Granskningar och kommentarer

You probably won't get this novel if you don't remember those times, those situations, where music can be magic. Not just nice to listen to, or even the pure emotional rush of it, but actual honest-to-goodness world-changing magic. And "remember" is indeed a key word here; just like music accesses some part of our brain beyond language, so do memories. Signal To Noise, therefore, takes place in two timelines: in 1989, when three outcasts at a Mexico City high school discover that they can use music to cast actual spells, and twenty years later, when Meche Vega returns home for the first time in 20 years to bury her estranged father and has to start sorting through her memories of what happened.

It's a novel about relationship and memories that doubles as playlist, or rather as mix tape; listening to the playlist (Spotify), a mix of old rock and jazz classics and somewhat cheesy, overproduced 80s Mexican pop, is almost necessary. It's not that I hear the magic in all those songs, or even that Moreno-García can always capture it in writing - but it still triggers something in me, a memory that doesn't have to go with that particular song. Our mixtapes are memories of untold histories, to quote a poet.

You might argue that the misunderstood-loner-in-high-school-discovers-magic-powers (though the magic bit is nicely understated, neither solving or spoiling anything by itself) plot is trite. Trite like an 80s pop song, that at one point meant everything and now gathers dust. Sure. You might even argue that it's hard to like (who decided we have to like fictional characters anyway) Meche, I still call her a bizarrely produced but brilliant single, all elbows, too loud drums and sharp notes. And while most of the action takes place in 1989, it's the distance - and the closing of that distance - 20 years later that makes the novel more than just a novelty. Sure it's been done before, sure all those drum machines and DX7s and teenage drama sound a bit silly today, but we lived through them, they changed our world, and it would be a lie to forget it.

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts..."

Six days into a 31-day mission on Mars, they get hit by a huge sandstorm. Abort mission. The astronauts sprint for the launch vehicle, one of them gets speared by flying debris, and his colleagues have to leave him for dead and take off.

Hours later, he wakes up in the wreckage of the expedition. Alone on Mars with no way to get off the planet or communicate with Earth. And after his first reaction ("I'm fucked!") he sets about doing what people do: Survive. (Yes, it's basically The Lonely Astronaut done seriously.)

This is about as hard as science fiction gets: No aliens, no quick hops between planets, no sudden discoveries of ancient Martian secrets, no corrupt politicians, no midichlorians... in fact, no antagonists of any kind beyond Mars itself. Weir has put a lot, and I mean a LOT into the details; what would NASA bring to Mars, and how would one man realistically be able to use it to MacGyver his way to surviving and getting home?

Of course, that would make the book a long list of wattage, circuitry, oxygen percentages and chemical reactions, so Our Hero (inevitably) turns out to be the sort of person who reacts to difficulties with humour. For the most part, the story gets told through his journal, which bolsters all the (as far as most readers will be able to tell remarkably realistic) technobabble with curses, jokes, explanations along the lines of "I adapted it using an advanced technical procedure called 'hitting it with a hammer'", repeated frustration that the only music the crew brought to Mars was an endless supply of 70s disco... You get the picture. Mark Watney is a fun narrator, even when he's inches from death, as he literally is throughout the entire novel.

Which is my only real problem with it; for all that the Mars parts of it are basically a found-footage film in writing, the constant gallows humour never really gives the story time to breathe (sorry) and the rare bits where Weir breaks out and starts describing Mark's situation in third person become jarringly dramatic. I know NASA pick their people very carefully - just look at Neil Armstrong, ffs - but seriously, EVERYONE from the Mars astronauts to the geeks at NASA are complete dashing badasses in their fields here. You'd think there'd be some time for at least moments of despair and fear; but the novel is so busy keeping its physics straight, its psychology tends to be about as clichéd as the 70s TV series Mark is forced to watch.

Oh well, it's just a book, and I should really just relax. I've rarely been this entertained by page upon page of technicalities; it's not a perfect SF novel, but it's an admirable one.

Three? Four? I'm honestly torn on this book. The problem isn't Sarah Waters the novelist so much as Sarah Waters the detective novelist. As usual, she picks a historical setting (this time, 1920s London) and then starts uncovering hidden layers both within the characters, within society, and within the narrative itself. Her characters never "just happen to be gay", without making that ALL the book is about; when Waters writes a story about a posh but impoverished landlady who falls for her lower-class tenant's wife, she uses that not only to tell a love story that must happen in secret for various reasons, and to explore 1920s views on women's sexuality and homosexuality (which could make the book a lot drier than it is), but also to have a narrator who queers (heh) the story itself. Narrators who are used to keeping things hidden - to live just to the left of the blinkers "polite" society - can see a lot of other things that are out there. Even if they don't see their own blinkers.

That's all neat, and Waters' eye for detail and character is just as good as ever; this is a novel where class, gender, sexuality, all those things that you're not supposed to cross take turns leading the plot (seriously, more novels should use sociolects as well as Waters does here).

But then, inevitably for a novel set in Agatha Christie's England, there's the crime story as well. And that's where The Paying Guests tends to make me yawn. It's not that it's implausible or anything, or that it's not related to the main plot, which it very much is; but it just goes on and on, repeating the same dilemmas and doubts, introducing new twists that don't always get properly addressed... Waters uses it to dig into her characters, which is the perfect way to use it, but I'm not completely sure she manages to dig her way out again. Which may well be the point; there are no easy ways out for this plot, and pretending otherwise would break the setting.

That still leaves the novel hovering between a solid four and a very strong three. So, y'know, it's not BAD. At its best, among stolen touches and miscommunication and rapidly changing expectations, it's even very good.

As fascinating and appetite-whetting as it wants to be, I can't quite shake the feeling that it gets wrong what most other "Subject X in The Simpsons" gets wrong: it tries to argue that the central focus of the series is their pet subject, rather than try to show how all the different approaches poured into the series work together.

Also, the Swedish translation is horrible. Just because someone knows how to translate pop-science books clearly doesn't mean they know how to translate comedy.