Monday 28 June 2021

 

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

  


       
Nobel and Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro has brilliantly demonstrated yet again the sad and sick society we live in with his chilling new dystopian novel, ‘Klara and the Sun’.  It is a cautionary tale, surely, the human race would never metamorphose into a society so terminally ill – would it?

            Sometime in the near future we meet Klara.  Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend, a life-size human copy, a machine operating on solar power.  She sits in a shop, expecting eventually to be sold to a family who would purchase her to be a companion for their child.  She is a super-intelligent machine who is capable of expert and intellectual thought, the ideal companion for children whose parents can afford her.  She’s not the latest model, being a B2;  B3s are even more versatile and sophisticated, but she hopes to be sold to a family who will be kind and appreciative of her special gifts – for Klara is special:  she has a treasured relationship with the sun, Giver of all Life, and it warms her heart to see it through the shop window travelling each day across the sky.  She sees other things too, that confuse her about humans:  where are they all going in such a hurry, and why?  And why is there pollution everywhere?

            One day a young, disabled girl stops in front of the shop window, and tells Klara that she’s The One, the one that Josie wants as her companion.  There’s something very wrong with Josie – not in her essence, but physically;  she is enormously intelligent, but her body is failing her and as Klara spends more time with the family it becomes horribly clear that genetic manipulation has occurred (now the norm in this society), but it hasn’t worked for Josie.  She is dying.  The effects on the family have been tragic:  the parents are now divorced and blaming each other for everything;  Josie’s best friend Rick hasn’t been genetically manipulated, he’s physically sound, but won’t have the same opportunities in life for that reason.  Klara’s heart (if she was built with one) aches for them all and, because she believes utterly in the healing power of her God the Sun, she requests Him to let Josie get better, so that she can have a normal, happy life with her friend Rick.

            But what is happiness?  Klara only knows that Rick and Josie long for it, as do their families.  There must be some way that she can help – because that is what she has been programmed to do:  to help.

            And the way Klara helps is the ultimate act of unselfishness, only to be repaid by the caprices of human nature.  Kazuo Ishiguro has demonstrated yet again his enormous skill in portraying society in all its guises – and self-destructiveness. His beautiful Klara will stay with us all long after we have read the last page.  SIX STARS.

Saturday 19 June 2021

 

The Last Bear, by Hannah Gold.             Junior Fiction.

 

    


        Reading this beautiful little book was sheer pleasure, and the icing on the cake was the beautiful monochromatic illustrations by Levi Pinfold.  This story has all the necessary triggers to make us turn the pages feverishly:  a young eleven year old girl whose mother has recently died;  her scientist Dad who is ill-equipped to take up both parental roles for her as he is grieving too, and her Granny Apples (so named  because she smells of apples) is wonderfully consoling, but lives too far away from Dad’s city job to be a help.  And the awful insult to injury is not that her mum died from an illness, but by an idiot drunk driver. 

            It’s hard to get back on an even keel from such a tragedy, and April’s only consolation is the affinity she feels towards the wild animals who visit her overgrown garden.  She has quite a rapport with a family of foxes and various other creatures;  they lessen the ache in her heart a little – her mother had the same gift:  wild things trusted her.  Will life EVER get better?  It doesn’t look like it, until her Dad gets a job on a remote Norwegian Island for six months, measuring weather patterns.

            Granny Apples is horrified that April is going too, but the deed is done;  They are off to Bear Island in the Arctic Circle, where the ice-melt is already causing huge problems for the remainder of the once-flourishing wildlife – including polar bears, those magnificent, ferocious beasts who once held sway in the region;  now most of them are starving as they can’t trek across the ice to hunt seals:  the ice has melted.

            And a bear – the last bear – is trapped on the island, starving, wounded by the horrible plastic rubbish the human race is shamefully responsible for all over our beautiful, nurturing planet:  even the Arctic Circle cannot escape our garbage.  Until April meets the huge creature, and unlikely as it sounds, forms a firm and wonderful friendship with him when she wins his trust.

            ‘The Last Bear’ should be a must-read for all children today, for they are the conservators of tomorrow:  they have to repair the damage their forebears have visited upon the world.  Hannah Gold has crafted a beautiful story of a friendship that ends on a very necessary message of hope;  the places and people she writes of are all based on sound factual research, which makes her story even better.  This precious little book should rightly become a children’s classic.  SIX STARS!! 

Monday 7 June 2021

 

The Abstainer, by Ian McGuire.

 

 


           English author Ian McGuire has constructed a novel so justly weighted against the country of his birth that it would be easy to mistake him as being from the Emerald Isle;  his fictionalised account of the infamous hanging in November 1867 of three innocent Irishmen wrongly accused of the murder of a Manchester policeman weeks before is the precursor to the monumental battle that follows:  the retaliation by the Fenian Brotherhood’s efforts to take revenge against authority figures in Manchester, that filthy, teeming city that is home and slave work in the mills to a large and dirt-poor population of Irish, there because their own country cannot feed them.  Thanks to the English.  Manchester is the battleground for what is to come, a war to the death between two men, representing each side.

            James O’Connor has been sent from Ireland to ‘advise’ the Manchester Police Force on the Fenians.  He had a career as a constable in Dublin until tragedy robbed him of his family and he took to the drink;  now, he is on his last warning and has become an Abstainer – and an Outsider with the Manchester constables, who treat him with ignore, or contempt.  Never friendliness.  Nevertheless, he has built up a good network of informers and learns that an assassin is coming over from New York to commit a retaliatory crime big enough to stop the English in their murdering, bombastic tracks.

            Enter Stephen Doyle, a soldier who survived the American Civil War and found that the strategies, battles – and killing – is what he is good at:  warfare is his speciality and he does not expect to return to New York having failed at his mission.  But he reckons without the complication of James O’Connor being added to the equation, especially when Doyle dispatches one of the informers, O’Connor’s nephew.

            What started as a routine assassination for Doyle, with various unfortunates being disposed of along the way, becomes a titanic struggle to the last breath against O’Connor, who has enough weights on his conscience without adding more family members to the list:  he needs to atone for his nephew’s brutal death.

            Ian McGuire has written a singular historical novel that reads partly as a thriller, nailing us to every page, and a tragedy Shakespearian in its proportions.  His spare, beautiful prose makes one sentence do the work of ten.  ‘The Abstainer’ is a truly Great Read.  SIX STARS.