Thursday, 29th of May, 2003

Jon Courtenay Grimwood does a good job of qualifying as a sort of British William Gibson. In fact, his earlier books in particular were more violent than Gibson (he got lumped with the “Quentin Tarantino of science fiction” tag for a while there), and the suggestion of Gibson is perhaps more in how he paints his worlds than in any cyberpunk trappings. Mind you, see here for an essay of Grimwood’s on “punk fiction” - as comprehensive as you can get. Of course he’s not the only Brit doing cutting-edge sf. In fact, I have rather laboured the point on these pages that most of the exciting new (radical, hard, whatever) science fiction these days is coming from Britain, with Australia and Canada up there too.
I had a little rant back here about JCG’s first two Arabesks. It was well worth skimming over those two books before I plunged into Felaheen - the third Arabesk, and plunge I did. Grimwood is a genius at page-turning plotting, and at the same time his worlds are remarkably well-drawn. The Arabesks are set in a world in which somehow World War I was headed off before it got going (it’s suggested at one point that the US brokered a peace), leading to various interesting differences in the balance of power in this relatively near-future setting. The books are set in a Middle East rather different from our own, predominantly in the Mediterranean city-state of El Iskandria (Alexandria); each is broadly a crime thriller, the reluctant investigator-protagonist being Raf/Ashraf al Mansur, who may or may not be the son of the Emir of Tunis. Grimwood makes great use of italicised flashback segments in each novel, and the revelations in that parallel plot are essential to the main narrative.
The alternate history engenders one of my problems with the novels: uncomfortably, Grimwood insists on using familiar brand-names, from Nokia to Starbucks to Linux; and does it really make sense that there’s a Sony making electronics in a world where the entire course of events that brought Japan into world politics didn’t happen?
My other main problem actually rests with the editing. Someone at Earthlight (a Simon & Shuster company) either has a real liking of sentence fragments, or hasn’t bothered to reign in Grimwood’s own penchant for them. A judicious use of sentence fragments (see Terry Pratchett’s work, for instance) can make for exciting, edge of the seat action. But the result, particularly in Felaheen, of their overuse is in fact to slow down the reader, as one tries to make sense out of the mangled grammar. Grimwood is apparently dyslexic, which may or may not contribute; I read the first Arabesk, Pashazade, as an uncorrected proof - and it’s testament to how brilliant it was that I made it through! Felaheen is certainly several strata above an uncorrected proof, but I think it could still have had a couple of extra rounds of editing before it hit the shelves.
These things said, everything else about Felaheen is first-rate. The continuity of plotting and style between the three Arabesks is excellent, and I was completely engrossed by this world once again. Grimwood’s understanding of and affinity with the Middle East is superb (so far as I can see!) and his characterisation is expert, and frequently touching.
These books are at the forefront of contemporary genre fiction. I plan to push them onto those friends who think they don’t like science fiction. A definite thumbs up!

Comments are closed.