Next by Michael Crichton

Next
Michael Crichton
Harper

Lucille Redmond

CRICHTON likes to scare the tripes out of us.

He's succeeded admirably with Jurassic Park, Next and a plethora of other scary stories based on nasty things happening because scientists get trigger-happy.

This time they're genetically engineering humans, thinking "Hmm, wonder what would happen if we threw a few human genes into a parrot… or a chimp…"

Crichton's fans know what will happen. Evil corporations will use their innocent discoveries to wreak havoc.

So it is that we soon have life insurance cancelled when someone's reported as having a gene for heart disease.

Oh no. It's not the man with heart disease whose insurance is cancelled - it's his son, who's now defined as 'pre-ill', and therefore uninsurable, because he shares the gene.

And the family of a man whose cells have the ability to cure cancer have to go on the run - because the evil corporation's supply of the cells has been stolen, and they want to (forcibly) take more from his kids and grandkids.

This is a book to gobble up for distraction, while noting the science stuff in your paranoia jotter. But it's not one of Crichton's best. It lacks a strong central character you can identify with - too many, too similar, too anodyne American characters.

But a great book for distraction, all the same.

How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper

How to Talk to a Widower
Jonathan Tropper
Orion

Lucille Redmond

POOR Doug. He's 29 and a widower with a teenage stepson. Doug spends his life in a damp morass of misery, mourning for his wife Hailey, killed in a plane crash.

But that was a year ago, and his friends and family are nudging him to get the mourning over with and find 'closure'.

When a cop turns up on the doorstep with stepson Russ by the collar, stoned and defiant, Doug is stymied, even when the officer tells him that the tough guy was crying in the patrol car, and referred to Doug as his father.

This doesn't in the least sound like a book anyone but a dedicated miseryguts would want to read, but surprisingly it is really funny, and very moving.

What do you do when your rejected stepson gets a blurry tattoo? And then reveals that it's a comet: Hailey's Comet, called after his dead mother.

Doug's life doesn't get easier. His one prop, his twin sister, throws herself on his mercy and moves in, pregnant, and their other sister, Debbie (who got off with her new fiancé at Hailey's funeral) is determined to have the perfect wedding.

Sad, funny, brilliant, How to Talk to a Widower is one of the great books of the season.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

First Among Sequels
Jasper Fforde
Hodder & Stoughton

THURSDAY Next, Jasper Fforde's literary (literally) detective, has some tough plots to crack. Her sullen son Friday must be mothered into adequate adulthood, as he's destined to be ChronoGuard director-general.

There's worse: funniness is leaking inexplicably from the novels of Thomas Hardy. Even Jude the Obscure, once full of laughs, is now morose.

And Thursday's haunted by her uncle Mycroft, whose keen mind had pushed the frontiers in disciplines ranging from fusion power to romantic fiction.

Amid government cuts, a dangerous surplus of national stupidity and a cover identity as a carpet fitter, Thursday must solve these mysteries.

On the side, she has a big cheese deal going across the borders in the Socialist Republic of Wales.

The horrible thing about this relentlessly funny book (a bit like being trapped with a joke-a-minute alcoholic) is that it's so near to truth in its Selbyesque surreality.

In one imagined reality TV show, Samaritan Kidney Swap, 10 renal failure patients try to persuade a donor, and voting viewers, which one should have his spare kidney - as done in reality (as a practical joke) last month in the Netherlands.

Jasper Fforde is a specialised taste, and for those who love quirky English humour, this will hit the spot.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
JK Rowling
Bloomsbury

The publication was preceded with a fever of carefully orchestrated hype, and when it was leaked onto the internet a couple of days before publication there were howls of fury from the Muggles involved in its publication.

A PDF file appeared on torrent sites such as Pirate Bay, with the chipped pink fingernail polish of the childish hands holding down the pages to be photographed clearly visible - unlike the type, which mostly disappeared halfway down the page.

This was soon followed by an audio file obviously read by a computer's text-to-speech software, which had difficulty with some of the spellings, reading out 'M.R. [pause] Weasley' for 'Mr Weasley', and spelling out anything that appeared in capitals, so that Harry often shouted "Stop! Ess Tee Oh Pee!"

Nothing daunted, avid fans downloaded both in their millions. But fear not, Muggles, they won't make the slightest dint in the sales, any more than the plot spoiler on Wikipedia. Harry fans will buy and buy.

Every generation feeds its children the stories that express its ideals. The kids of the 1960s read James Stephens' translations of the stories of Fionn, and Patricia Lynch's cosy Travellers' tales, and Enid Blyton's safe adventures.

In the time of suicide bombers, we've entered a darker world. JK Rowling, drawing from JRR Tolkien, brings us into a paranoiac otherworld where a brave Resistance is hunted by evil forces.

With the final book of her Harry Potter series, Rowling makes the parallel with racist/religious ideologies all the clearer.

For those who've been living in an enclosed convent, here's the background: Harry Potter is the only survivor of a family of heroes. He's marked by the scar caused when the evil ideologue Voldemort killed his parents and attempted to kill him.

