A Review of Steve Amsterdam's What the Family Needed

 I enjoyed Steve Amsterdam’s award winning apocalyptic, climate change novel Things We Didn’t See Coming, so I was quick to purchase a copy of What the Family Needed. Calling Things We Didn’t See Coming a novel might be bit of a misnomer as it is a collection of short novellas. But they all feature the same character and are told in chronological order. Amsterdam uses the same technique with What the Family Needed, but this time each story is told from the viewpoint of a different character. 

What the Family Needed begins with teenagers Giordana and Ben arriving at their Aunty Natalie’s house with their mother Ruth. Once again their mother has deserted her husband. Giordana is looking forward to the normalcy of her Aunts family’s stable life, but she has not factored in the fantasies of their son Alek.

Gordiana feels her mother does not care about her opinion of her father, and that she is taken for granted by her mother. It’s like she is invisible. While being entertained by one of Alek’s made-up fantasy games he asks her to choose: invisibility or flight? She chooses invisibility. Minutes later she wishes she could sneak down stairs and listen to what her mum is saying about her dad, and she suddenly becomes invisible.

Ben, Ruth, Natalie, cousin Sasha, Uncle Peter, and Alek all tell stories of their own. The stories are in a chronological order so they don’t overlap or show an incident from a different viewpoint.

Ben’s story starts a few years after Giordana’s. He is unemployed and full of regret for marrying and having a baby too young.  He wants to be free.  Guess which super ability he gets.

Ruth is a nurse who wants to make the lives of her patients and families as comfortable as possible, if only they would tell her what they really wanted.

Sasha has never been able to form a long-term relationship. He would do anything to get his lover to return his love.

Natalie is busy, too busy to help and fix her delusional son Alek, if only she was more efficient.

Peter just wants his family to stay stable and for nothing to change.

They each acquire a super ability, but their abilities have mixed results.

The novel is written in a wry tone. Most readers will identify with the desires of the characters: wouldn’t it be nice to find out what people are saying when you are not around, or to flee a boring life, or if nothing ever changed.

The novel ends with Alek’s story. It is clear from the start of the novel that he is the catalyst for the gaining of super abilities by his relatives and other members of his family. I was very keen to find out how and why. Alek’s story offers surface answers but not the bottom of the iceberg answers I was looking for. I felt a bit dudded, disappointed. 

Things We Didn’t See Coming had a sense of urgency about it. It has a demand that we change, and a character that changes to suit the environment. While What the Family Needed shows that change can be hard to cope with, even when magic intervenes. In the end, it says be careful what you wish for because the change might not be worth it. It is a gentle novel, perhaps too gentle.

Review of Brother in the Land

Brother in The Land begins with teenager Danny taking a break from working in his father’s corner store for a long bike ride into the English countryside. It starts to rain, so he takes shelter in a World War II pillbox. As he waits for the rain to stop, he sees the flashes of nuclear missiles exploding.

Aware that the rain might contain radiation, he waits for it to stop and then rides back to his fictional hometown of Skipley. It is badly damaged, and hundreds are dead. The rest of the novel tells the story of Danny’s attempt to survive.

Brother in the Land is a young adult novel told exclusively from Danny’s point of view. Danny seems slightly emotionally detached from what is going on around him. He mourns little for family and friends who died, which leaves the reader wondering if he had had any friends. But perhaps he is just in shock and too busy getting on with surviving to mourn.

The novel does a realistic job of describing the aftermath of a nuclear attack: the breakdown in authority, the wait for help while people do whatever it takes to survive, people dying of radiation sickness, crops failing, and deformed babies being born.

The novel was written and set in the 1980s, at a time when nuclear war was a big fear. But it reads like it could have been written in the 1950s. One reason for this is the near-total absence of females in leadership roles. There is only one substantial female character in the novel, the tough but pretty Kim. She is used to show that Danny still has teenage hormones.

