Month: August 2024

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is Salman Rushdie’s forensic retelling of the 2022 attempt on his life by a knife-slashing young man on a public stage. Straining every memory cell, Rushdie provides a fascinating account of the harrowing event and the even more harrowing painstaking recovery, sans one eye. Wielding plot like the literary master he is, he steps us through the attack while dodging back in time to provide context, while at the same time dissecting the meaning behind the ordeal using all his powers of scholarship and metaphor. The level of detail is nigh cinematic, so that the early and middle sections of Knife are the most kinetic and compelling. The love between the novelist and his recent novelist/poet wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, shines from the pages. In a daring gambit, toward the end Rushdie imagines a series of prison dialogues with his attacker, and although these might interest a fellow writer or a critic, to this reader they miss the mark. Nonetheless, to bring such a level of dispassionate storytelling to a near-death experience less than two years old is a remarkable achievement.

A seemingly gentle novella that quickly seizes the reader with dread, Water shows Irish novelist John Boyne at his best. The storyline is simple if oblique: a Dublin woman flees the ignominy of a husband recently jailed for some unmentionable crime, flees to a tiny island where she adopts a pseudonym and attempts to recover but also to examine her own complicity in the crime. Slowly the insular, remote community draws her in and she stumbles toward some form of understand, maybe even redemption. The author’s supple, lyrical style is never intrusive but quickly and beautifully creates worlds, physical and internal. Rural Ireland comes to life, Boyne’s bravery in tackling a dark subject head on is notable but its rendering through our heroine’s internal landscape is especially moving. I gather this is the first of four similarly styled novellas named after the elements; each should be snapped up and devoured, for here is a master at work.

Comedians can craft funny novels and The Satsuma Complex, by British personality Bob Mortimer, tries its hardest, with modest success. The plotline comes straight from Haruki Murakami. A meek, detail-minded thirty-year-old legal assistant becomes plunged into a dangerous mystery, laced with the prospect of love at last, when he meets a colleague in a bar but also an enigmatic woman bearing a book called The Satsuma Complex. The colleague goes missing, our hero seeks the girl, and events corkscrew toward catastrophe. Gary, our hero, is an engaging protagonist, perhaps over-described, and the plot almost works. Billed as “brilliantly funny,” it comes across instead as worthy of a mild gag-rendered chuckle now and again. Overall, The Satsuma Complex makes for a pleasant enough read but fails to excite with either plot, characters, or language.

Irish writer Colm Tóibín‘s 2009 gem, Brooklyn, told of Eilis Lacey who immigrates to New York as a penniless young Irishwoman, struggles and survives, falls in love with young Italian Tony but then is drawn back to Ireland by a tragedy and there faces wrenching choices. The unexpected new follow-up, Long Island, set in 1976, sees Eilis residing in Long Islands, married to Tony and surrounded by Tony’s wider family, with two teenage children. One day her world is rent asunder when an Irish stranger comes to her door, telling her his wife will soon bear Tony’s child and that he will deposit the child with Eilis. The author is a master of understated fireworks and this plot starter kicks in at the very start of Long Island, and I dare any reader not to be swept in immediately and then transported. Eilis’s response sends her back to Ireland and the resulting tale of loves, regrets, and decisions is told from her point of view and that of pub owner Jimmy and his secret paramour Nancy. The author never wastes a word on unnecessary details and immerses the reader in the inner turmoils of these three, in a quiet, gently rhythmic cadence that mesmerises. The tension toward the end is nigh unbearable. If Long Island does not end up being my favorite novel of 2024, something remarkable indeed will need to soon reach my bookshelf.

Longtime AI expert Neil Lawrence has expressed his view on the subject in The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI, a stylish book imbued with serious wisdom. Employing stories, which he says is humans’ means of expressing their unique form of intelligence (one that meshes intricately with the world), he spins an extended yarn like a fireside chat. Through these tales, as varied as they are fascinating, he compares the history and nature of AI (which bounces between logical programming and the new probability-driven, mass-data LLMs) with how we think, feel, and create. In the end he concludes that while the likes of ChatGPT do indeed pose a threat, the threat comes from inequality of human power, an inequality that he seems confidence we will rectify. The LLMs, which are neither fully digital nor analogue will, in the end, be employed by us to better us and to better understand ourselves. If that summary strikes you as shallow, it is just my restatement. The Atomic Human does a wonderful narrative job and is recommended for anyone seeking to understand our near future.

Almost too prolific to keep up with, Adrian Tchaikovsky turns to comedic futuristic satire with Service Model, in which a robot valet, in a world teeming with robots, finds itself on the run after inexplicably murdering its wastrel human master. The author clearly relished depicting a future dystopia of human and robotic disintegration; many of the cameo characters can readily be imagined as outre depictions in a Terry-Pritchett-style movie. Tchaikovsky is a superb plotter and world builder, and the story steams along toward a hotly anticipated climax. What surprised me during the read was the poignancy imparted to the central mechanistic robot, and Service Model can also be read as a deeply thought “what if” offering a vision worth considering during our current era of AI advances and debates.

Debut novelist Madeleine Gray offers a distinctive sharp millenial voice in Green Dot, the tale of a young woman obsessed with an older male colleague. At turns savage and comic, the perspective of Hera, plunging down a path known by all, including herself, as disastrous while longing for trueness, proved to be intoxicating. Written in that pellmell first person voice so loved of many modern authors, the book is a pleasurable yet poignant confection to read. I found the climax missed an opportunity to grant the hero wisdom or closure or … or something, and the overall plot could have been fiercer, but I did relish the evening taken to devour Green Dot.

Predicting Our Climate Future: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, And What We Can’t Know is a book we should all read, especially policymakers, and climate scientist David Stainforth is just the person to write it. Climate modelling stands at the heart of our modern world’s most dire existential crisis, yet few of us know much about the modelling. In particular, as Stainforth points out time and time again, those models are a bewildering mix of hard science, near-wild speculation, and all the gradations in between. Moreover, climate modelling is a youngster in the pantheon of science, yet very little effort is expended in understanding and explaining exactly what they predict and how sound those predictions are. As Stainforth acknowledges, our newly obtained massive increase in computation blinds us to the problems inherent in attempting to model an entire planet. In essence, Predicting Our Climate Future is the author’s impassioned plea to take modelling to a new, clearer, better understood level. Stainforth is a brilliant expositor, able to offer wonderful analogies to explain the intricacies of the models. I was besotted from beginning to end, but also angry beyond belief that my Australian government does not devote unlimited public service funds and resources to gaining a bipartisan, deep comprehension of the impact of national policy (instead both our parties rely on rubbish modelling brochures with no debate). I can heartily recommend Predicting Our Climate Future but beware: this is as clear a telling as possible but the very nature of climate models means the read is a brain strainer.