So Many Books... - The Fourth Horsemen, Kate Thompson

05:18 pm - The Fourth Horsemen, Kate Thompson

(A swollen gland (daughter's) can be added to the list of medical woes around here now. Enough is too much!) (Also my eyes aren't focussing today for some reason. Some reason other than the reading, of course.)

Haven't yet read a single review, response or babbling about Kate Thompson's latest, and having very much liked The New Policeman, expected nothing less from The Fourth Horseman. I've as yet no idea whether I'll be alone in shaking my head and wondering just what went wrong. It's not the story, which is a decent and potentially great mix of fantasy, science and thinly disguised Real World politics. But the writing seems so bad in comparison to that in The New Policeman it's truly surprising. Instead of trying to write coherently about it, I'll throw out a few quotes, younger daughter's response to same, one apparent scientific error, two character plot-holes and one line I just don't know how to categorize. Slight spoilers inevitable.

Narrator is a 15 year old girl. In the first quote she's talking about her brother Alex, who's two years younger, and is practicing aikido with his friend.

'There was a beautiful discipline about their actions. They were both shooting up like nettles on a dung heap and coming into their adolescent strength, but they had none of the awkwardness of other boys their age. The aikido kept them both as supple and graceful as dancers.'

Next one is Laurie talking about being busy so she hasn't time to worry about having seen the horsemen.

'In any event, time blunts the sharpest edge and, no matter how momentous the visions had been at the time, they were fading in importance with each day that passed.'

There are lots and lots of heavier-than-my-taste allusions to fate: 'On that day in early summer when I'd decided to be a warrior, my fate was already pointing to this moment.'; 'And sometimes I believe it was more than that. I believe that our extraordinary fate was already written on our palms or stamped across our brows.', just a few examples.

To verify that I wasn't completely mad in finding this stuff heavy, heavy slogging, I read them to Younger Daughter when I was about two-thirds through the book. She snorted in disbelieving disgust, and said 'How did you even get that far?', which was enough to convince me.

The scientific error involves the father's project, which is genetic engineering, to find a virus which will affect grey but not red squirrels. He develops a programme to compare human and squirrel genomes, discards any that are shared, and so 'all that was left at the end were the genes that were peculiar to the squirrels'. Just sloppy, and not crucial to the story, but it's pretty sloppy indeed, I'd have thought. The first plot hole is the fact that this project is super, extra-specially, top secret. He's got to sign the Official Secrets Act, while reporting to only one other person - the extremely elusive Mr Davenport of constantly changing mobile phone numbers and no known address. But he discusses the whole thing, not only with his wife, but also his two children, and comes to let Laurie serve as his only lab assistant, with Mr Davenport's knowledge. Umm - right. The second involves the plan for Laurie, Alex and his friend Javed to go to Shasakstan with Javed's father - a plan which is repeatedly said to be totally safe ('You don't think I'd let -- go if I didn't know it was safe, do you?'), though this country is an unstable Middle Eastern country with a growing fundamentalist Islamic element - oh, right, and nuclear weapons. And when the boys and Javed's father do go, a coup occurs and Javed's mother says she knew it was coming, just not that soon. Excuse me?

And finally, the baffling:

'I don't know why it was that Mum was never there when the most momentous things happened. ... that was what her fate seemed to have planned for her: to be the one who heard about it all after it had happened, and who had to help pick up the scattered pieces of her family's lives. Perhaps it was her punishment for having been away from us so much.'

??? Punished for taking a job (physio to the England cricket team) which takes her away from her family (which consists of a father who can arrange his job to be at home a lot, and two independent teens)? Granted, I'd hate that kind of life with a passion myself, and was thinking that shortly before reading the line. It's entirely possible that Thompson intends it to be read as Laurie's resentment only, though it seems less than likely from the rest of the book, and could have been written to show that more clearly if that was the intention. Would the sentence - whatever it's 'supposed' to mean - even have been written about a man whose job took him away from his family though?

EDA a 'gah' to the non-workingness of tab in Xjournal, which I keep forgetting.