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There's a standard plot for single-parent ghost stories: Single woman (almost never a man) with small child moves into new flat, tries to balance parenthood, supporting herself and her child, and society's mixed views of single parenthood. The more it all gets to her, the more she starts to notice that something is Wrong in the flat. That's The Exorcist, that's Dark Water, that's (the mostly excellent 2014 film) The Babadook... To some extent it's The Turn Of The Screw as well.

Junge makes the clever move of having the young mother be a West German moved to the former East Berlin, about 10 years after the reunification, adding another ghost layer; an entire country, an entire set of rules and social mores and memories that have officially ceased to exist. There's an invisible country just underneath the one she sees, and her neighbours have all known each other for a long time, so who does she turn to when her 2-year-old son starts talking about seeing a strange woman in their flat...? Is there an actual ghost, or is she the young reunited German just slowly losing track of where she is and whether she shares the same Germany as her parents and her neighbours...?

Sadly, the novel never quite lives up to what the setup promises. Junge never raises the stakes enough to make it a good ghost story - especially with the rather lame ending - and her protagonist/narrator never quite digs deeply enough into the world she finds herself in to be much more than a passive observer. It's still a great setup, and it delivers for a while, but putters out to a weak ***.

Essentially Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable set during Stalin's purges and stretched to 250 pages, Darkness And Noon is obviously dated but not not outdated in the way it circles the question of Greater Good, the worth of one life vs the worth of a thousand, the question of just what an idea is worth, etc. The irony: A revolution based on an idea of progress inevitably (?) becomes a (literally rather than politically) conservative regime dedicated to continuing refining the idea and fighting against any notion of changing it. (Makes me wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy vs any of its challengers - how do you sell an idea that's just about what you do now as a contender to an idea that promises either utopia or apocalypse in the future? Is the problem of liberalism that it lacks the endgame that Lenin, Hitler, Jesus or Mohammed can offer? Were the political ideologies of the short 20th century just secularized escatology?)

At the same time, as a novel, it tends to get very longwinded. What makes an interesting philosophical argument can also make for a fairly dry novel, as Koestler's small cast of characters walk around in their cells contemplating political theory. Any boredom is saved by the last paragraph, though, which is glorious.

Even more The Road with half-human hybrids than volume 1.

I kind of like that the hero is basically Paul Newman's character from Slap Shot.

Watch this video, and you'll get a sense of what I like about this novel. (Or just watch it anyway, because it's a good way to spend 3 minutes of your life if you're even remotely interested in space travel.)

That video is where this novel lives: 300 years from now, mankind has.spread throughout the solar system, terraforming Mars, living in domes on other planets and moons, shuttling back-and-forth between them in hollowed-out asteroids converted to tiny little custom-made worlds. We haven't quite escaped the increasingly decrepit Earth, which continues to struggle with political divide and a collapsing environment that's flooded just about every major city, but now we have something that starts to look like options.

Exactly how realistic this is isn't the point; Robinson makes it seem plausible, and it gives him a playground where he can speculate at length exactly what it's like to live on Mercury, or on Titan, or be one of the millions of workers trying to terraform Venus; but also, and this is the really nifty part, what it does to society. Because not only has mankind mastered interplanetary travel here, but they've almost conquered aging - there are people who, while considered old, are still active members of society at 200, and our heroine is 130. A far more interesting question than "How long can we live in zero G" is "How bored would we get by age 150?" Just look at all the 40-going-on-21-year-olds around you and extrapolate that. Robinson shows humanity balkanazing - occupation-wise, appearance-wise, gender-wise, sexuality-wise, ethnicity-wise, even size-wise; "speciating before our eyes". And yet they're still all very human, with the same issues and existential (and class) struggles as today. That's a brilliant, endlessly detailed setting for a novel, and Robinson is just enough of a poet to want to show it from a lot of different angles, mixing the narrative up with excerpts from works written within this world, free-form ruminations on it, etc.

And then there's the plot. Which, unfortunately, is a mess; imagine a James Ellroy novel (you know, it's all about water rights!) IN SPACE, except without all the clever conflicts of interest and convoluted plots and character studies. Or sex. Or violence. Or rather, it's there, but so perfunctory you'll be excused for missing it. Above all, the whole thing suffers from a ridiculous case of everything being centered around our main three or four characters, whether they want it to or not. And it's hard enough to imagine a jaded cop accidentally overhearing the mayor of LA plotting something, but when we're talking about a whole solar system of scores of billions of people spread out from Mercury (or technically, from the Vulcanoids - how neat is that?) to Pluto, and everything is still done by THREE FLIPPIN' PEOPLE, let's just say you'll be excused for thinking it'll all turn out to be a dream. (Though that would explain the 100 pages in the middle where even Robinson seems to get bored with the plot and just has the characters go off on a completely different adventure for a while.)

