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

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more