspring Most are highly entertaining like Kate hilarious and moving tribute to her three-year-old teenager Phineas jolly picture of family life and Michael witty but serious tribute to virtuous The few irritating contributions include Sophie farrago of self-excusing cliches and above all Adam monopolisation of 65 pages out of 262 His mother obviously never told him to be quiet SDP: the Birth Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King (Oxford £15-99) Crewe has been election analyst for The Guardian since 1995 King analyses Gallup polls for the Telegraph In crisp intelligent prose they unfold the sorry tale of the party which was euphorically launched in 1981 and despite winning with the Liberals a quarter of the vote in two general elections disappeared six years later in a frenzy of infighting Ask Me Why by Tania Kindersley (Sceptre £6-99) When Ash meets Virge pink-haired and tall it seems as if the two young women have known each other for ever At their Oxford college Virge and her gay brother Michael are the people everybody wants to know but the idyll must end and real life impinge The book works as an Oxbridge novel which highly unusually portrays a mixed university where students actually work as a lament for a youth we all thought would never pass and as an exploration of friendship It is quite brilliant Old Favourite Little Herr Friedemann and Other Stories by Thomas Mann (Minerva £6-99) You should not read these stories if you are feeling at all insecure Mann digs below the surface of self-satisfied pre-First World War Germany and shows us its outsiders: crippled Herr Friedemann mocked by the lady he loves lonely Tobias Minder-nickel killing his dog in temper Those who live within the charmed circle are corrupted by idleness Mann does not hate his characters he just has exceptional clarity of vision and feels a duty to report what he sees FH THE MOST momentous science-fiction novel of the year is Kim Stanley Antarctica (Voyager £16-99) After his socially and ecologically conscious trilogy about the colonisation of Mars Robinson has turned his gaze on a landscape almost as hostile and unspoiled In the next century will Antarctica be looted for oil or will eco-terrorists save the last wilderness? Robinson has been to Antarctica and describes it gloriously well Last-gasp heroism sends a space crew on a one-way mission to moon in Stephen Titan (Voyager £16-99) Evidence of life has been detected there and our own world is in dire straits The outcome on Titan though is even bleaker and on a grand heart-wrenching scale In Arthur 3001: the Final Odyssey (Voyager £5-99 pbk) the astronaut Frank Poole last seen in 2001 floating near Jupiter is revived Society has become utopian if somewhat dull but the robotic monoliths await orders from afar to snuff out humanity as an evolutionary mistake Disable those monoliths Frank! Clarke indicts religion as the sickness in Homo sapiens hindering us from true civilisation There is nothing lazy or old-hat about this sequel by a world citizen on the brink of his 80th year Other redoubtable sequels include the energetic Peter War and Peacesized epic The Neutronium Alchemist (Macmillan £17-99) set in his hugely detailed future universe where the unquiet dead are on the rampage Hamilton mixes SF with horror David Wingrove brings to an end his encyclopedic Chinese-dominated future in Book Eight of Chung Kuo The Marriage of the Living Dark (NEL £6-99 pbk) How could such a Great Wall not have some dud bricks in it? But there it stretches thousands of pages long a formidable vision from a non-Western perspective Greg Slant (Legend £16-99) is somewhat of a sequel to his Queen of Angels although fully accessible on its own In a world convulsed by future shock and data-overload brain-technology keeps our embattled psyches lucid while artificial intelligences gird their loins In Phoenix Cafe (Gollancz £16-99) Gwyneth Jones wraps up a trilogy of alien human interpenetration eloquently blurring sexual and psychological boundaries while with Cradle (Legend £16-99) Brian Stable-ford concludes a half-million-word trilogy of bio-deca-dence which ingeniously dresses the mutton of SF as the lamb of fantasy a cunning marketing ploy at a time when the latter outsells the former Under his cloak Stableford remains the ironic maestro biologist Back in 1959 Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz skilfully explored paradoxes of religion after devotees will need William Seekers at the WulfRock (HarperCollins £16-99) the second volume of The Wolves of Time with nasty Hungarian wolves fiihrers and mystic search Other fantasy quests resumed or started during 1997 Garry Kilworth well known for his animal sagas continues his vivid account of a magical alternative Polynesia in The Princely Flower (Orbit £16-99) Book Two of The Navigator Kings Kristine Kathryn Rusch in The Fey: Rival (Millennium £16-99 £9-99) offers a third volume of battles magic and strange customs all rigorously worked out with meticulous attention to character a sort of textbook of superior fantasy Other heavyweights in the fantasy stakes are bestselling David Gem-mell with Winter Warriors (Bantam £15-99: Corgi £5-99) in his Drenai series Raymond Feist's stolid Rage of a l3emon King (Voyager £11-50 pbk) Volume Three of the Serpentiiar Saga and Maggie Dhiammara (Legend £5 99 pbk) Book Four of The Artefacts of Power For fantasy involving dominatrices and a hero shamelessly named Cypher very competently and daunt-ingly handled consult Terry Goodkind's Blood of the Fold (Millennium £16-99: Orion £6-99) Volume Three of The Sword of Truth