Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence - Michael Marshall Smith

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence is a new standalone novel from Michael Marshall Smith. It’s something of a coming-of-age tale, as the young Hannah Green travels with her Grandfather and the Devil (yes, the actual Devil) in an effort to hold the seams of reality together, and help her parents work out their relationship.

Hannah is the young girl whose existence is apparently so mundane. She lives in a world of routine – of trips to other parts of the state, in the back of the car whilst her parents talk. Of school – lessons, bells, and so on. It’s a universe of certainty, where each day holds close to something of the previous. That routine is shattered when Hannah’s parents decide to stop living together. Smith manages to give Hannah a unique, persuasive voice. She’s only eleven, and so lacks some of the context that an older reader may get, as her parents relationship gently fails. But she’s bright, inquisitive, and not afraid to ask questions – and if there’s an innocence there, it never grates. There’s some great characters floating through this text, but Hannah is probably the most challenging, and the most convincing – a girl thrown into situations she doesn’t entirely understand, determined to make the best of them, to be treated as if her opinions matter, and do the right thing. 

Where Hannah is a gentle and amusing protagonist, her parents are something else entirely. Smith paints a picture of a relationship which isn’t in crisis, per se, but in slow decline. There’s an energy to it, a sense of individuals struggling to define their emotional connection to each other – or redefine it. If Hannah’s character is one of the highlights of the text, this relationship – febrile, built on memories and now in flux – is another. The silences, the justifications, the sense of drifting further apart, of quietly needing different things, is well-crafted and feels genuine. 

Then, of course, there’s the Devil. He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a nice person. Still, as Hannah and her family have layers, so does this personification of malice, whose efforts to work out why he’s no longer as powerful as he should be  are entangled with Hannah and her family. The Devil’s straightforward, politely expressed spite is a gem – each appearance mixes polished banter with an aura of lethality. The Devil is joined by an “Accident Imp”, also described as a talking mushroom, which attaches to people and gets them into, well, accidents. As a foil to the Devil’s polish, the imp is a gem – avuncular, chatty, aware of its low status in the Devil’s er…organisation – and prone to mishaps of its own. There’s a warm comic timing between the two, and the imp’s interactions with other people are equal parts hilarious and charming, inhabitant of Hell though he is.

Along with Hannah’s grandfather, a man with a penchant for machinery and mystery, this motley collective make up a thoroughly enjoyable cast. The frustration and emotional devastation of Hannah’s parents is palpable and real, at least as much as the whimsy and determination of Hannah herself, the Devil’s temper and penchant for overwhelming force, or the accident imp’s surprisingly insightful banter. 

That they operate, mostly, in the real world is helpful – the vistas of Nothern California are lovingly described when required, and the small town life which Hannah leads really does seem to come alive as one meanders through it alongside the story. From a multiplicity of coffee shops and forests, through to the environs of Hannah’s home, each environment feels both strange and familiar, coming off the page with vivacity and verve.

The plot – well, no spoilers, but I think it works rather well. Hannah’s journey is one which encompasses both an effort to save the world, and one to understand her family. Both these threads are fascinating in their own right, and where they wend and intersect with each other, it becomes impossible to stop turning pages. This is a story of a journey, and of a family, as much as it is one of demons, ancient pacts and talkative mushrooms. I’d have to say that these, and the sheer imagination deployed, make this book one that is very much worth picking up.

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Infinity Wars - Jonathan Strahan (Ed.)

Infinity Wars is the sixth collection of short stories in Jonathan Strahan’s ‘Infinity’ series. I’ve read several of the others, and found they contained some good stories, so I was quite hopeful going into this one. There was a decent mix of authors who I was aware of and those I’d never read before, which always helps.

Infinity Wars is about the future of war. The scope ranges from alien invasions at interstellar distances, down to the human cost of pulling the trigger. In some ways the environs can be familiar – people wading through muck and blood, or in the cold darkness of outer space. In others though, they can be strange or alien – soldiers driven by their subconscious, or government agencies weaponising a climate grown more ferocious after global warming. The stories in this collection look at war across the scale – and provide an imaginative, inventive window into one of humanities oldest pursuits. 

It’s not all explosions and space battles. There’s some great character work going on as well. Nancy Kress gives us “Dear Sarah”, a letter sent home by a soldier now part of an unpopular military – which also touches on the issues of personal and cultural identity, on prejudice, and on the feeling of what is right. There’s a unique voice there, and a sense of personality which grips you as the pages keep turning. Or Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon is not a Battlefield”, which gives us a woman who was once a soldier on the moon, reliving the grace and beauty of her youth, and the dreams which shaped her as she returns to an earth which is less than forgiving. There’s soldiers as heroes, and as bureaucrats. Elizabeth Bear’s “The Perfect Gun” gives us a richly cynical mercenary, someone accustomed to making the amoral choices, whilst working within a ship powered by an AI. The latter becomes perhaps more personable as the tale unfolds. The former is charmingly unlikable, but entirely believable – a person out for themselves, unashamed and unafraid. If you’re looking for characters to shape these stories, then you’re in the right place. Warfare has always had the capacity to break or shape humanity – and the characters here have been exposed to the kind of pressure that moves them, shifts their centre, and lets us explore a raw humanity beneath. 

