Warlord of Mars (Arvid Nelson, Steven Sadowski and Lui Antonio)

One of the most productive avenues for authors of comics is mining pulp fiction of the early twentieth century. It was while browsing through various Conan titles on Amazon that I came across this adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Warlord of Mars'. Seduced immediately by the gorgeous art and pulp storyline, I ordered it just before Christmas.

This trade paperback collects the entire first run of Dynamite's 'Warlord of Mars' comic. The tale starts in post-Civil War Arizona, where John Carter, late of Virginia's army, is mysteriously transported from a cave to the red planet, known to locals as Barsoom. There he finds a race of four armed green warriors, the Tharks, who are mostly savage and brutish, apart from a few heroes, such as Tars Tarkas, who Carter quickly befriends out of mutual respect. The atmosphere of Mars makes Carter un-naturally strong and quick, and with his martial training on earth, he becomes a peerless warrior and chieftain among the Tharks. But then, one fateful day, he realises that the green men are not alone on Barsoom: the Tharks capture a princess of the "red men" (physiologically the same as humans, but red skinned) who is a compelling, scanitily glad, passionate beauty. Dejah Thoris immediately becomes Carter's raison d'etre, and he daringly jail breaks her...and this is just the start of their adventures together.

The comic strip is framed by an opening section penned by "Edgar Rice Burroughs" explaining how "Uncle Jack" told him these stories and left him these manuscripts, and also by a closing section which inventories the technology of Barsoom. I don't read a lot of comics/trade paperbacks/graphic novels, so to catch my eye, a work of this genre has to stand out from the crowd. This does just that, a rollicking adventure, economically told and gorgeously illustrated, complementing rather than replacing Burroughs' original pulp adventure, styaing true to the world, the characters and the vision. Recommended.

The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes)

The Booker Prize for Fiction (or "The Man Booker Prize" as it's called these days) creates excitement and debate around the literary world like no other award. Over the years, it's been awarded to works of genius (Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' in 1981), works of excellence (Margaret Atwood's 'The Blind Assassin' in 2000), works of solid literary merit (Pat Barker's 'The Ghost Road' in 1995) and works which were merely good (Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' in 1997). Interestingly enough, I hadn't read a Booker winner since 2001, when Peter Carey secured the prize with 'The True History of the Kelly Gang'. None of the winners since then had piqued my interest enough to pick them up. I've perused the displays of Booker nominees in the bookshops, sure, but not bit the bullet. So it was a pleasant surprise to pick up 'The Sense of an Ending' in Waterstone's back in October and have my interest well and truly piqued. Registering my interest, my girlfriend put this under our Christmas tree for me, and here we are.

A tightly structured and beautifully written little novella, 'The Sense of an Ending' is predicated on the fact that our memories and recollections can in fact be trumped by actual historical documents, which may place ourselves in a less favourable light. The novella asks the very pertinent question "what is history?". Is it the song of the victor or the self-delusion of the defeated, or indeed both? Is there such a thing as history if we cannot understand the history of the historian? What kind of power does the distorting hand of time hold over us and can we ever come to terms with this? These philosophical musings are masterfully woven into Barnes' plot, so we become painfully aware of our own failings, just as the narrator and protagonist, Tony Webster, becomes painfully aware of his. It's an unsettling, dark and nasty little tale, just as most of the best books tend to be, at least in my view.

The book begins in a modest public day school in London in the early 1960s, where three friends- the narrator, Tony Webster and his close friends Colin and Alex  are joined for the final year of school by the enigmatic and intelligent Adrian Finn. Together, the boys pretentiously float around the sixth form, and like all cliques, revel in their superiority over their peers. When they are separated by university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica Ford, who turns out to be something of a manipulative succubus, and after a visit to her family one summer turns the relationship sour, she ultimately leaves him for Adrian. Infuriated, Tony writes them both (what he thinks) is a strongly worded but broadly magnanimous goodbye letter and cuts them both out of his life. We then get a brief run down of what happened to Tony during his adult life, including the news, in his early twenties, that Adrian had committed suicide. This is only half the story. It is the other half of the story that is really compelling. A letter arrives from the solicitor of Veronica's recently deceased mother. And here, the tragedy begins.

