M83 – Junk

The inspiration for Junk, says M83 frontman Anthony Gonzalez, was 1970s and 1980s TV shows. This may seem like a weird source of inspiration, but as soon as you start listening to Junk, you kind of get what he means. ‘Moon Crystal’ sounds almost like the theme to a kid’s TV show, and ‘For the Kids’ features a child monologue that seems like it belongs at the end of an old TV movie: ‘This is our day, Mom / If we believe it, it will happen’. Additionally, many of the album’s song names could be mistaken for old TV shows or video games: ‘Bibi the Dog’, ‘Laser Gun’, ‘Road Blaster’. It’s an album that has been moulded out of Gonzalez’ nostalgia.

It’d be a cheap blow to say that Junk’s title can be seen as a descriptor of the album, but in a way it’s true. Just like the cheesy old TV shows and video games (there is a very Sega Genesis-esque synth about a minute into ‘Do It, Try It’) that M83 have taken inspiration from for this album, there is a sort of disposable, forgettable quality to Junk. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just means that this isn’t the sort of album you’re going to want to return to again – unlike M83’s last album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

Take lead single ‘Do It, Try It’ for example. Though I didn’t like it much at first, it managed to worm its way into my head. I still don’t think it’s that great a song, but I think it’s a fun one, possessing a certain off-kilter energy that I’ve heard be compared to a jaunty saloon tune. The lyrics support this, being easy to follow (‘Listen to the sound / Of a new tomorrow’) but not really saying anything at all. It’s a song that sums up Junk in a nutshell: fun but hollow.

That’s not to say there aren’t any solid songs here – because there are. The best ones are those where guest vocalist Mai Lan takes over singing duties, like ‘Go!’ and ‘Laser Gun’. Like ‘Do It, Try It’, these songs aren’t particularly deep or original, but they are an incredible amount of fun. ‘Go!’ in particular is great, with its catchy, stuttering vocals, singalong chorus and over the top guitar riffs. Like I said, it’s fun – and when the album focuses on just being that, it succeeds most.

While there’s nothing as good as, say, ‘Midnight City’ or ‘Reunion’ on Junk, there’s still a lot to enjoy. If you take it for what it is, just a bit of fun, and don’t try to pull it apart too much then I’m sure you’ll have a great time listening to it.

 

Essential Songs: ‘Do It, Try It’, ‘Go!’, ‘Laser Gun’.

 

Eleanor Wasserberg – Foxlowe

Eleanor Wasserberg’s debut is an odd novel – but in a good way. It focuses on a family that lives in a huge country estate named Foxlowe; the ‘family’ is made up of people from all walks of life, all of them having ended up at Foxlowe for different reasons. Unlike most of the house’s residents, Green was born at Foxlowe and knows no other life. With her two childhood friends, Blue and Toby, Green tries to survive as the only world she’s ever known begins to fall apart.

Going into Foxlowe completely blind, I thought the setting was post-apocalyptic at first. The novel has a claustrophobic feel to it – only giving the reader brief glimpses of the world beyond Foxlowe. Like Green, and many of the other residents of Foxlowe, we aren’t allowed to venture any further than the moors that surround the house.

However, rather than being an apocalypse novel, Foxlowe is a cult novel. The residents do believe themselves to be living in a post-apocalyptic world though – one taken over by an all-encompassing evil referred to only as the Bad – and Foxlowe is seen as the only haven. The benefit of the story being told from Green’s perspective, someone who knows no other life, is that it allows the author to make the cult’s lives seem normal and understandable. There’s something appealing about the world that Green romanticises so deeply.

But if Wasserberg uses the novel’s first half to romanticise cult life, illustrating the positive ideas it promotes such as community, then she uses the second half to examine it with brutal reality. Though there are some flashes of darkness in Foxlowe’s first half, the novel’s latter half is much harsher, focusing on the years after the cult is dismantled and examining the long-term negative effects it has on Green’s life.

Wasserberg constructs the world of Foxlowe really well, with the story unfolding in a slow fashion. A lot of time is spent constructing the character of Foxlowe itself – and the house forms a pretty integral part of the story. As we experience the characters’ day to day lives, we slowly become familiar with the building’s many different rooms – and many different secrets. And when the novel decides to finally leave the house behind, it has a really disorientating effect.

