Broken Monsters - Lauren Beukes

Broken Monsters is Lauren Beukes' fourth novel. The first two were set in her native South Africa but for the third, The Shining Girls,  she moved to the US. She sticks to the US for this novel, moving from the city of Chicago to Detroit. Although Beukes has clearly outgrown small publisher Angry Robot, I must admit that I miss the South African setting of her first two novels a bit. The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters are fine books in their own right, in terms of writing probably a step up, but there is something about the use of language in those books, as well as the wildly inventive concepts that does not seem to have survived the crossing of the Atlantic. Of course, if you are looking for a supernatural mystery novel, you still couldn't do much better than Broken Monsters.

A monster is on the loose in Detroit. When half of a young boy is found, messily attached to half a fawn, one of the most gruesome cases in Detective Gabi Versado's career begins. In a city that is slowly dying, she has to find a killer who is obsessed with transforming the death around him into art. A race against the clock begins to find him. On top of a killer, Versado also has to contend with a teenage daughter facing her own monsters and a failed writer turned reporter who insists on bringing every gory detail of the murders to the public.

The Detroit of Broken Monsters is indeed about broken things. A failed artist trying to make a career out of the broken remains of his life, writer fleeing his own failures in New York, trying to make a name for himself, a broken family trying to make things work and above all a community of people trying to bring a broken city back to life. Detroit as described in this novel is in a sad state indeed. Bankrupt, rapidly loosing its population and even more rapidly decaying into an industrial wasteland full of ruins that were once the heart of a proud Motor City.

Beukes' mystery is not a whodunit. Early on in the novel it is already quite clear who is responsible for the murders. What Beukes is interested in is the motivation for these killings. Where many novels about serial killers would include a motivation grounded in sick ways of obtaining sexual gratification or sexual frustration as a motive for the killings, Broken Monsters takes another approach. That makes it a refreshing read for a mystery reader. There is something ironic in the way the killer tries to get attention for his 'art' but often manages to achieve exactly the opposite.

Throughout the novel Beukes draws parallels between the attempts of artists to create art out of the abandoned factories of the city and the killer's attempts to create art out of dead things. He sees his art as a way to open a door, to transform imperfect beings into something new. Where the factories do indeed turn into places where their old function transforms into something new, where a new Detroit is born from the ruins of the old, for the artist it turns out to be a bit more complicated.

A motif that Beukes takes with her from her previous novel is the presence of doors. Not the ordinary kind, but the ones that take you from one place to another. Where they involved temporal displacement in The Shining Girls, the door the killer tries to open leads to an even more frightening place. The door motif returns quite often in the street art mentioned in the book. There is even a character who makes a living by opening doors of abandoned buildings to see if there is anything worth salvaging left behind.

Information technology is another element that receives a lot of attention in this novel. Layla, detective Versado's daughter is practically stuck to her phone and lives her life as much online as in the real world. Beukes shows how each mistake shared on the web can have dramatic consequences and how, no matter where you are in the world, it will keep pursuing you. She also shows another side of all this new technology. The failed writer reinvents himself as a journalist and uses relatively cheap equipment and software to follow the murders. In the process he gets in the way of the investigation. These two story lines show both the possibilities and dangers of the Internet. Just like looking through the lens of a camera creates a psychological distance from events taking place right in front of you so does the Internet lure the characters into a false sense of anonymity and security.

As usual with Beukes' books, it is hard to categorize. You could see it as a mystery or thriller, but it also contains elements of urban fantasy and horror. Towards the end the novel becomes increasingly strange, with events for which there doesn't seem to be a rational explanation following each other rapidly leading up to the final showdown that is the climax of the novel. It's something that seems to suit Beukes but depending on what expectations the reader has before reading the novel, reactions will be mixed. The author's mix of genres is both the forte and weakness of this book depending on the reader's preference.

I enjoyed reading Broken Monsters more than I thought I would. It is a very smooth read most of the way. Only early on in the novel, when Beukes rapidly introduces a number of main characters, is the reader's patience tried. It is pleasantly different from her previous novels but also contains some elements that firmly links it to  her older work. Although, as I mentioned in the introduction, I would not mind seeing Beukes return to a South African setting, her attention to detail makes Detroit come alive on the pages. It is, in short, a novel well worth reading, even if it didn't manage to unseat Moxyland as my favourite book by this author.

