LITERATURE
BOOK REVIEWS Railsea China Miéville An imaginative reworking of the classic tale of Moby Dick by a daring and experimental author, Railsea (2012) is a fantasy work steeped in false science and the drama of humans at hunt. In place of the famous leviathan is Mocker-Jack, a great southern moldywarpe (giant mole), and the setting is a distant post-apocalyptic trash-planet traversed by train tracks forming a ‘railsea’. The reader trails through this world behind the faintly unlikeable, passive protagonist Shamus Yes ap Soorap (Sham), an apprentice doctor in the service of Abicat Naphi, captain of the Medes (the female equivalent of Captain Ahab). In contrast to the impotent and colourless protagonist is a scarcely explored, vibrant world that is dangled tantalisingly on the peripheries of the main narrative. Continuing his tradition of toying with language, Miéville litters the text with curious turns of phrase and invented words that might make a Baby Boomer frown, but should pose no problem to the liberally-minded students of a university campus. This is not an exercise in easy reading, and can be demanding upon one’s imaginative capabilities, with the author creating such vivid and unique imagery that one must pause to fully comprehend and appreciate what is being described. This made it a particularly strong contrast with the book I read immediately prior— the poorly written, but fairly steamy and easy-to-read, 50 Shades of Grey (I’m very single right now). In true postmodern fashion, Miéville readily breaks the fourth wall to matter-of-factly explain the reasoning behind aspects of the narrative’s structure and layout. Yet despite this, a third of the way through, it inexplicably about-turns and becomes an action-adventure novel at odds with everything up until then. Mirroring this, Sham abruptly develops courage and leadership skills completely out-of-character, that have a crew who never liked him following him into the railsea’s equivalent of the Green Zone. The world Miéville has created is spectacular, but this is an uncharacteristic error from the experienced novelist. Score: 3.5/5
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Gentlemen And Sledgers: A History of the Ashes in 100 Quotations and Confrontations Rob Smyth Some of the most stunning works of sport history in recent times have come not from historians but from the cabal of talented writers who have circled the offices of Manchester’s The Guardian and London’s The Times. The cultural turn has provided the canvas for Jonathan Wilson’s brilliant work, as well as Rob Smyth’s own The Spirit of Cricket and Danish Dynamite – a co-authored work on the idiosyncratic Danish National Men’s Football Team whose golden age concluded in a shocking EURO tournament win in 1992. Gentlemen And Sledgers falls a little short of these benchmarks. The format of the book is 100 short chapters headed by a quote from either on the pitch, in the contemporary press, or rumoured to have been said out in the streets. This episodic structure is the main weakness of the book. Stories are tossed aside once their time is up, and there’s little consideration of how the events of one Ashes might impact another later one. It becomes so segmented that each incident described within seems localised, temporally fixed and consequently unimportant. Even the enduring legacy of the Bodyline series, which gets solid treatment in five chapters of Smyth’s stylish prose and influenced relations between the two teams for years to come, is essentially discarded at the end of its chapters. Smyth doesn’t even deign to focus on what happened to the England Captain Douglas Jardine after its conclusion. Smyth made his name as an esoteric and quick-witted ball-by-ball commentator on the Guardian website, and the best part of Gentlemen And Sledgers are the one-liners and retorts that were the mark of this work. However, on the whole, Gentlemen And Sledgers is more Twenty20 than Test Cricket, exciting when read in short, aggressive bursts, but without the narrative complexity to sustain interest for a whole five days. Score: 2.5/5
Best bit: An imaginative treat, you will understand only two-thirds of what you read.
Best bit: On W.G. Grace, page six: “Grace was used to doing unto the laws of the game as Uri Geller does unto spoons, and triumphing as a result, but on this occasion had urinated on the wrong nest.”
Worst bit: A stand-alone text, you are unable to return to explore this fully formed world and satisfy your longing for the railsea.
Worst bit: The feeling that you’re reading 100 straight Grantland articles and should get back to work.
Samuel J. Cox bought his baby nephew a pair of Louis Vuittons to “grow into.”
Josh Chiat is a crabbish, defensive opening batsman. He has never hit a six. UWA FACT Your mum only reads your article
The Novel Habits of Happiness: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel Alexander McCall Smith