Many of Foxlowe’s characters are well developed too, but there are quite a few central members of the cult who we don’t really get to know. Characters like Dylan, Pet, Egg and even Blue – who is pretty central to the plot – are only illustrated with broad strokes. The other main issue I had with the novel, which I’ll stay vague about for spoiler reasons, was the narrative style used by the author in the second half. Wasserberg skips over a huge chunk of the story before returning to it right at the end of novel, just to end Foxlowe on a big reveal. Characters talk about this big moment very vaguely in the novel’s second half, to keep it a secret from the reader, and it ends up feeling like a cheap move. Besides, it becomes pretty obvious what the big moment is far before Wasserberg shows us it at the end of the novel.

But despite these problems, Foxlowe is a great debut. Its fascinating focus definitely helps it to stand out from the crowd.

Gabriel Packard – The Painted Ocean

Without reading it, The Painted Ocean looks like a pretty solid novel. The cover suggests something very sophisticated and literary, and the review quotes on it are pretty positive: ‘Hauntingly compelling’, ‘a thrilling and literate debut’, ‘a fearless tour de force’… How can you argue with that?

But sadly, the novel falls incredibly short of its cover – and its interesting blurb – and is, I can safely say, one of the worst pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. It’s a bold claim, but I’m really not exaggerating; The Painted Ocean is mind-bogglingly awful. It’s ‘oh my God, how did this ever get published’ awful. It’s ‘I’m really concerned about the guys at Little, Brown’ awful. So this review is going to be really long, and, in actuality, more of a rant than a review – just to purge this book from my mind, and to use it as an example of how not to write a novel. This will involve spoiling most of its plot, but that should be fine, because none of you should read it.

So I’m going to start with the novel’s few positives before I get into the bad. For the first ten pages or so, The Painted Ocean is pretty solid – solid enough to make me think that I made the right decision in choosing to read it. It sets up an interesting premise, and begins to offer some insight into Indian culture (and what it’s like for a single Asian mother to raise a child in England). It makes me think of Annabel Pitcher’s My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece a little bit (a really fantastic book, which you should read), with it examining racism from a child’s perspective. There are also some sections of the novel that feel kind of well plotted, and Packard manages to pull together some fairly tense sequences. Despite the novel’s many negative aspects, there were a few moments I did enjoy outside of the novel’s very beginning.

But that’s all I can really say in terms of positives. Now it’s time to go on to the negatives, and where to start? Let’s go with the plot.

The first quarter of the novel focuses on the heroine, Shruti, and the difficulties she faces in remaining with her mother after her father leaves them both. Child services want to take her away because her mother has no income, her great uncle wants her mother to move back to India to remarry (without Shruti) and the teachers at school think the abuse Shruti is receiving from her fellow students is coming from home. This first section of the novel is its best part, and it managed to hold my attention fairly well.

The main problem with this first section is that Packard drags it out for so long, before abruptly changing the novel’s focus. A girl of Indian descent being taken away from her mother and placed in foster care? That could make for a pretty interesting story, but Packard tells it in the worst way possible.

None of the characters in this section feel realistic in the slightest, and almost everyone other than Shruti exists simply to cause her suffering. Shruti’s mother, we are told, cares about her daughter deeply, but we see absolutely no evidence of this, and time after time (after time after time – because Packard really does drag this section out) she pushes her daughter away and refuses to rescue her from foster care for paper-thin reasons. Shruti’s great uncle is almost a cartoon villain – like all of the men in the novel – and exists just to abuse Shruti and make sure her life is living hell. The various characters from social services and Shruti’s school (if they can be called characters) are incredibly stupid and unable to listen to Shruti’s pleas for help. At each turn, when they are given a decision to make, they choose the one that will affect Shruti the worst, even if it makes no logical sense. Shruti explains that she’s being bullied at school? Of course social services would come to the conclusion that she’s being abused by her uncle without even investigating the kids in Shruti’s class at all.

Meena is the only character that doesn’t stand in Shruti’s way (and is the closest thing to a friend she has), but she’s equally insufferable. She’s a weed-smoking twelve-year-old (okay?) who casually commits arson and wavers between caring strongly about her friend’s situation and not caring at all. There’s also an odd scene where Meena stands up to Shruti’s mother and tells her how horrible she’s been to her daughter. It’s a moment that could have been powerful, but is weighed down by clunky and unrealistic dialogue.

