Review: Hurricane Gold (Young Bond #4)
Jan. 30th, 2010 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiI love Charlie Higson.
This is because the man terrifies the shit out of me. I mean, Steven Moffat does things that I understand are scary in theory but don't feel in practice (the exception being The Empty Child), Kelley Armstrong occasionally freaks me out and the last chapter of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is forever etched in my memory, but for pure untainted disgusting, gory horror, the kind that gets into my bones and has me utterly gripped even as I squirm, and then cracks a joke and makes me laugh, it's Higson every time. In the first three books of this series, he's had his erstwhile protagonist:
To say nothing of the various disturbing deaths of side characters and the fucking running joke in Double or Die where one of the mooks keeps losing body parts in unlikely Bond-related circumstances, counting down to his final death.
And these are just his YA novels. Were I to add in Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), I could also mention beheading, incurable measles, umbrella-through-the-chest, David Tennant in a bloodstained wedding dress wielding a chainsaw... oh, and a ghost clearing a room by farting.
This isn't to say that he's perfect, of course. Blood Fever had severe pacing problems, and Higson's style is quite stark and clipped - which is perfect for describing the effects of a cloud of hungry mosquitoes descending, but not so good for your common-or-garden descriptions of rooms and events. He also has a tendency towards unnecessary exposition: I understand the desire to tell us your antagonist's backstory, to prevent him from appearing to be nothing more than a card-carrying villain with a goatee and a white cat, but really, there are better ways to get it in than a page-and-a-half infodump during the preface. When he starts doing it with scenery, it gets even more irritating, and when, as occurred with the Mithraism dump in Blood Fever, it's a subject I actually know quite a lot about and he's oversimplified it dreadfully, it becomes painful.
But! This is not Blood Fever, I know shamefully little about Mayan culture (or Mexico in general for that matter), and I do declare that Hurricane Gold is, despite the customary style issues, even better than Silverfin.
Having just barely recovered from the events of Double or Die, and not yet fit to return to school, James - now roughly fourteen years old, although the chronology is a little fuzzy - accompanies his aunt to Mexico where she's going to the archaeological site at Palenque. He's left behind with her friend, Jack Stone, and his children, Precious (aged ~12-13, and Higson is punny) and Jack Jr (JJ, ~6).
And once Jack Sr and Aunt Charmian have helpfully cleared off to Palenque, there's a hurricane... and the house is raided by gangsters. The moral of this story is to never leave a protagonist unattended.
Higson's great strength as a writer is how very body-centred he is. He never lets you forget just how many bruises, scrapes and internal bleeds his characters have acquired: they don't magically heal, they need to eat and sleep with shocking regularity, and for all that I whinge about over-exposition, his description is top-notch. That hurricane was astoundingly real, its effects on the house - and on the characters as they tried to navigate it and deal with the gangsters - terrifyingly believable. My one nitpick came right at the end of the sequence, when Our Heroes 'miraculously' found a dry change of clothes. Miraculously? Come on, that's no better than the dreaded 'somehow'!
It's clothes, though: food and water (especially clean drinking water) are a consistent problem from here on out, and it's not as if those clothes don't end up ripped to shreds anyway.
And from there, we're off! One hero, one prissy heroine, one small boy with an infected leg wound. Again, massive props to Higson for his handling of that - I knew I was reading a YA novel, I knew the child could never die in children's literature... and yet he almost had me convinced that JJ would die, and certainly had me convinced that the boy was dying. Body-centred writing, people. The man never once lets you forget about all the crap his characters have already been through.
Speaking of characters, his are strong as ever. I can see how a new reader might have had a problem with Precious, though - for the first couple of chapters she's nothing more than your stereotypical spoiled rich brat, and while Higson did a marvellous job of making me hate her within five lines, if I hadn't already trusted him as a writer I might well have been put off by that. As it is, she develops rapidly and interestingly, and by the end she's definitely earned her place as the first true Bond Girl (previous novels have had girls, but James hasn't been interested. His libido is starting to develop, it seems).