I enjoyed this book a tremendous amount, and finished it in a mere day. The prose style is musical, stark and haunting, and Barnes has a keen eye for what sort of things rise from our past to trouble our psyches.I found all of the characters entrirely believable and Tony's narrative voice is controlled and painfully self-aware. Motifs recur and rear their heads like hydra, and certain phrases stick with you, bore into you. This is real fiction, ladies and gentlemen, and it's the most lurid compliment I could pay this book when I say that it reminded me most of Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' and Margaret Atwood's 'The Blind Assassin', two books which also take a compellingly bleak look at the past lives of their narrators. I can unreservedly say that last year, the Booker judges chose an absolute humdinger. How it stands up to history remains to be seen, but as of right now, I think this is a book destined for future greatness.

Breaking Dawn (Stephenie Meyer)

So here I finally am again, at the end of my comprehensive re-read of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. I will say this, dear reader, the last book of the series, 'Breaking Dawn', is a doorstopper and a half, nearly eight hundred pages in hardback. Fitting in a book of that size around work commitments is an achievement, let me tell you. At times, I rather dreaded the proposition of wading through it, and wished fervently that I had not committed to re-reading the series, especially given the amount of exciting little literary novellas I was given for Christmas sitting on my shelves unread. In the end, all I really needed was an extended period of reading time to immerse myself into Meyer's world again, and that time presented itself in a series of train journeys last week. Given that set of circumstances, 'Breaking Dawn' is an absolutely fantastic read, with a few genuinely jaw dropping passages. This book is escapism personified, and to the detractors of this series, I will say this: there's nothing wrong with escapism.

'Breaking Dawn' begins as Bella Swan prepares for her wedding to Edward Cullen, and for the immortality that will follow. Mercifully, Meyer doesn't go into too much detail about these preparations, and the wedding is done and dusted fairly quickly, with a brief altercation with Jacob the only event to impinge on the harmony. Edward and Bella's honeymoon off the coast of Brazil is a bit more painful to read, particularly the rather cringy sex the still mortal Bella has with the very much immortal Edward, but the queasiness I felt while reading this subsided as soon as Bella's mysterious pregnancy manifested. We then switch perspectives to Jacob Black, which in itself is very interesting, as it starts weakly- Jacob initially turning out to be even more irritatingly angsty than Bella- but suddenly becomes the most compelling and best written part of the book, as we watch Jacob's hostility to the Cullens turn into protectiveness, respect and friendship as he helps them nurse the sickening Bella, who is being murdered by her own quickening child. At the moment the child is born, half-vampire and half-human, we switch back to Bella's narrative, and her new life as a vampire, which swiftly comes under threat from the dreaded Volturi, who desire the death of her miracle child and the acquisition of the "talented" individuals of the Cullen coven...but as you can probably guess, there is, unlike in 'Wuthering Heights', which Meyer has cribbed so consistently through the series, a happy ending...

Things I liked about this book: the genuine growth of the primary characters, who finally evolve out of the teenage archetypes Meyer had imprisoned them in for the duration of the first three books; the introduction of many more vampires and their various special abilities; Jacob's narrative voice which is surprisingly well executed after its initial chapters; the 'OMG' moments I experienced when I realised that Bella was pregnant and when I realised that Jacob had imprinted on Bella's daughter (that section is the best bit of writing in the entire series). Things I disliked about this book: the fact that there was not an apocalyptic battle between the Volturi and the Cullens/Quileutes; the fact that even four books in, Meyer can't resist dancing with cliché at least four times a page; dodgy descriptions of vamp sex; the fact Edward and Bella name their daughter Renesmée, surely the single dumbest name of all time.

Overall, you have to say that Meyer achieved something memorable here, one of the most successful teenage fiction franchise in history, a franchise that rewrote the myths on vampires and werewolves, captured the imaginations of millions and provided some damn fine page turning thrills. Yes there's some issues with her prose style, yes there's some issues with character development, but nobody can argue with her ability to spin a yarn. Hats off to you Steph. 100 million teenagers can't be wrong, can they?