Like the young Luke Skywalker, Harry has a psychic connection with Voldemort, the Hitler of the magical world. Up till now, we haven't known why that was.

The books are set in two parallel worlds: that of the Muggles (humans) and that of the magical people who live partly in their world and partly in another, enchanted one, using magic to do the things Muggles do with machines.

Harry is the star of Hogwarts school, the boarding school for wizards, but also lives as the unloved nephew of a Muggle family in our suburban world.

In this seventh book, vicious Voldemort has returned to a worldly incarnation. His plan is to cleanse the magical world of 'mudbloods' - those of mixed magical and Muggle blood. Using deception, terror and torture, he has infiltrated almost everywhere, including the Order of the Phoenix, the Resistance working against him.

Harry is a Resistance leader, on the run with his comrades and under constant attack from the Voldemort's death-eater troops.

The story is full of the old Rowling magic - aerial dogfights on broomsticks and enchanted motorcycles; an Armageddon in which Professor McGonagall leads a charge of galloping desks, cheered on by the characters charging after them from portrait to portrait; mandrakes used as weapons of mass destruction.

But it's less rich in Rowling's old humour, and there are longeurs and pages of explication.

In fairytale settings, woods, weddings and swamps, occasionally mixed with Muggle chip-shops, Harry pursues or is pursued by seven magical items - a diary, a cup, a diadem, a person - objects resonant with Harry's parents' and Voldemort's history.

The nuanced story of double agent Severus Snape is fantastically worked out. People surprise you - Draco Malfoy, Dudley Dursley, even Dumbledore, Harry's mentor - murdered... or was he?

Lily, Harry's mother, who died to save her baby son, proves to have been central to the motivations of - well, let's not spoil it.

In the end, when you close the last of the seven books with a satisfied sigh, it's all been worth it. The world has been restored to its happy self. To quote the last sentence, long disputed and many times inaccurately leaked - all was well.

Life Class by Pat Barker

Life Class
Pat Barker
(Hamish Hamilton €??)


PAT BARKER books always have a spéirbhean or two, moist-lipped, hot-eyed, mysterious of gaze.

And sure enough, in the years leading up to the Great War, here we are at the Slade school of art.

Grimly art-focused North of England lad Paul Tarrant is casting warm looks at Elinor, a siren who always makes any man or woman she speaks to seem at the centre of her world.

But it's Teresa, a model for Augustus John and all that crowd, who becomes his lover. Teresa may or may not have an angry, jealous husband. She gets threatening notes, but did she write them herself?

No, it turns out when the husband beats the tripes out of Paul, and Teresa takes herself off out of the way.

Next thing, Paul's working as a medical orderly patching together the blown-up half-corpses of Ypres, and sharing a love-hate thing with the lad billeted with him.

Barker is a fine writer, and couldn't write a bad book if she tried. Her books have been filmed and won Bookers and Guardians. But this isn't her best work ever - there's a lack of centre in the story, and the characters are thin.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson
Vintage

TWO boys go out stealing horses in the forest idyll of Norway a few years after war has ended and the Gestapo been routed.

Not really stealing, just larking - but the day-out-of-time sense of those beautiful hours is shatteringly reversed by the revelation, later, of what has happened just before it.

Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses comes laden with awards, the latest the Dublin Impac, the largest prize in the world for a single work. Fittingly, for ex-bookseller Petterson, it's a prize awarded by libraries all over the world.

This is a book full of solitude, with the super-reality of a world brought to life in a phrase. It's a short-story-writer's novel, concentrated and disciplined.

The alternate chapters are the youth and age of the narrator. In his sixties, alone again, he has returned to the woods to find a shape for his life. In his youth, he is learning to be a man, under the tutelage of his flawed, heroic father.

And underlying it all are the stories of the Resistance, the occupation, and the betrayal of the parents' marriage.

Petterson has a unique ability to show character by a single, well-placed brush-stroke: a glance, a word, even a word not said. And what characters!

How lucky we are to live in a time when we have this to read.

The Woman in the Fifth by Douglas Kennedy

The Woman in the Fifth
Douglas Kennedy
Hutchinson

HARRY RICKS is a bad man to cross. Bad things happen to those who do him wrong.

He's also a haunted man, on the run in Paris after blowing his suburban life to bits. Behind him in the rubble are a marriage (defunct), a lover (dead by suicide) and a career (casualty of events).

He's as far down as he can fall. Or so he thinks. But one consolation: for years, he's taken French classes, planning to give it all up one day and go to Paris to write.

It's a gripping story, but forgettable, because of the coldness and dislikeability of every character but one.

In Paris, Harry falls ill and is selflessly aided by a kindly Turk, who is almost immediately written out of the story.

After that, Harry finds night work with nasty people doing something unknown but probably unspeakable. He takes a foray into a literary salon for some hostile flirting with a mystery woman from the classy Fifth Arrondissement, who soon comes to play all too important a part in his life.

The novel follows every rule of storytelling: every event torques the horror up; every page has a new surprise, a twist.

We may expect to see it on the screen any day soon.