The two major antagonists were fairly bland, both in the mould of 'coldly calculating impassive'. They both served their purposes, and they were distinct and believable in their own rights, but characterising his villains really isn't Higson's strong point any more than it seems to have been Fleming's.
His mooks, however...
Oh, his poor mooks. From those guys in R&H: Paranoia who're trying to gatecrash the conference and kill Milton to that guy in Double or Die who loses a body part every time we see him, Higson's mooks are doomed to slow, painful and above all interesting deaths. There's Strabo and Sakata, one of whom dies quite dully and the other of whom has an attack of conscience (though not before helpfully teaching James some jujitsu), and then... there's Whatzat and Manny.
Whatzat is a deaf explosions expert who dies quite gruesomely. Manny... Manny gets pushed out of a window during the hurricane and spends the rest of the novel with severe brain trauma, including some utterly gruesome (and fascinating) physical symptoms.
The plot culminates in what is, basically, a dungeon crawl designed by the DM from Hell. The biggest problem here is the meta: all the time Our Heroes were wondering what the final task was and what was lurking in the water tank, this reader was thinking, "There's a crocodile on the cover. I bet it's a crocodile," and funnily enough...
Again, though, that evil talent for description won out.
Like two of its three older siblings, Hurricane Gold was beautifully plotted and well-paced, keeping the action going without once making it clear how the end was going to come about, and it ties up very nicely. There's a lovely running joke where, at the beginning of every part (the book being split into three 'acts'), we see a letter written to James by someone from home - and he himself only sees the first one. And some foreshadowing, too, in that he will apparently never see the others... which does not bode well for By Royal Command.
It's dark and gruesome and funny, often all at the same time, and terrifyingly believable. I wish I could find something bad to say, except for my usual moans about exposition, but I can't: I love Charlie Higson.
This is because the man terrifies the shit out of me. I mean, Steven Moffat does things that I understand are scary in theory but don't feel in practice (the exception being The Empty Child), Kelley Armstrong occasionally freaks me out and the last chapter of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is forever etched in my memory, but for pure untainted disgusting, gory horror, the kind that gets into my bones and has me utterly gripped even as I squirm, and then cracks a joke and makes me laugh, it's Higson every time. In the first three books of this series, he's had his erstwhile protagonist:
- Immersed in a tank of hungry eels
- Nearly turned into an eel-human mutant... thing
- Tied to a stake in the middle of a jungle and eaten alive by mosquitoes
- Waterboarded with high-proof liquor, resulting in alcohol poisoning
To say nothing of the various disturbing deaths of side characters and the fucking running joke in Double or Die where one of the mooks keeps losing body parts in unlikely Bond-related circumstances, counting down to his final death.
And these are just his YA novels. Were I to add in Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), I could also mention beheading, incurable measles, umbrella-through-the-chest, David Tennant in a bloodstained wedding dress wielding a chainsaw... oh, and a ghost clearing a room by farting.
This isn't to say that he's perfect, of course. Blood Fever had severe pacing problems, and Higson's style is quite stark and clipped - which is perfect for describing the effects of a cloud of hungry mosquitoes descending, but not so good for your common-or-garden descriptions of rooms and events. He also has a tendency towards unnecessary exposition: I understand the desire to tell us your antagonist's backstory, to prevent him from appearing to be nothing more than a card-carrying villain with a goatee and a white cat, but really, there are better ways to get it in than a page-and-a-half infodump during the preface. When he starts doing it with scenery, it gets even more irritating, and when, as occurred with the Mithraism dump in Blood Fever, it's a subject I actually know quite a lot about and he's oversimplified it dreadfully, it becomes painful.
But! This is not Blood Fever, I know shamefully little about Mayan culture (or Mexico in general for that matter), and I do declare that Hurricane Gold is, despite the customary style issues, even better than Silverfin.