The novel has a real boy’s own adventure feel. Obviously, its author, Robert Swindells, had a military background, with Danny’s devotion to duty being one of the novel’s big themes. Duties included helping his family and joining a militia to fight those who sought to enslave the survivors.

The prose is straightforward, with little creative flair. The sentences are short, and there is a lot of foreshadowing. Brother in the Land won the “Other” award, but I could find no reference to that award on the web.

Originally, the novel ended with little hope for Danny’s survival, but Swindells added a new chapter that gives some hope. This seems unnecessary and goes against the novel’s overall bleakness. It also seems unrealistic.

Except for the additional chapter, Brother in the Land appears to be a relatively realistic portrayal of a teenager trying to survive after a nuclear war. As it progresses, it becomes a passable action novel, with Danny forced to fight to survive. But his lack of emotion left me thinking the author was too scared to explore the inner thoughts of his main character. It is a novel for teenage boys who don’t want to read any girly emotions.

Review of The Method - a dystopian science fiction novel.

Juli Zeh's The Method is a very believable dystopian, science-fiction thriller. It is a different take of themes explored in novels like 1984 and Brave New World. The novel is set in a future Germany, not too different from the current version, except society is controlled by a strict set of rules known as “The Method”.

The Method is an all-encompassing health regime that every member of society is legally obliged to follow. Every person must eat the right foods, excluding those deemed unhealthy. Everyone must do the right amount of exercise. People are only allowed to mate with those who have compatible immune systems. Anyone who fails to follow the rules is arrested and rehabilitated.

An individual’s commitment to The Method is tracked by microchips embedded in them, and by their toilets that automatically examine their urine. Each member of society has an exercise bike on which they must complete a certain amount of kilometres per week.

The novel revolves around Mia Holl whose devotion to The Method is waning. She is eating the wrong foods, and falling behind in exercising. She is upset about the execution of her brother Moritz. He was found guilty of murdering a woman he desired. Mia and her imaginary friend, the Ideal Imorata, are convinced her brother was innocence.

Mia is put on trial for her lack of devotion. While on trial Kramer, the public face of The Method, visits her. He was partly responsible for the conviction of her brother. Kramer tries to convince Mia to return to The Method. He is concerned her faltering conviction to The Method will be noticed more by the general public because of her brother’s execution. He worries she might cause others to question The Method. Like 1984, the novel is about the need of a dictatorial society to eliminate all dissent. 

The Method was written by German Juli Zeh and translated into English by Sally-Ann Spencer. They have written a thriller where each scene builds on the tension of its predecessor. Zeh had a number of quirky ways of introducing chapters. Sometimes she wrote in second person as she foreshadowed coming events. Her writing flows, but has a formality to it, which emphasised Mia’s scientific background and analytical mindset.

Mia is a different type of main character, one who does not display her emotions, preferring to analyse the world around her. But she uses an imaginary companion to express her emotions.

Kramer is a charming ruthless fanatic who will do anything to protect The Method. He is very reminiscent of many current politicians.

The novel’s themes resonate with the desire of real world governments to monitor and control their citizens. The novel asks if the increasing amount of data collected by governments could be arranged by overzealous authorities to show the guilt of anyone they choose to investigate. Data could be arranged like incorrect forensic evidence was used to wrongly convict Lindy Chamberlain of murdering her child. 

The Method is a novel for readers who enjoy stories that cause them to think about society and where it is heading. With increasing surveillance and concerns about massive health expenditure, a version of The Method could become a reality.

Review of Holly Childs' No Limit.

No Limit is a book about hip young things doing hip things and wanting the world to know about their hipness via social media.

The novella is set in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2012, which is important because the world was supposed to end then due to the Mayan calendar running out. To add to the apocalyptic feel of the novella, a volcano is erupting. Its ash causes the cancellation of Ash’s plane to Australia. With no idea how long she will have to wait, Ash decides to look up a cousin in Auckland. She spends much of the novella searching for him, meeting a few strange people along the way.