That isn’t to say there aren’t some storming plots as well. I absolutely love Garth Nix’s “Conversations with an Armory”, where several tired, scarred and wounded men try and talk their way past an Armory AI, in a putative effort to stop an alien invasion. It’s a delicate piece on the costs of war and what happens to those who remain – and also carries an urgency, a sense of the kinetic, a high-stakes story. There’s a race against time, and the consequences for failure are dire. It’s an absolute page turner, and also one with a serious emotional punch. Then there’s the creeping horror of Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship”. Here our protagonist is asked to pay the cost to infiltrate an enemy craft and bring it down before it can cause incalculable harm. The risk, though, is assimilation into the collective of the enemy. It hits all the right beats – there’s an organic tension, the smell of something dead or alive in the air, and a growing awareness from the reader that our narrator could become what she’s set out to oppose. It’s a story about loyalty and hard choices – and that kept me turning the pages. 

In the end, this is another solid entry in Strahan’s “Infinity” series. It looks at the lies and truths of war, the mental and physical joys and costs. There’s plenty of humanity on display here – the darker, stranger parts, and the virtues we cling to when everything else is lost. There’s also the strange, the weird, the wonderful and horrifically alien. So if you’re looking to explore some new authors, or want to think about humanity and its conflicts of the future, then this collection is worth your time.

The Imposters of Aventil - Marshall Ryan Maresca

The Imposters of Aventil is the third in Marshall Ryan Maresca’s “Maradaine” sequence of novels. The author has also written several other series in the same universe – and if you’ve been following those, there’s some crossover here.

Aventil is one of the districts in the city of Maradaine. In comparison to others that we’ve seen in previous books, it’s rather prosperous. There’s a university, packed out with a large number of well-heeled students – aspiring lawyers, magnates of tomorrow, and the occasional wizard. The streets are fairly clean, and if the money of the University is one reason, another in is because Aventil’s crime is organised, but also fractured. There are several different street gangs, all with their fingers in separate pieces of Aventil territory, and each with their own history and grudges with each other.  That said, they all deeply resent intrusion into that territory from the outside – and will band together to savage interlopers. They’re insulated by a police force which is more lethargic than actively corrupt –unwilling to rock the boat, start trouble, or indeed finish it.  Aventil is, in its way, thriving – money moves and everyone has an interest in a stable neighbourhood, and as a result it has a cosmopolitan and socially active feel. This is especially true of the University, which sees wonderfully insular, with its own politics and problems, looking out on the rest of the neighbourhood from a bubble of privilege you can almost see rising off the page.

The characters…well, there’s the infamous Thorn, of course, and his gang of merry followers. Then there’s Inspector’s Rainey and Welling, brought in to investigate murders, and trying to chase down the Thorn. Alongside them, there’s our connection to the Aventil street gangs, who also happens to be tied to the Thorn. Also a small horde of side characters. I think my only complaint here is that given the smorgasbord of characters present, we don’t get to spend a lot of time with all of them. It’s great seeing the crossover between different aspects of Maresca’s worlds, but I think we could have done with a text twice the size to give them all room to breathe.

Still, the characterisation is solid – especially for Minox and Welling, whose cool competence, and incisive intelligence mixes well with troubled consciences and icy pragmatism. Those two pretty much own any page that they’re on. The Thorn and his gang, on the other hand – well, I need to go back to the earlier books to really get the context of their relationships, I think. But coming to it fresh, there’s a sense of history missing; I was able to get a sense of what tied the characters together, and it all worked, but I suspect that the deeper context from previous books would have helped immensely. Still, they each get their moments to shine. There’s a sequence that felt reminiscent of fight club halfway through the book which really shaped one of the Thorn’s accomplices for me, for example – in their reaction to danger and courage in the face of adversity. They also have a sense of privilege which seems to gradually deflate as the story goes on – as the stakes rise, and they run afoul of meddling inspectors.

They’re joined by our eyes in the gangs. This one was easier to come to without the context, really – a lone actor, of sorts. He’s a man struggling with old loyalties and old curses; an internal monologue turns these over for the reader, with a genuine voice, and a tone that seems tired of the life that’s led this far. There’s loyalty and bravery there as well, and a sense that the centre can not hold. It’s a stark contrast to the Inspector’s view of the criminal fraternity of Aventil as thugs and menaces – noting that there are costs and consequences, that gang work is violent and sometimes ugly, but not stripping away the essential humanity beneath. This is one whom I’d follow again – to see where he ends up, if nothing else

All of these characters are thrown together in a melting pot, as the Thorn appears to go on something of a murder spree. Execept of course that he hasn’t, as far as he knows. Maresca has form in this area – a slow burning plot, with investigations, discoveries, false leads and revelations, leading to an explosive conclusion. He doesn’t disappoint this time either. I was turning pages to work out exactly what was going on, trying to understand what drove the murders, who was behind them and why – and then, as that started to gel together, kept turning pages to see what would happen next. It’s a sharply observed investigative thriller, this one, in a mature and well crafted fantasy world.

Is it worth reading? I suspect if you’re new to Maradaine, you might want to go back to the start of this series, or to the start of Rainey and Welling’s adventures; it works as a standalone, but definitely benefits from exposure to the rest of the series. If you’re already a follower of the Thorn, I’d say pick this one up.