Fantasy with real women in an alternative post-Roman Europe (plus reincarnation) propels Katherine Kerr's Red Wyvern (Voyager £16-99: £9-99) which launched a new lap of her Dragon Mage series In the madcap area which one might call as opposed to sagas Tim Powers interweaves myth and contemporary California in Earthquake Weather (Legend £17-99): while in Darker Angels (Gollancz £16-99) Somtow finest cultural export magnificently applies mythology and magic and resurrection to the American Civil War In comic vein the super-selling Terry Pratchett sends his Discworld to war in Jingo (Gollancz £16-99) while Tom Holt reworks Ali Baba in Open Sesame (Orbit £15-99) The fantasy event of the year however is non-fic-tional: The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Orbit £50) edited by John Clute and John Grant Its zealous aim is not only to inform but also to initiate the reader Fantasy novels engage in quests: this massive volume requires likewise of the user Stories arise from the meaning-generating structure of the human brain: thus fantasies are not frivolities but are means of altering our perceptions in a subversive and liberating way So here is the point in reading all these fantasists busily spinning their sagas provided that they fulfil their obligations as decreed by the Encyclopedia to furnish wonder and enlightenment not just literary wallpaper of Dave Dorman (Titan £19-99 pbk) edited by Stephen Smith and Lurene Haines FIVE Stanley Baxter of Life Harrison Worlds David Garnett Encyclopedia John Klute Grant must: exuberant mind- stretching multiple universes microscopic starships exploding suns: Truth Mines and cosmic consequences The best SF story collections of 1997 are Colin The Plenty Principle (Voyager £5-99 pbk) Stephen Vacuum Diagrams: Short Stories in the Xeelee Sequence (Voyager £16-99) and Ursula le A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (Vista £5-99 pbk) Although mega-novels increasingly dominate SF publishing the short story remains a vital taproot New writers emerge and cut their teeth in magazines and anthologies but established writers also turn out short stories more for love IAN TOP 1 Antartica by ini Robinson 2 Titan by Stephen 3 Signs by MJohn 4 New ed by 5 The of fantasy ed by ix John than money Most SF magazines which focus on fiction (as opposed to media-SF magazines showcasing Trek or the latest Hollywood space epics) struggle commercially It is for example a bit of a national disgrace although symptomatic that the stand-out anthology of the year edited by David Garnett New Worlds (White Wolf Biblios £9-99) the latest incarnation of a British title going back 50 years in magazine then book form appeared only in America with no publisher here willing to provide a separate British edition As a result it must be sought diligently The other noteworthy anthology The Best of (Voyager £5-99 pbk) wonderful: funny vivid and completely unexpected Joanna Lumley Sneered at by critics embraced by children Tony Bradman on an awesome talent Opening the door on that first nativity scene Wendy Cope considers seasonal offerings for the young From Star Wars: the Art global atomic doom a prospect less likely nowadays Published posthumously his Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (Orbit £16-99) is a sequel set in the same milieu and consequently is something of a museum piece although it does evoke much of the original frisson Meanwhile Paul McCauley kicks off an ambitious new trilogy Confluence with Child of the River (Gollancz £16-99) deploying the fine old tropes of a vast habitat abandoned by its makers and full of assorted aliens the squatters must find out what makes their home tick The newcomers Stephen Palmer and Tricia Sullivan won praise this year for the baroque Glass (Orbit £5-99 pbk) and Someone to Watch over Me (Millennium £16-99 £9-99) respectively The latter is perhaps a bit over the top but is in such cases And for ripeness Greg Diaspora (Millennium £16-99 £9-99) is a And now we have this Treasury a handsomely produced tombstone of an anthology which includes extracts from all the principal works for children several shorter stories in their entirety plus poems letters and some previously unpublished bits and bobs There are new illustrations from Quentin Blake as well as from a dream team of other artistic talents Raymond Briggs Posy Simmonds and Ralph Steadman to name but three You might quibble with some of the selections in particular I thought The Witches would have been better served with a slightly different range of extracts but as the maestro of the grand set-piece Dahl is one author whose writing is ideally suited to the anthology form The Treasury is both a marvellous introduction to his work for new readers and a fascinating overview of oeuvre for children The book is worth its cover price for the two introductory essays alone The second is by daughter Ophelia and gives us a touching glimpse of a fondly remembered magically inventive Dad The first is by publisher Tom Maschler He boldly claims status for work and says that writing has which leave us enriched But then children knew that all along edited by David Pringle and reprinting stories from the past seven years did appear in Britain as a benefit anthology with the authors donating their share of the proceeds to Interzone Here is an excellent sampler of Britain's flagship SF and fantasy magazine which should spur all right-thinking souls to buy a Christmas present subscription (at £52 for 12 monthly issues from 217 Preston Drove Brighton BN1 6FL) Signs of Life (Gollancz £16-99) by the stylish John