And then there’s Shruti herself… Oh my… Shruti can hardly even be described as a character. Packard shows no interest in developing her at all, and she remains the same passive punching-bag throughout the whole novel. The Painted Ocean, in short, is nothing more than a summary of horrible events that occur to Shruti without any reason and without her seeming to care. Shruti gets taken away from her mother, she gets beaten up and verbally abused at school, she gets ignored by her friend, an elderly Filipino man tries to sexually assault her, she goes blind after being stung in the face by a jellyfish (like I said, the novel goes off track), she becomes a sex slave on a desert island… It just goes on and on with no relief. Packard puts her through so much ordeal and for no reason at all.

Another issue with the novel’s protagonist is that she’s mind-bogglingly stupid. Packard tries to stress that she’s clever early in the novel – getting strong a-level results – but offers no other evidence of this. I’ll give you an example of her stupidity: Shruti tries to book a working holiday in New Zealand for herself and Meena, and goes out of her way at the airport to make sure her plane tickets aren’t refundable – just so she won’t miss her flight:

‘And I tell the woman I want two plane tickets to New Zealand, but only if they’re completely non-refundable and won’t let me change the dates, and if I miss the flight I’ll lose all my money.’

It’s ridiculous. And the only reason Packard does this is to create some tension later on when it becomes almost impossible for Shruti to catch her flight on time. Not only is every character out to make the protagonist’s life a living hell, but she is herself too.

Though the worst part about Shruti is her voice. Packard’s style of writing is absolutely painful; he tries to capture the voice of an eleven-year-old, and has very little success (again, read My Sister Lives On the Mantelpiece for a good example of how to write a novel from a young person’s perspective). There are a few ways that he tries to do this. The first is by beginning the majority of the novel’s sentences with the word ‘and’. Now, there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with ‘and’, I do it all the time, but the unwavering frequency with which Packard does it causes the novel to read like one big list. Imagine if everyone wrote like this:

“And then I got out of bed. And then I had breakfast. And then I went to the park. And then I got kidnapped by ninjas and I had to fight them all off and it was really difficult and I eventually got away.”

That’s how Packard writes (obviously the plot is a little more complicated though). He’s just listing event after event, and with no sentence variety it feels like a shopping list of plot details. It’s incredibly dull.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Shruti’s voice. The novel is written in the present tense, which is fine, but Packard does not use the typical speech word, ‘says’ (for example: “‘I fought ninjas today,’ says Bill”), using ‘she goes’ and ‘she went’ instead (for example: “‘I beat up all of the ninjas’, goes Bill”). It makes me cringe – especially because Packard’s use of it seems to be the one consistent thing in the entire novel. Shruti also says ‘cos’ and ‘mate’ a lot, which, while annoying, isn’t too bad. It’s not like a young person wouldn’t use those words. But when Packard starts dealing with serious issues – such as rape, and death through childbirth – later in the novel, it does cause some tonal whiplash (along with ‘she goes’ and ‘she went’). The casual child-like tone does not work at all in the later parts of the novel (especially because, after the first quarter, Shruti is nineteen rather than twelve), and causes the protagonist, and other characters for that matter, to seem detached from the things happening to them and happening around them. For example, when Meena reveals to Shruti that she’s giving birth:

“‘All right, mate,’ she’s like. ‘I’m having a baby.’”

And then a few moments later when she reveals to Shruti that she’s going to die in childbirth:

“‘I’m dying, mate.’”

And finally, Shruti’s reaction to this revelation:

“‘All right, then.’”

There are worse incidents than this, but I’d rather not trawl through the novel for more quotes.

As I noted before, the plot changes pretty drastically after the first quarter or so. Packard seems to lose interest in the story of Shruti losing her mother – it’s referred to a couple times later in the novel, but with little depth – and takes us forward several years in time. Along with Shruti’s mother, he also abandons The Painted Ocean’s interest in the whole ‘what’s it like to grow up in England with an Indian heritage?’ focus. Quickly the novel turns into a shallow thriller (not that it wasn’t shallow to begin with).

