Skip to main content

By the Pricking of Her Thumb (SF) - Adam Roberts *****

Sometimes a sequel betters the original - think Terminator 2 - and Adam Roberts has done this with his follow-up to The Real-Town Murders. (It's sensible to read the first book before this: while it's not essential, there are plenty of references you will miss otherwise.)

 Ostensibly this is a murder mystery, or, as Roberts tells us, a combination of a howdunnit and a whodunnit-to, as the central character Alma is called on to work out how someone found with a needle stuck through her thumb was killed and which of a group of four super-rich individuals is dead when all claim to still be alive - though one of the group who hires Alma is convinced that the death has occurred. 

 However, this is anything but a conventional murder mystery - far more so than the strange crimes suggest. Alma and her partner Marguerite (the latter still trapped by an engineered polyvalent illness that requires treatment every 4 hours and 4 minutes) don't do a lot of detecting. In fact Marguerite hardly contributes anything and Alma relies more on other people telling her what's happening than inspired Holmesian induction.

 In reality, what we have here is an exploration of the nature of money and death, spiced up with a buzzing mix of fun and cultural references (pop and otherwise). It all starts with the title of the book, mixing traditional (Shakespeare) and pop-ish (Bradbury) references and continues helter-skelter from there. I particularly loved the Monty-Pythonesque heavies the Kry Twins (Reg and Ron, of course), though I was rather sad they didn't mention Dinsdale or Spiny Norman.

 Whether you enjoy spotting a quote from Dune or the luxurious combination of a cultural reference and a pun in the chapter title Les the Mis in Person, Roberts is clearly having a good time here. Just occasionally the punning and wordplay gets a trifle overloaded, but never enough to strongly irritate. And running through the book, both explicitly and in its structure and narrative is the über-reference of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey.

 What amazes about this book is the way that Roberts combines the frippery of many of the conversations with some heavyweight emotional trauma and genuinely interesting philosophising on the nature of money, particularly in a world where much activity is in a virtual reality. Although the ending is perhaps a little obscure in this respect (though you could hardly expect anything else, given the model of 2001), the musing on money has a surprising amount of content.

 Just one very small instance. One of the four very ultra-rich people has a slice of Stonehenge as the frame for the entrance to their building. Simply to demonstrate that they have so much money they can do what would be assumed to be impossible. What's fascinating is that if you visit Stourhead gardens in Wiltshire, you'll see in the garden the medieval town cross that should be in Bristol - a parallel real-life example of one of the insights in the book into the way money influences behaviour.

 As long as you don't expect 'A fast-paced murder mystery' (I don't know what book the Guardian reviewer was reading) but instead a mix of fun, wonder, intellectual stimulation and more, all set in a re-branded Reading - I'm not sure this book mentioned that the main setting R!-Town is Reading - you are in for a treat. (Oh, and remember the monkeys at the start when you get to the end.)

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more