Harrison is unclassifia-bly its own unique and admirable self: grey areas of biotechnology: a woman attempting to become a bird: Hungarian gangsters: harrowing relationships Harrison with Jane Johnson under the joint pseudonym of has also produced the first volume of a magical fantasy quest The Wild Road (Century £16-99: Arrow £5-99) a Watership Down for cat lovers Dog tures in Art series This book presents a selection of paintings of the nativity scene ranging from a 14th-century book-of-hours illustration to a 20th-century work by Albert Herbert Sister commentaries are an illuminating blend of art criticism and religious teaching expressed in clear and simple language: at how amazed Joseph is and how silently Mary looks on Even they are learning about love from This is a book for adults and children to share although competent readers of 10 and over should be able to manage it on their own In Mary An Angel Just Like Me (Frances Lincoln £9 99) illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu we see an Afro-Caribbean family getting ready for Christmas One of the boys Tyler examines the decorations and worries about the angels: are they always He goes shopping but fails to find an angel who looks like him In the end an art student friend makes one for him: best This is a likeable story for children of four and over However it does give the game away about Father Christmas in department stores which might be upsetting for anyone who believes that the real Santa manages to be in all of them at once 46 According to the blurb on the back of The Roald Dahl Treasury (Cape £19-99) Dahl two years before his death in 1990 was described by a commentator as Pied the sound of whose pipe is and If Dahl was a literary Pied Piper the kiddy-lit establishment definitely played the role of the Hamelin town council grumpily bemoaning the success The blurb mentions the awards won by Dahl but these came late in a career characterised by a general snootiness in critical quarters and a growing tide of popularity with the punters which eventually became a deluge of Noah-style proportions Like it or lump it (and there are still plenty of kiddy-lit critics who fall into the lumpish category) for many young readers and their parents Roald Dahl simply is books Inevitably Roald Dahl is also an industry There have been Hollywood versions of The Witches (so-so) Matilda (very good) an animated version of James and the Giant Peach (so-so) and Jeremy pretty decent biography Roald Dahl (Faber £6-99 pbk) which tackled the usual charges of misogyny and general awkwardness and seemed to lay the foundations for a standard view of the man as difficult but awesomely talented Mary Hoffman's book made me aware that another title from the same publisher Ding Dong! Merrily on High omits anyone who looks like Tyler except of course for the usual dark-skinned king I am not an authority on angels but I do know that choirboys and choirgirls (should we call them choirchildren?) are not always white-skinned nowadays Furthermore £12 99 is a lot to pay for one verse each of five well-known carols with tunes and guitar chords but no piano part Even so this is a lovely book with very attractive pop-up illustrations (by Francesca Crespi) on every double-page spread On the page you pull a tab to make the heavenly choir appear and open the stable door to find the holy family Children of three and over will enjoy looking at this while you sing the carols together My final recommendation is Jane The Story of Christmas (Orchard £8-99 £4-99) This has a text adapted from the King James Bible and beautiful illustrations by the author First published six years ago it continues to outshine other attempts to narrate for children of five and over the events we celebrate at Christmastime CHILDREN are like supermarkets When it comes to anticipating Christmas they begin ridiculously early and do not let up The best time to present a child with a book about Christmas is not December 25 when the excitement is almost over but in the weeks leading up to the great day Of this publications on a seasonal theme I especially like Peter Codington's A Small Miracle (Cape £9-99) a story about an old woman poor and hungry who sells her precious accordion to buy food The money is snatched by a robber and she collapses in the snow on her way home She is rescued by the figures from the local church crib who come to life and carry her home The kings sell their gifts buy back the accordion and in my favourite scene go shopping for groceries The woman wakes to a happy Christmas There are no words in this moving book superb pictures ted us everything we need to know Children as young as four or five could understand the story but this ready is as the blurb claims for members of the The same is true of Sister Story of Christmas (PrestelBiblios £9-95) another title in the Adven More than 10 'A million copies of Janet and Allan books have been sold in the past 20 years: The Jolly Postman alone accounts for five million of them Janet (above) who twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal for her illustrations died in 1994 Janet Last Book (Penguin 9 99 pbk) is an unashamedly personal by her husband and working partner First published privately it gives a unique insight into methods of working and includes many favourite pieces of her detailed artwork including roughs from ideas for books that were unfinished Never sentimental this poignant this tribute will make readers smile and it will surely make them cry FIONA LAFFERTY A first novel of style wit and confidence The Times PAPERBACK WARNH? BOOKS OUT NOW IN.