Category: Reviews

A Dire Prediction

On By Carl NorthwoodIn ReviewsLeave a comment

A few health and work issues since my last post have set me back a bit, but almost ready to get back on the proverbial horse – only the proverbial one, mind you, the real one is going to take a few months more.

Over a week in quarantine waiting for an operation, then a couple of weeks recuperating, I set myself to look forward to a productive period of reading and writing. But a busy few weeks at work, with every task taking me twice as long to do, left me disappointed. Three weeks – and only one book read (two if you count a Slaine graphic novel!). What a let down!

Though, to be honest, it was a damn good read and I would thoroughly recommend it to all fans of crime thrillers. Though with a title like ‘Lockdown’, you might want to give it a miss for a few years. As well as a top notch thriller (Fantasy is my number 1 genre, but any good thriller comes a close second), Peter May’s ‘Lockdown’ is a good lesson for many authors.

London, the epicentre of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder simmer. Martial law has been imposed. A deadly virus has already claimed thousands of victims….. At a building site for a temporary hospital, construction workers find a bag containing the bones of a murdered child.

Written initially in 2005 after the Bird Flu was touted to be the next big pandemic, it was turned down by British publishers as the portrayal of London under siege to a global pandemic, an invisible killer ‘was unrealistic’. May filed the novel away in his project drawer, only to revisit it 15 years later when COVID 19 reared its ugly head. The lesson – it may not be the right time for that novel to be published, your brand might not be right, or simply, the world is not yet ready for it! But there could be a time when its perfect for publication.

The pandemic is a lot grimmer in May’s Lockdown, than in our own present, with the army patrolling the streets of London, enforcing the curfew with deadly force. Every aspect of the quarantine seems to have been explored and detailed, from the crosses painted on doors of the housing estates in a throwback to when the black death ravaged the country to the no-go areas walled off from outsiders and guarded by the clean folk within. The site of the crime, a building site for a temporary hospital is a terrifying prediction of the Nightingale Hospitals that have sprung up around the country in our own efforts to contain the disease.

All in all, well worth a read. His protagonists vary the pace of the story, Jack MacNeil is the detective, chasing down leads and ruffling feathers. Amy Wu counters Jack’s hotheadedness with a calm attitude towards forensic science. Even the grim backdrop of the pandemic hanging over London doesn’t obscure the fact that a child has been murdered and that MacNeil and Wu will do anything it takes to get to the bottom of whatever conspiracy they uncover.

If you don’t read it now, give it a year or two, then read it.

The Weirdstone

On By Carl NorthwoodIn Musings, Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Why this journey and why ask you to accompany me? Well it would be easier to start with why Fantasy? Back in the day, when I was at lower school (that’s ages 5 – 9) I used to gorge on historical non-fiction from the school library and the scholastic book catalogue. Stories of Rome, Vikings and Crusaders entertained me on many an evening. My heroes at the time were, Caesar, Scipio, Leif Erikson and Richard Coeur de Lion. And then there were the weird ones. Books covering UFOs, mysteries, Loch Ness, myths and legends. Greek gods, Norse gods and Roman gods were my weekend reads. I am sure you can see where this was going. But at the time, I couldn’t – Not until my Form 6 teacher read Alan Garner’s ‘The weirdstone of Brisingamen’ to us.

Oh

my

word

…..

From the intro I was spellbound (did you see what I did there?). Cadelin Silverbrow keeping watch over the sleeping knights in Fundindelve, ready to waken and save the land. The characters were both fantastic and believable, as believable as my historical heroes. And the main protagonists; Colin and Susan, were just like me – well, Colin was, Susan was slightly different. I felt I was being sucked into the world that Garner had woven, just as Colin and Susan were drawn into the mystical battle between Cadellin and his allies and the forces of the Morrigon. It felt to me that Garner’s world could have been under any hill, in any wood or anywhere. But after a while I came to realise that it wasn’t that.  The world of Cadellin and Fundindelve, like so many others in the Fantasy genre, can be found at the turn of a page.

Since then countless other books took pride of place on my shelves – Howard, Burroughs, Leiber, Le Guin, Harrison, Tolkien, Eddings, Feist et al. All were fantastical worlds to be lost in, worlds to replace the humdrum of daily life. But all had the ability to be perceived as more realistic than a world where nurses are paid a pittance whilst sports and entertainment starts are paid millions, reality TV stars can be elected as presidents, and the world’s most powerful tool is used to watch videos of people falling over (which I will admit, can be quite funny).

As a footnote to The Weirdstone, some thirty odd years later, I named a character in an online RPG as Brisingamen in homage to the book. I met some fantastic people as Brisingamen, and after a few years I went to visit a great couple only to found myself driving past Alderley Edge a few miles outside their town of Macclesfield, the scene of the final cataclysmic battle in the book. It was as if the circle was complete.

Not really a circle – more an ouroboros.