Enter the Quaniverse

It’s Not Yet Dark: A Memoir by Simon Fitzmaurice
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a filmmaker, Simon Fitzmaurice knows how to tell a story. His memoir ‘It’s Not Yet Dark’, is written with an engaging narrative and voice and often in short, poetic scenes, it feels like the book is as much movie as a memoir.

For a book about slowly losing control of one’s body, it’s surprisingly hopeful. Fitzmaurice is unabashedly romantic and his love for his wife and family are the framework for the story. His voice and his attitude is direct and hopeful. He’s philosophical but not pessimistic. He doesn’t invite pity.

At one point, he digresses from the story to make a very specific point about health policy and NLS (about ventilation) and while I understand that he felt it important to make this point (and books don’t need to be apolitical), I found the change in tone jarring, and took away from the short, jazzy sentences which make up most of the book.

The book has been out for a few years in Ireland and the UK but has just been released in the USA. It’s a good time for a book like this. In a recent interview in People magazine, he said “I’m in love with this life, and it’s worth every hardship to me.” In these dark times, I hope this book finds a good readership with its message of hope and perseverance and indeed, a love of life. And may Fitzmaurice, like Stephen Hawking who was also told he only had two years to live upon diagnosis with ALS, live a long life. He clearly has more films to make and more books to write.

View all my reviews

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes a story about a book is enough to get me to read the book itself… and a Guardian profile, describing how Faber has decided this is his last book, and wrote it over a long period of time during which his wife died of cancer, and that he is an innovative writer that plays with different genres… all of that intrigued me enough to download it.

Yet at first I was not so engaged. I’m totally up for science fiction and dystopian fiction, and am a huge fan of Margaret Atwood’s forays into the future, and I thought the premise was interesting enough: a preacher recruited by a corporation to minister to an alien population near their new colony. But I couldn’t really grab onto something. I didn’t love the narrator and his faith, a reformed drug addict, pious and always preaching. The letters back and forth with his wife, worried about their cat (and I should have liked this part, being a cat-owner) were mundane, and the world falling apart that she describes a little too close to the last weeks of typhoons, floods and civil unrest around the world. I was a bit perturbed early on that many of the human characters are described first and foremost by the colour of their skin and their race upon first meeting them. I didn’t love the voice or narrative style.

What I was most interested in was the local inhabitants of the planet, and how their physicality and nature are slowly revealed. The descriptions of the new planet, its weather systems and how the colony is surviving… also: interesting. And there was certainly enough to keep me going until I found myself more and more immersed. The letters between husband and wife become much deeper, raising questions about how we are responsible to the ones we love, how to manage distance or not, how self-centred we can, what roles we play. I found myself feeling affection for the Oasans in their robes, each one of a different colour, and their odd language. And in the end, I was surprised at how touched I felt by the book, having entered a strange new world for the time of reading it.

Another few reviews on Goodreads take issue with an unfinished feeling at the end but it felt appropriate to me that a book that slowly opened itself to me would not come to neat conclusions.

View all my reviews