The novel is full of references to pop culture. For example, Tom, everyone’s first Myspace friend, makes an appearance. And many words are spent describing the clothes the characters wear. Labels, labels everywhere.

The characters all seem to suffer from attention deficit disorder as their thoughts flick from observations of the world around them to desires, to how they are going to get to where they want to be, and then to wanting to be somewhere else immediately after they get there. Their lives seem jaded by too many unlived and unanalysed experiences.

All along the way, they want to record everything they do and say, but the internet keeps on dropping out, perhaps the end of the world is really happening. The novella emphasises a youth culture that can’t see the point in doing anything if they can’t take pictures of it and then share it on social media.

This is Holly Childs' first published longer work of fiction. She is a writer and artist, who, according to her bio, creates work around digital semiotics, transformations of language, obscurities, fashion, aberration and corruption. 

She uses a lot of short sentences in No Limit, as if to emphasis the quickly passing thoughts of the characters. The novella is written with a lot of humour.

This is a novella for those who enjoy watching the slightly deluded lurch from one unfulfilled fantasy to another.

  

Review of Lauren Beukes' Novel Zoo City.

How did Zoo City win the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award? Not that it’s a bad book, it is a very enjoyable, imaginative and well-written novel. The problem is science does not drive its plot, so it is not science fiction. If anything, the novel is fantasy, as its plot’s two main drivers are magic and spiritualism.

Lauren Beukes sets Zoo City in an alternative version of her homeland, South Africa. In this alternative version, criminals are identifiable by the animals attached to them. Not physically attached, but an animal and its master are psychically linked. The animal feels what the human is feeling. The animal has to be close to its owner or they both will panic. The animals also instil minor magical abilities in their owners.

The animals reminded me of the Daemons in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. Beukes acknowledges that similarity by mentioning that series within the novel. But Zoo City is nothing like Dark Materials.

Zinni is the book’s protagonist. She is an ex-journalist who, after killing her brother, winds up with a sloth. The sloth gives her the ability to find lost things by following the threads they leave. She makes some of her income by finding people’s lost rings and keys. She also runs a number of scams where she dupes the gullible out of their money. She is just surviving, living in a part-abandoned block of flats.

While trying to find a lost ring for a client, the client dies. Outside her client’s house, two well-off cultured people with animals contact her. They want her to find a missing pop star. She tells them that her magical ability only helps find lost things, not people, but they are insistent. She needs the money, so she agrees to search for the singer. Her investigating leads her through the decaying suburbs of Johannesburg.

The novel consists of many short chapters. At the beginnings of chapters, often her motives for going or being somewhere are not clear. Usually the connection with her investigation becomes clearer as the chapter progresses. Similarly, the search for the singer seems to conclude well before the end of the novel. Zinni then begins to investigate some murders of animals and their owners. That investigation eventually enlightens her on why the popstar went missing.

Zinni is a tough, intelligent, independent and strong female character, who takes men, rather than submitting to them. She scams people, lies to people, sets people up, and fights back when attacked.

Her sloth – she has not bothered to name it – lets her know of its displeasure with many of her activities. It hisses in her ear or jabs her with it claws if she drinks too much or puts them in danger. It will take a swipe at the face of anyone it does not like who tries to get too close to Zinni. The sloth’s grumpy reactions are an enjoyable counterpoint to some of the serious situations Zinni find herself  in.

Beukes’ writing flowed, like Zinni and her sloth, the words linked together nicely. With Zoo City, she has excelled at word building. She has created a wonderfully edgy alternative Johannesburg, a decaying world full of dangerous and magical people.

At its essence, Zoo City is a fast-paced crime novel set in a different version of reality. It is a world where magic is real, but does not dominate. The novel should be enjoyed by anyone who likes fantasy that mingles the familiar world of today with the strange.