Book Details
Title: Broken Monsters
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 520
Year: 2014
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-00-746459-3
First published: 2014

The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes

South Afircan writer Lauren Beukes created quite a stir with her first two novels. They were published by Angry Robot, a publisher who likes to take on books that are a little different and don't easily fit into a category. Especially Beukes' second novel Zoo City (2011) attracted quite a bit of attention and won the Clarke Award in 2011. For her third book a bit of a bidding war between publishers ensued. The UK rights ended up going to HarperCollins, which is the edition I've read. Moxyland (2009)  and Zoo City were two very different books so I didn't quite know what to expect of her third novel. The Shining Girls turned out to be quite different from her previous novels.

In the early 1930s Chicago is something of a poverty stricken mess. Unemployment is high, crime even higher and Roosevelt's New Deal is still a few years off. Like so many, Great War veteran Harper Curtis has fallen unto hard times. On the run after pissing of some people you'd rather not meet in a dark ally, he stumbles into a house whose owner lies dead in the hallway. The man was obviously doing well for himself, money, good food and booze are all over the place. How he need up being murdered is a mystery to Harper. Soon, the house ensnares him in a web of murder and time travel. Compelling Harper to find his Shining Girls at several points in time and murder them. Harper finds this immensely satisfying, until one of the girls refuses to die.

Somehow I seem to have managed to pick up another time travel story. The Shining Girls is set in Chicago at various times between 1929 and 1993 and include a lot of social and historical developments in the city. She touches upon women's entry into the workforce during the second world war, the problematic position of gay transgender people in the 1950s, the Red Scare, the introduction of contraception and the abortion debate and a number of other interesting historical events. They are usually only briefly mentioned as the characters that experience them tend to be killed rather quickly. Only the life of Kriby, the one surviving victim of Harper, is chronicled in more detail.

Beukes did a lot of research for those brief sketches of certain time periods. The Radium dancers were a particularly interesting detail and one of the things not many readers will have heard about before. She could easily have been tempted to invest more in the shining girls' characters but the author keeps the novel moving. Chapters are brief and switch between Kriby and Harper, whit a number of secondary, most notably Kirby's mother and her journalist mentor/friend Dan. It must have taken something to keep the novel as concise as it is but I do think it was a wise choice. The tangle of time loops, as Harper thinks of them, would probably turn into one big Gordian knot if he spent too much time in the various time periods.

Kirby's side of the story is if anything even more interesting. She is faced with the challenge of finding a murderer who can travel time in a city where a lot of young women get murdered. The number of clues she has to work with are few indeed but her search becomes something of an obsession for her. Kriby is described as a scarred and in some ways vulnerable girl but also one who is determined to keep the search going when the rest of her world feels she should let go. Her character is developed way beyond what we get to see of Harper. Although I enjoyed reading Kriby, I wouldn't have minded understanding a bit more of Harper's motivation as well. He feels compelled to leave a trail of breadcrumbs through time, not unusual for serial killers, but why he does so remains a mystery.The true nature of the house and its influence on Harper is left up to the reader. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I did feel it left Harper a bit too much of a stereotypical psychopath.

Beukes previous novels were set in South Africa, which enabled her to work local influences and language into those stories. For me, that added to the reading experience as it is not a setting I'm usually exposed to. It was something I did miss in this novel. Chicago makes for an interesting backdrop, but with a lot of its history at leas superficially familiar to me, it wasn't quite as captivating as Kendra's exploits in near future Cape Town. That is a very personal preference of course and Beukes did succeed very well in portraying the city of Chicago throughout the 20th century. When picking this up don't expect another South African flavored novel though. It simply isn't.

With this science fiction/mystery hybrid, Beukes shows how versatile a writer she as. The three novels she has published so far have each been both difficult to fit into a particular genre as well as very different from each other. There is no telling if a novel like Zoo City or Moxyland will appeal to a reader who likes The Shining Girls but for the reader who likes to be surprised, Beukes' novels are simply a treat. I think I still like Moxyland best but truth be told, there is not much in it. Mostly Beukes choice of subject that makes the difference really. In short, The Shining Girls is another well-crafted and inventive novel by Beukes. There is even talk of making it into a television series. You may want to read it.

Book Details
Title: The Shining Girls
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 391
Year: 2013
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-00-746456-2
First published: 2013

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

There is absolutely no point in reviewing The Hobbit (1937) of course. Like Tolkien's Magnun Opus The Lord of the Rings, it has been analysed to death and then some. I very much doubt I'll have something to add. The first movie in a trilogy based on The Hobbit is expected in December so I wanted to reread the book anyway. Jackson will no doubt do a fine job, even if I don't see why he'd want to stretch it to three movies, but his images will change the story forever. Cinema has such a wide audience that even popular novels like The Hobbit run the risk of being relegated to the book behind the movie. Of course Tolkien has been very popular for decades. Maybe that will mitigate the effect some. Anyway, I have a date in December with my girlfriend to go see this movie, now is the last chance to read the book without being affected by Peter Jackson's version.