Meena tricks Shruti into coming to India with her, suggesting that she’s going to reunite her with her mother. Instead she leads her to a desert island owned by her boyfriend Steve – who inherits villain duties from Shruti’s great uncle. It’s a particularly gruelling journey to the island, and while Packard gives us some brief glimpses of Indian culture during it, the main focus of it is Shruti’s sadistic torture. One sequence in particular, when Shruti is just arriving on the island, may be the single worst part of the novel.

After Steve falls out with the people transporting Shruti and Meena to his island (killing them), Shruti falls into the sea and has to make her way to Steve’s camp herself. It’s a long sequence (maybe fifty pages) and it’s painful to read. The author’s torture of Shruti is incredibly sadistic. First her feet are swollen from trying to swim in the freezing sea, and then she is stung in the eyes by a jellyfish. The author describes the latter incident through Shruti’s voice so perfectly that it can almost be seen as poetic:

“[M]y eyes started screaming in pain. Cos I must have flicked the jellyfish stingers right into them.”

From there, it only gets worse. After spending the night sleeping on a rock out at sea, Shruti finally makes her way to the island, wandering around blind (from the jellyfish sting) and frequently falling over and cutting herself. At one point she fears that a wound on her knee might be infected, so Packard devotes a paragraph to her describing herself clawing off her scab and clawing out the dirt underneath it. She wanders around for a couple more days without food and water (accidently eating what is suggested to be bird faeces) before being abruptly rescued by Steve.

The single worst part about this sequence is that it serves no purpose. The events have no lasting effect on Shruti (even her blindness heals later without explanation) and it does not develop her character in the slightest. (Not that she is ever developed at any point in the novel.) It doesn’t help her see things from a different perspective, it doesn’t make her stronger and the events are hardly referred to again. Packard indulges in long descriptions of her suffering for no reason.

And the novel just gets worse from here. It is revealed that Steve is trying to create his own society on the island with Meena and Shruti, and has developed his own traditions that they must both follow. One of these is that both women must have sex with him each night before they go to sleep (leading to some very indulgent rape sequences). There are also a bunch of other weird traditions that Steve presents, but most of them are only mentioned once. All three of them must tell a story after dinner each night, no one is allowed to swear except Steve and the two women are not allowed to speak like ‘commoners’ (though this has no effect on the amount of times Shruti says ‘cos’).

Shruti soon discovers that she will never be allowed to leave the island (“I can’t believe they’ve kidnapped me onto a desert island for the rest of my life”), she becomes keen to escape. It’s also revealed (very abruptly) that Meena is pregnant, which seems to happen for no other reason than for Packard to present us with another awful sequence. Meena dies in childbirth (the child dies too), and Steve and Shruti are forced to cremate her body. This leads to a description of the protagonist watching her friend’s body burn up with a dead baby half-sticking out of her. And just to make matters worse, Packard throws in a couple of sentences about the smell of Meena burning making Shruti crave pork.

Steve, it must be stated, is nothing more than a cartoon villain. He’s evil, he wants to make Shruti suffer and Packard fails to develop him any further than that. He seems to be so self-aware of this that, at one point, when he gets the upper-hand on Shruti he states, “That, my friend, is what they call a plot twist.” Towards the end of the story, Packard offers some hints that he might develop Steve into something a bit more – he’s shown to be distraught over Meena’s death – but ultimately this doesn’t lead anywhere.

Shruti finally escapes from the island through a chain of events I won’t go into too much. She steals some gold from Steve (who has two million dollars’ worth buried behind his hut) and uses it to travel back home to England. From here, the novel gets even more bizarre; we get a long description of Shruti opening a business to launder the money she stole from Steve (a jewellery shop named ‘Island’ – yes, ‘Island’), we see her try to reconnect with her mother (but it’s touched on so briefly that there’s no depth to it) and also witness her going to a creative writing workshop to pass off her story as a piece of fiction she wrote.

This last section in particular is incredibly odd, and revealing about the person who wrote The Painted Ocean. In fact, it reveals Packard’s own insecurities about the novel and its poor quality. The people in the creative writing workshop suggest that Shruti (or whatever Shruti names herself in the fictionalisation of her story) isn’t an interesting or compelling character. This is a point that I agree with, and it’s odd that Packard would draw attention to how poorly written his heroine is. Maybe he’s trying to be cool and meta, suggesting that the terribleness of his novel was intentional? I really don’t know.

