Book Review of Total Fallout by Alex Shaw

This is a very competent sequel to the author’s novel “Total Blackout”. However, this time around the “superweapon” is much more credible and has interesting implications. Indeed, the main reason why I am giving this five stars instead of four is because I think the author is presenting a possibility to which we should give some serious attention. In effect, it is a weapon which allows one nation, or organisation, to get two or more of its enemies (or victims) to use their own weapons to destroy each other, largely at their own expense.

Even as the action level of the plot is about not knowing what the truth is or who you can trust -and this makes it an effective thriller- the question the novel is asking is whether in the very near future we will be able to trust any news, idea or information to be true. The answer seems to be: perhaps, but only by looking at everything we know and examining many obscure or neglected sources, rather than relying on and taking at face value what we are told by convenient, “trusted” or “authenticated” sources, any of which might be subtly corrupted or seamlessly falsified.

This isn’t a highly intellectual book, but it is asking questions which the high intellectuals, so far, ain’t competent to answer!

 

Total Fallout by Alex Shaw is published by HQ Digital on the 19^th of February 2021

Book Review of “Light Perpetual” by Francis Spufford

Either despite or because of the fact that Light Perpetual ignores a lot of given wisdom in the literary world and breaks many of the rules which the intelligentsia set for each other, let alone us plebs, it is one of the best books I have reviewed in the past few years and I am quite selective about what I request from Net Galley for review.

None of the five principal characters is presented as a hate figure (or as someone to be mocked) at any point, even though they all get involved in bad scenes and two of them would, in any intelligentsia-compliant novel, be text-book examples of very stupid people doing bad things: one becomes an unrepentant property developer, the other falls in love with and marries a man she knows to be a violent wide-boy who then becomes a skinhead and a leading figure in the neo-fascist “British Movement.” Such evil isn’t hidden, denied or excused but neither is it judged on political reflexes or nostrums. And, believe me, the author doesn’t shrink from making his evil shocking.

Other characters take a decade or more to recover from setbacks (which is how it actually is in the real world: I know this) and even then they fail to make everything perfect for themselves and their loved ones.

This book also contains the only sermon I have read in the past decade or two by a fictional black evangelical preacher, which is not a parody or a self-vindicating declaration of anti-Christian bias dressed up as reportage. It is a plain good sermon and whilst I would not expect to hear it from a Roman Catholic or Anglican priest of any trendiness level whatsoever, it is genuinely theologically sound. The author is disposed to show black evangelical preachers as they are, and not as it is fashionable to perceive them. And I grew up as a white boy with a beloved Jamaican “Auntie” taking me along to meet quite a few of the breed.

Lastly, this novel breaks the rules by being about salvation by Grace rather than by conformity with either social-political theory or laws. 

 

Light Perpetual is published by Faber and Faber on the 4^th of February 2021