Poor Bilbo Baggins, a respectable Hobbit very much enjoying his comfortable life at Bag End. It is rudely interrupted when the wizard Gandalf shows up. Before Bilbo knows what is happening, his home is being invaded by a party of thirteen Dwarves. The plan a journey to the far off Lonely Mountain, where the dragon Smaugh has been hoarding a Dwarven treasure. They mean to take it and re-establish the Lonely Mountain as the Dwarven stronghold it once was. Thirteen is an unlucky number however and besides, the Dwaves expect to need a burglar to gain entry into the halls Smaugh now occupies. According to Gandalf, Blilbo is just the man for the job.

Tolkien has been something of a blessing and a curse for the Fantasy genre. Almost forty years after his death Fantasy that can be considered Tolkien clones is being published. Although the popularity of Epic Fantasy in the vein of The Lord of the Rings seems to be receding at the moment in the English Language word, it is still going strong over here in the Netherlands. In Germany as well, stories about Dwarves, Elves and epic struggles between good and evil continue to sell well. Whether we like it or not, Tolkien has made a lasting impression of Fantasy and literature as a whole. And it started with this little novel, which against Tolkien's expectations, became a huge success.

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is a children's book. The language is probably a bit dated but it is not nearly as flowery and verbose a text as The Lord of the Rings. I would say it is still very readable for today's children. The Hobbit has a kind of light-heartedness about it that makes it much less dense and much more plain fun that Tolkien's work for adults. I've often wondered what could have driven Tolkien to write two such completely different works, but still part of the same history. Tolkien was always tinkering with his work, even long after it had been published. There have been countless revisions of the texts of The Lord of the Rings over the years. The Hobbit didn't entirely escape this. Some revision was done, especially to Gollum's part of the tale. Apparently he tried to bring The Hobbit more in line the The Lord of the Rings stylistically as well but fortunately his beta readers (or whatever it was they called these folks back then) told him it wouldn't work.

I guess the book shows it age in other ways too. The total absence of female characters is one. I think Bilbo's mother is mentioned once but that is just about the best I can come up with. At least Tolkien improved on that marginally in The Lord of the Rings. That being said, Tolkien does present a pretty fast paced story. Once Bilbo leaves his comfortable home, he rolls from one adventure into another. Each more distressing than the next. Bilbo is at the same time the humorous note in the novel and the voice of reason. Tolkien's Dwarves are stubborn and not entirely free of greed. It also contains less that flattering accounts of human and Elvish actions. Most of the text might be lighthearted, it hides some pretty ugly scenes. Tolkien more or less does the same thing in situations where Bilbo is in mortal ganger. For instance by Gandalf tricking the Trolls and having the Goblins sing silly songs.

My favourite part of the book is the invisible Bilbo facing Smaugh. He is a traditional western dragon. Evil, clever, dangerous, hoarding a treasure and to be killed by a hero. I guess the outcome is a little predictable but I enjoyed Bilbo having fun with the dragon and getting his tail feathers singed when he is being too clever. What always struck me as a little odd about the book was that Smaugh's demise is not actually the climax of the tale. Along the way, the Dwarves seem to have stirred up a hornets' nest and a big battle with Goblins ensues. The Lord of the Rings and its appendices shed some light on the background of these evens but in The Hobbit they aren't very well explained. It is one of those battles that Tolkien would go on to write more of, full of unlikely heroics and tragic deaths. It is what one expects from a man who has such an influence on modern Fantasy I suppose.

While there are many hints of the dark days to come for Middle-Earth I still mostly see The Hobbit as a fun adventure. Tolkien is not yet dragged down by the weight of all the mythology he created or the countless unpronounceable names that complicate his later works. Perhaps it is not a very surprising story for the the more experienced Fantasy reader but I can still see why I enjoyed this book when I first read it in my early teens and why it encouraged me to read more Fantasy. Genre readers may be a bit tired of Tolkien's influence on the genre but that simply isn't an excuse to skip this book. It really is a must read for fans of Fantasy and literature in general.

Book Details
Title: The Hobbit
Author: J.J.R. Tolkien
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 285
Year: 1993
Language: English
Format: Mass Market Paperback
ISBN: 0-261-10221-4
First published: 1937