In the novel’s workshop sequence, the workshop teacher also highlights that The Painted Ocean, in part, is an allegory for colonialism (the white man Steve enslaving two women of Indian origin in their own home country). At first it seems like Packard is simply drawing attention to how clever his novel is, just in case the reader has missed it, but then he undercuts this with Shruti’s reaction to the teacher’s reading of the story.

She doesn’t particularly like the colonial reading, and states the following: “And all I really want is for people to read my story, and to see what these characters did and maybe get involved in the plot, and then see how evil Steve was and how much they hate him, and how sorry they feel for ‘the Shruti character’.” (Side note: count the amount of ‘and’s in that sentence). She also states that the story basically boils down to “I was good, and Steve was bad, and Meena was bad”. I don’t quite understand what Packard is trying to achieve in this part… Is he trying to tell us that we should ignore the novel’s allegorical aspect (perhaps its only positive aspect) and instead just enjoy the story? It’s a really strange note for him to end the novel on.

Packard also uses the workshop sequence as a mouthpiece for one final point. In another class, Shruti tricks the teacher into thinking that the story was written by one of her white friends rather than herself, causing the teacher to question what right a white person has to ‘occupy a character of South Asian descent’. Once again, Packard is trying to pre-empt a possible criticism towards The Painted Ocean: what right does he have, a white man, to write about a woman of South Asian descent like Shruti? In my opinion, there is no problem with Packard writing a novel from the position of a woman of South Asian descent (though I suppose I am a white man as well). As long as he does it well, and he captures the culture well, then where’s the problem?

But unfortunately, he doesn’t capture anything well – as this rant shows. Packard isn’t interested in writing a novel about Indian culture, and is instead much more interested in writing an awful thriller about a woman who is kidnapped onto an island and turned into a slave. He is interested in writing a novel where none of the characters have any depth, where the plot seems to change focus every ten minutes and where he indulges in grotesque descriptions of his heroine being physically and mentally tortured.

The Painted Ocean is a stunningly bad novel, as this long rant hopefully demonstrates. What Packard has put together here is a fantastic guide of what not to do when writing a novel. If this book can get published, then any book can. Aspiring writers, I urge you to view The Painted Ocean as a sign of hope (as well as a sign of despair).

Bastille – Wild World

Like a lot of people around my age, I was pretty heavily into Bastille’s debut Bad Blood when it came out. I remember having songs like ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ and ‘Bad Blood’ on repeat, and loving the album’s connections to mythology (‘Icarus’) and pop-culture (‘Laura Palmer’). It’s only been three years since that album came out, but it feels like a hell of a lot longer… Perhaps it’s because Bastille has been touring that album pretty much non-stop since its release, or because everyone has been so eager to see how the band’s second album will turn out. ‘How will they follow up Bad Blood?’

And, in short, the answer to that question is ‘by giving us more of the same’. Wild World doesn’t do much that the band’s first album didn’t – the only somewhat noteworthy additions are guitars and movie quotes – and many of the songs from the album feel like they could fit comfortably onto Bad Blood and vice versa.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a bit disappointing. Since my obsession with Bad Blood, I’ve gotten into loads of other bands – many of them much better than Bastille – and so what worked for me in 2013 doesn’t really work for me as much now. I’d like to stress that this isn’t a bad pop album – in fact, it’s a really competent one, being filled with catchy lyrics and good hooks. It just feels disposable. While I’m enjoying the album now, I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll revisit most of its songs ever again after a few months.

As the band have failed to develop, a lot of the problems Bad Blood had are present on Wild World. They were kind of excusable the first time around, but by repeating them the band have just made them all the more glaring. Dan Smith’s lyrics are the main problem. Too many of the songs hinge on cliché phrases, which just dampens any emotional impact they might have had. ‘The lesser of two evils’, ‘sleeping with the fishes’, ‘bury my head in the sand’, ‘I can’t believe my ears’, ‘turn a blind eye’, ‘we’re not that different, you and I’… How many times have you heard these phrases before? Can’t Smith come up with anything more creative? There are some nice lyrics here and there – I like ‘Won’t you exorcise my mind?’ from ‘Send Them Off!’ – but there’s too much that just makes me cringe.