2312 never ceases to fascinate me, but it's all in the details. It comes across much like one of those little asteroid-worlds that our heroine spent her youth designing and now regards with mild contempt; you want to explore it on foot (or by rocketship, I guess), endlessly, while avoiding the people in it.

A masterpiece of text, not of story. Perhaps it's a sign of success for the next wave of immigrants (because this is very much an American novel, which is neither good nor bad) to get the same exact story - the all-American family therapy of unspoken things revealed - as the previous ones did. And it's not a bad or undeserving story as such. Just, y'know, same old same old, only with a different spin.

Selasi's prose is a marvel - one long rap in 12/8, ta-TA-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-TA! - that's just as enthralling as when I saw her do a reading last year and realised I had to read this book. But at some point, despite myself, I start thinking it's a little too much. The voice never changes, never falters, just keeps the same rhythm no matter what (and I find myself trying to write the same meter, the beat still pounding the back of my head). It's a good song, just overproduced; a Coltrane yet to find out what notes not to play.

Doomsday Book is by no means a perfect novel; though it may just be the perfect novel for Christmas 2014.

It's tempting to say, like some reviews here do, that it really needs an editor. Not because there's anything wrong with taking your time to set things up, but because for the longest time, almost nothing happens - and it does so in an annoyingly self-assured way. She establishes her two separate timelines and then spends ages describing both without much happening, endlessly repeating jokes that weren't very funny the first time, and while I actually kind of like that her future version of Oxford is painfully 1970-ish (land lines! No indoor heating! Computer terminals that take up entire wings!), at times it's like an unfunny take on Pratchett's Unseen University. The 14th century timeline is more interesting, but again, repetitive as fuck and frustrating in that the plot is entirely about our heroine waiting to get the chance to talk to this one guy who always seems to be otherwise occupied. And sometime around page 300, you start wondering if the person who wrote the blurb on the back simply got bored and made something up.

But stick with it. Because Willis is playing a long game, and the thing about the world ending is it never arrives with trumpets and a huge banner saying "TURN BACK NOW".

Because this is a novel about the black death, and if you need spoiler warnings to tell you that things are not going to end up as cutesy as they start out, then I'm sorry but why are you even bothering reading this? The black death wiped out half of Europe. There were villages, entire towns, that simply ceased to exist and were forgotten for centuries - but that's the historical perspective, which completely ignores how the people themselves saw it. Our safe, trauma-avoiding 21st century culture has no tools for handling that kind of carnage; we have monuments with the names of every victim of 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami, etc. (Every victim from where we're from, that is.) They number in the thousands. We panic when a single (white) ebola patient is discovered. When we get to the shoah, our minds balk; six million dead? An anomaly; evil; incomprehensible, even though it's so clearly delineated. It becomes a statistic, safely out of range. We may pity the people of 1348, so clueless, so uninformed, so savage in their reactions - witch burnings! Pogroms! "Medicine" that only made things worse! All so very different, of course, from our society (just yesterday someone, cheered on by politicians who talk about the necessity of listening to the concerns of the common man, burned down a mosque in Sweden). The people of 1348 didn't know what a germ was; what's our excuse?

Yes, Willis openly invites those comparisons, and not subtly, but there's nothing subtle about the topic of fear of the unknown, of our need to find something to blame. That joke was never funny in the first place. And if you stick with it, Doomsday Book might just break your heart.

Everything dies, baby that's a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back

En idé som låter krystad men faktiskt visar sig fungera; Linde tar alltså Springsteens Nebraska och återberättar den som en historia om Norrland, bygger ut varje låt till ett kapitel i en berättelse som snart hittar förgreningar och rötter och kronor långt bortom Nebraskas raka motorvägar och övergivna bondgårdar. Drömmen om Amerrkat - om det Andra, om Friheten, om det mytologiska Last Stand - lever ju ofta starkast i en Volvo 240 med tärningar i backspegeln. Men man kan inte göra sådana saker i Sverige, här blir de bara brott, bara deckare, bara depression, bara diskbänksdrama; Linde lånar Springsteens patos lika mycket som hans textrader, placerar den mörka amerikanska himlen över det sossiga Sverige.

Sen jo, ibland kan jag önska att hon gömt förlagan ännu något bättre. Egentligen borde det inte vara konstigare att anpassa en skiva till en roman än att anpassa en roman till en film (eller en låt till en film, som Sean Penn gjorde med "Highway Patrolman"). Men Springsteens raka arbetarklassmonologer samsas inte alltid helt väl med Lindes mer impressionistiska (om det nu inte är för att jag kan Nebraska i princip utantill); varje gång hon faktiskt citerar rakt av ur en låt känns det lite påklistrat. Men ändå. Fint.