(no subject)

I'm being wildly intelligent today. Being wildly intelligent means reading my supervisor's notes on my novel and devising solutions where solutions need devising. It means making little cheese pastries with filo, half-baking them and then freezing them for when needs must. It means putting rubbish out and washing dishes.

All the houseworkish activities are linked to the novel. It's time for some thinking. And, I admit, it would be rather nice if my place were less a pigsty by the time a friend drops round this afternoon.

Matt Forbeck - Carpathia (Angry Robot)

I was finding it hard to focus (literally, my eyes were attempting to disown me) because of Incoming Weather and other Minor Issues. I realised that I could blow up the text of e-review books to an abnormal size. So here I have, for your Sunday afternoon/evening delectation, Matt Forbeck's Incoming Novel, Carpathia.

It starts, as so many narratives do, on board the Titanic, just when the iceberg hits. The focus, however, is not the tragedy of the Titanic, for the Carpathia (the ship that famously saved the few surviving passengers*) has strange cargo and some passengers are not what they seem…

On board the Titanic is a love triangle and on board the Carpathia is an interesting situation just about to go bad. When one meets the other, once the ship is sunk, that's when things get darkly peculiar (or peculiarly dark).

Most novels about the Titanic have a certain writing style and atmosphere. This lacks it. The language isn't plain and unadorned, but it's not quite the best language for the story. An early description of a character is "Tall, blond, and broad of shoulders and chin" or, later, when a dress fitted like a tailored glove (and I started imagining an alien body, with tendrils) - it felt a bit like entering a pulp novel, with the adjectives toned down. As the novel progresses, thankfully, the descriptions tend to be tighter.

Like the pulp novels, a sense of believability is occasionally lacking. I can't explain the particular episode that made me feel this most strongly, because it gives away a rather important plot point - all I can say is a very high level of suspension of disbelief is needed from time to time in order to enjoy this book.

Having said that (evil criticism out of the way) Forbeck's capacity to build tension is wonderful. Where most writers would add one, two or even three lines of worry, he adds a fourth and a fifth and they're all well-founded and reasoned out. We know that things are going to go wrong (the Titanic, after all, did sink) but in Carpathia it goes wrong in all kinds of new ways. In a typically Forbeckian fashion, characters are not wasted and the story is fast and evil right until the end.

It's a tribute to Stoker, and a good one.

*If you do some googling about this, you may, as I did, discover an ad for plumbing.