Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

my body opening in anticipation of the relief to come, strange and unsavoury liquids beginning to gurgle
along mysterious internal pipes. You know how it feels. I looked in puzzlement up and down a long
corridor. No loo, but lots of doors leading to other hotel rooms. Oh.
It almost made me wish I owned some pyjamas.
Clive Barker's new novel is something of a departure for him. For the first third of the book you would
swear that it was a perfectly naturalistic novel about a homosexual photographer whose ex-partner is
dying of AIDS. Will Rabjohns specialises in photographs of endangered species. He is attacked by a polar
bear and suffers terrible injuries. In a coma he revisits his childhood and relives some of the important
episodes that have made him what he is. We meet the mysterious Jacob Steep and Rosa McGee and get
the first hints that all may not be what it seems to be. In Steep's company, Will is introduced to death -first
of moths, then birds and finally the death of the artist Thomas Simeon who is gnawed on by a fox.
There are reasons to believe that Simeon died two hundred years before Will was even born. He seems
to be a refugee from something called the Domus Mundi and a mad guru called Rukenau.
When Will regains consciousness the episodes of his childhood have assumed a new importance. He is
haunted by the ghost of the fox that gnawed on Simeon and by the idea of the Domus Mundi. What is
the connection between Jacob and Rosa and the Nilotic in a mysterious picture painted by Simeon before
he died? The novel gets darker and darker and the transcendental climax in the Domus Mundi itself is
truly awe inspiring. This is Barker's best novel to date.
Joseph Wambaugh is not a prolific writer, but his every novel is a treat. He writes stories about cops
(once he was a cop himself and he knows how it works). His novels are blackly humorous and cynical in
the extreme and Floaters is one of his darkest and funniest books. It is set in San Diego during the
Americas Cup. Two harbour cops called Fortney and Leeds patrol Mission Bay ogling beauties and pulling
decomposed corpses from the water. But their cosy routine is upset by the Americas Cup. San Diego is
aswarm with sailors, schemers, spies and saboteurs, not to mention the cuppies (cup groupies) who
lust for a sailor. The story revolves around a randy cuppie called Blaze, and a dastardly plot to sabotage
the New Zealand yacht Black Magic...
When I was seven years old I attended Withinfields County Junior Mixed School, a fancy name for a small
and utterly insignificant village school in the heart of Yorkshire. On Friday afternoons we had "optional" -we
did what all young children love to do; we played with clay and plasticine, splashed paint about,
hammered nails into wood -- fun stuff like that. We all looked forward to Friday afternoons.
The Yorkshire dialect that I grew up speaking was rich in double negatives, all of which we used to MEAN
the negative, not the positive that a strictly grammatical analysis insisted it really meant. (In later years I
knew that Mick Jagger was not really bragging when he claimed he couldn't get no satisfaction).
This common speech habit must have annoyed the teacher (a pedant at heart, his name was Mr Hanley
and I remember him well) and one Friday morning he gave us a lesson in grammar and told us all about
how double negatives REALLY worked. It was all very boring and nobody except me listened. Then he
asked the $64,000 question: "Who doesn't want to do no optional this afternoon?"
My hand went up. It hovered there alone in the class and the whisper went round the room. "Eee, look at
'im! 'E dun't want to do no optional! 'E's weird!"
You can guess what happened. I got to do optional that Friday, but I was all alone. The rest of the class
had ordinary lessons. I was not the most popular person in the world after that little exploit...
Jane Lindskold's novel Smoke and Mirrors is about a telepathic prostitute called Smokey. Her ability to
sense and respond to the unvoiced desires of her clients have made her the richest working girl on the
planet and the industrial secrets she steals and sells have gained her another fortune. But she is forced
to leave it all behind when she comes across traces of a cold, hard alien mind hiding in one of her clients.
Fortunately help is at hand -- by a strange coincidence her mother and father are visiting the planet and
in the nick of time she escapes with them. Much of the novel can be summed up as "in the nick of time".
Coincidence piles upon coincidence and really Smokey has quite a cosy time of it. Somehow the threat