Having just barely recovered from the events of Double or Die, and not yet fit to return to school, James - now roughly fourteen years old, although the chronology is a little fuzzy - accompanies his aunt to Mexico where she's going to the archaeological site at Palenque. He's left behind with her friend, Jack Stone, and his children, Precious (aged ~12-13, and Higson is punny) and Jack Jr (JJ, ~6).
And once Jack Sr and Aunt Charmian have helpfully cleared off to Palenque, there's a hurricane... and the house is raided by gangsters. The moral of this story is to never leave a protagonist unattended.
Higson's great strength as a writer is how very body-centred he is. He never lets you forget just how many bruises, scrapes and internal bleeds his characters have acquired: they don't magically heal, they need to eat and sleep with shocking regularity, and for all that I whinge about over-exposition, his description is top-notch. That hurricane was astoundingly real, its effects on the house - and on the characters as they tried to navigate it and deal with the gangsters - terrifyingly believable. My one nitpick came right at the end of the sequence, when Our Heroes 'miraculously' found a dry change of clothes. Miraculously? Come on, that's no better than the dreaded 'somehow'!
It's clothes, though: food and water (especially clean drinking water) are a consistent problem from here on out, and it's not as if those clothes don't end up ripped to shreds anyway.
And from there, we're off! One hero, one prissy heroine, one small boy with an infected leg wound. Again, massive props to Higson for his handling of that - I knew I was reading a YA novel, I knew the child could never die in children's literature... and yet he almost had me convinced that JJ would die, and certainly had me convinced that the boy was dying. Body-centred writing, people. The man never once lets you forget about all the crap his characters have already been through.
Speaking of characters, his are strong as ever. I can see how a new reader might have had a problem with Precious, though - for the first couple of chapters she's nothing more than your stereotypical spoiled rich brat, and while Higson did a marvellous job of making me hate her within five lines, if I hadn't already trusted him as a writer I might well have been put off by that. As it is, she develops rapidly and interestingly, and by the end she's definitely earned her place as the first true Bond Girl (previous novels have had girls, but James hasn't been interested. His libido is starting to develop, it seems).
The two major antagonists were fairly bland, both in the mould of 'coldly calculating impassive'. They both served their purposes, and they were distinct and believable in their own rights, but characterising his villains really isn't Higson's strong point any more than it seems to have been Fleming's.
His mooks, however...
Oh, his poor mooks. From those guys in R&H: Paranoia who're trying to gatecrash the conference and kill Milton to that guy in Double or Die who loses a body part every time we see him, Higson's mooks are doomed to slow, painful and above all interesting deaths. There's Strabo and Sakata, one of whom dies quite dully and the other of whom has an attack of conscience (though not before helpfully teaching James some jujitsu), and then... there's Whatzat and Manny.
Whatzat is a deaf explosions expert who dies quite gruesomely. Manny... Manny gets pushed out of a window during the hurricane and spends the rest of the novel with severe brain trauma, including some utterly gruesome (and fascinating) physical symptoms.
The plot culminates in what is, basically, a dungeon crawl designed by the DM from Hell. The biggest problem here is the meta: all the time Our Heroes were wondering what the final task was and what was lurking in the water tank, this reader was thinking, "There's a crocodile on the cover. I bet it's a crocodile," and funnily enough...
Again, though, that evil talent for description won out.
Like two of its three older siblings, Hurricane Gold was beautifully plotted and well-paced, keeping the action going without once making it clear how the end was going to come about, and it ties up very nicely. There's a lovely running joke where, at the beginning of every part (the book being split into three 'acts'), we see a letter written to James by someone from home - and he himself only sees the first one. And some foreshadowing, too, in that he will apparently never see the others... which does not bode well for By Royal Command.
It's dark and gruesome and funny, often all at the same time, and terrifyingly believable. I wish I could find something bad to say, except for my usual moans about exposition, but I can't: I love Charlie Higson.