Relating to the band’s refusal to develop, this album feels way too safe. Bastille never veer from the basic ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus’ structure, and this leads to all of the songs feeling the same to an extent. What the band are offering here is a clump of 19 (which is probably too many for one album), three-and-a-half minute, playlist-ready pop songs.

I don’t despise Wild World, and will admit that I quite like some of the tracks on it. ‘Send Them Off!’ is a highlight for me with its fun trumpet-y opening, and ‘Two Evils’, despite having some of the weakest lyrics on the album, makes for a great change of pace – stripping the band down to nothing more than Smith’s vocals and a single guitar. I love the instruments on ‘The Currents’ and the political edge of the song, and I think ‘Winter of Our Youths’ acts as a pretty good melancholy closer to the album (if you ignore the bonus tracks on what is called the ‘complete edition’).

If you’re looking for a set of fun, catchy pop songs, then Wild World will more than meet your need. Though if you were expecting something new from Bastille, then you’ll probably find it as disappointing as me.

Essential Songs: ‘The Currents’, ‘Two Evils’, ‘Send Them Off!’.

 

Metronomy – Summer 08

On Metronomy’s new album, the band (essentially just Joseph Mount) tries to recapture the style of their breakout album, Nights Out. Summer 08, the title, is a not-so-subtle reference to this, with 2008 being the year of that album’s release.

Nights Out is probably my favourite Metronomy album – I just love its strangeness – and while the two albums that followed it were great, they did smooth out the band’s eccentricities and weirdness a bit. Compare ‘Holiday’ from Nights Out to ‘The Look’ from The English Riviera and you’ll get what I mean.

Summer 08’s great opening track, ‘Back Together’, screams of this weirdness. The odd timings of the guitar and drums create an off-kilter, alien feel. Mount’s vocals are equally odd/brilliant, with him doing a high-pitch, cartoonish impression of the woman he’s trying to woo in the song. At the end the whole song crescendos into a dreamy outro with a great bit of bass.

‘Old Skool’ is another stand-out track, carrying a similar feel to ‘Back Together’. While that track focuses on 2008 Mount’s arrogance with regards to wooing the ladies (‘I’m sure I’ll find some time inside my diary’), this one is about his resentment towards those richer and more successful than him. The whole song comes across as a jealous, whiney impression of a successful person – intentionally, of course – ‘Make some money / Make more money / With your new friends, throw a party’. It’s got a really great groove to it as well.

After ‘Old Skool’, Metronomy drops the weirdness a little bit, but keeps its focus on nostalgia. ’16 Beat’, for example, shows Mount reminiscing about when he started to make music. There are a lot of solid songs in the album’s second half, with ‘Night Owl’ perhaps being my favourite. For the first minute of the song, the only instrument playing is a particularly melancholy-sounding synth, and it captures the album’s whole nostalgia theme perfectly. When the song kicks off properly, it just gets better. It almost acts as a flipside to ‘Old Skool’, swapping fun for sadness.

This is another one of those albums where I wouldn’t say there are any bad songs, just unmemorable ones. ‘My House’, ‘Love’s Not an Obstacle’ and ‘Summer Jam’ are the sort of songs I enjoy when listening to them, but as soon as they finish, I can’t remember anything about them. Summer 08’s great songs definitely outweigh these ones, though.

Joseph Mount reembracing the band’s early eccentricities has led to a fun album that captures all the different sides of nostalgia well. Definitely worth listening to, even if you aren’t familiar with Metronomy’s other stuff.

Essential Songs: ‘Back Together’, ‘Old Skool’, ‘Night Owl’.

Neil Gaiman – The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is typical Neil Gaiman. It’s got the sort of the storyline that only he could write and characters only he could create. It’s got that childhood joyfulness about it, despite, at the same time, feeling very adult. And like most Neil Gaiman books, it’s very good.

After returning to the town he grew up in for a funeral, a man finds himself remembering things about his childhood he had long forgotten… Sitting in a farmhouse he hasn’t visited in decades, the man slowly recalls the time he spent with a girl named Lettie Hemstock and the adventure they went on together.

The novel is about memory; forgetting things, remembering things and misremembering things. We all did exciting things when we were kids, went on adventures, made up stories… and sometimes it only takes the smallest thing to cause these memories to come back to us with the clearest clarity. This is what I think Gaiman is trying to tap into with this novel – and, if so, it’s something he does really well. It only takes the smallest moment to make the protagonist’s entire adventure with Lettie to come flooding back to him – after it had escaped from him – and it causes him to relive his childhood again. At the back of the book, Gaiman even notes that his inspiration for the novel came from his father telling him about an event from his childhood that he had completely forgotten about.

Like most of his novels, Gaiman crams The Ocean at the End of the Lane to the brim with ideas. I wouldn’t say it works quite as well for me here as it did in American Gods and Stardust, but it’s still a joy to see all the fantastical things that come out of his head. And it really ties into the child perspective of the novel. All kids come up with weird and wonderful ideas, and Gaiman’s method of filling the book with fantastical ideas really seems to reflect that. The protagonist’s childhood adventure – despite its darker moments – almost seems like the sort of thing a kid would come up with.

And like a child’s story, if you look too deeply into the novel and try to analyse it too much, it does start to come apart at the seams a little bit, and becomes a little bit nonsensical. So don’t. Just relish the opportunity to become a child again, and enjoy all the book’s great colourful characters; Lettie, Old Mrs Hemstock, Ursula Monkton…

Neil Gaiman has once again written the sort of story that all writers wish they could write.

Glass Animals – How to be a Human Being

One of the most distinctive things about Glass Animals’ debut album Zaba was its great jungle vibe; ambient jungle sounds run in the background on all of the tracks and frontman David Bayley spends much of the album singing about ‘snake-baboons’ and ‘ape-swines’. This vibe served Glass Animals well, and helped fuel some really good songs such as ‘Black Mambo’ and ‘Pools’.

But on their second album, How to be a Human Being, the jungle theme has been done away with almost completely. As the album’s title suggests, they’ve moved on from animals to people. Now they’re singing about living with your mum, waiting in line for premade sandwiches and eating mayonnaise from the jar. Each of the album’s songs is a vignette about a different character’s life. So while they may have ditched their last album’s theme, they’ve found a new one to replace it – one that might be even better.

Less restricted in terms of subject matter, the band is able to make music about whatever they want, and the lyrics, and Bailey’s delivery of them, are such a damn pleasure because of it. I could spend the whole of this review just listing the lyrics from this album – ‘thought that I was / Northern Camden’s own Flash Gordon’ – ‘pineapples are in my head’ – ‘she said I look fat / but I look fantastic’ – but I’ll try to limit myself. Besides, you’re probably better off just listening to the album; the delivery of them is part of what makes them so memorable.

The album is more consistent in terms of song quality than Zaba overall, but they don’t fit together quite as cohesively. There’s a lot of different styles on this album, and every song has a different feel to it. There are big and theatrical songs like ‘Life Itself’, chilled out ones like ‘Season 2 Episode 3’, melancholy ones like ‘Agnes’ and very R&Bish ones like ‘Cane Shuga’. Each style reflects on the song and its subject-matter perfectly. For example, ‘Season 2 Episode 3’ has a chilled out feel to it because it’s about a girl who sits around all day eating cereal and getting blazed, while ‘Take a Slice’ is loud and in-your-face because that’s what its main character is like: ‘gonna fuck my way through college’.

And the best thing about the album’s varying moods is that the band masters pretty much all of them. I loved the theatrical songs and I loved the slow ones. Glass Animals have really come into their own with this album, and they improve on almost every aspect of their debut. The only songs I’m not overly keen on are ‘Cane Shuga’ and ‘[Premade Sandwiches]’. ‘Cane Shuga’’s lyrics are great and memorable, but the style of the song didn’t do much for me. ‘[Premade Sandwiches]’ was interesting – it’s a 40 second spoken word song – but I don’t feel like the album would have lost much if they’d decided to leave it out.

Overall, How to be a Human Being is one of my favourite albums of the year so far. It’s got a great sound, great lyrics, great variety… Not sure there’s much more I could have wanted from it.

Essential Songs: ‘Life Itself’, ‘Season 2 Episode 3’, ‘Pork Soda’.