February | 2013 | Guy Portman's Blog

The Earth Shifter

Feb 22 2013

This week I finished reading The Earth Shifter by Lada Ray.

The Earth Shifter by Lada Ray

The Earth Shifter is the first part of a paranormal YA trilogy written by the prolific Lada Ray.

Humanity is unaware how close the Earth came to ending on June 30th 1908. On that occasion it was saved by the mysterious Earth Keepers. The world is now under threat once again from the Comet of Karma and the The Earth Keepers must decide if the Earth is worth saving or if it is beyond redemption.
Teenager and Moscow resident Sasha Elfimova possesses powers that could change the fate of the Earth, as she is a Time and Mind Shifter, whose developing abilities are yet to be fully realised. Sasha’s mentor is a Siberian shaman named Tengis, who resides on the shores of the largest fresh water resource on the planet, the beautiful Lake Baikal. On the other side of the world in Chinatown, New York City, live Kei and Win, two enterprising twins of Chinese origin, one of whose destinies when combined with Sasha’s could alter the fate of mankind. Will destiny bring these two together to form an alliance that will decide the fate of our planet or is mankind destined to face annihilation?
The Earth Shifter is essentially a complex and diverse tale with a good versus evil theme, in which the author is adept at merging real world events such as the aforementioned meteorite explosion and explaining their continued relevance today. Though the book could best be described as a cosmic adventure thriller, it also combines fantasy and mystery elements and this along with its compelling narration of Russian history, embrace of the natural world and fascinating insights into Geopolitics assures that The Earth Shifter will not only appeal to a younger audience.
The second instalment is due for release next winter and it will undoubtedly be eagerly anticipated.

Follow Lada on Twitter – @LadaTweets

Glamorama

Feb 15 2013

This week I finished reading Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis, which I review below.

Glamorama

Victor Ward aka Victor Johnson is a male model living in Nineteen-nineties Manhattan. Victor is a vapid, soulless character, devoid of meaningful content, obsessed by celebrity culture and living an existence that revolves around social connections and physical appearance, abdominals being a particular obsession.

Prior to moving to New York, Victor attended the illustrious Camden College, which is evidently a haunt of the elite with many of Camden’s former students residing in Manhattan and appearing in the book. Victor is in a long-term relationship with model girlfriend Chloe, but has no qualms about seeing a host of other women, who include wealthy Damian’s girlfriend Alison. Victor had been planning to open a nightclub with Damian, but matters go awry when Damian discovers the affair.

Shortly thereafter Victor, who is increasingly suffering from mental turmoil, is visited by a mysterious private investigator, by the name of Palakon. Palakon persuades Victor to leave New York and travel to London, his mission to locate Jamie Fields, a former female pupil of Camden, who is apparently still in love with our protagonist. We follow Victor’s escapades, first on the journey across The Atlantic on the QE2 and then in London and later Paris as he finds his life entwined with a group of fashion models turned terrorists, led by the dangerous former male model Bobby Hughes. A confused and increasingly Xanax dependent Victor struggles to comprehend the events that he finds himself unwittingly involved in.

Glamorama can essentially be viewed as a satirical work, which is adept at capturing the hedonism of New York during this era. In typical Ellis fashion, the text is punctuated with numerous pop-culture references, in addition to the occasional vivid description of violence and prolonged graphic sexual encounters, which are not in every instance heterosexual in nature. The author is widely regarded as the master of dialogue and his skills are in evidence throughout the book’s four-hundred and eighty-two pages, with layer upon layer of speech and continual torrents of conscious thought. As a result the book though often comical and engaging is at times difficult and often extremely confusing. The reader is left undecided as to whether many of the events, particularly in the second half of the book, are actually real or are merely part of a constantly mentioned film set. It could be argued that the film set is not real and its presence is allegorical or maybe merely a comment on the protagonist Victor’s world view. At any rate it is not clear and there are many other bewildering elements such as the bizarrely numbered chapters of vastly varying lengths, which are for sections of the book in descending order while during other parts seemingly random.

To appreciate this book it is essential that the reader does not become overly obsessed with the myriad of unanswered questions, but instead allows themselves to surrender to the endless display of surfaces and be engulfed by the convoluted world of confusion, more akin to Burrough’s Naked Lunch than a novel, so unconstrained is it by the burden of plot. Glamorama is a polarising work by a polarising author that is unique, exploratory and free-flowing, in which the author evaluates how reality is actually structured.

Bret Easton Ellis’s most famous work, American Psycho is also reviewed on this site.

Downham Market

Feb 08 2013

It’s late morning and I’m driving through The Fens in Norfolk, making my way to the small town of Littleport. Having left plenty of time for the journey there is time to linger and I meander along the A1101 at a gentle pace, savouring the fresh Fen winter air gushing through the partially opened window whilst looking out at the vast expanse of fields either side of the road. I am accelerating over The Old Bedford River Bridge in the picturesque historical Fenland town of Wenley when I am met by the sight of water covering the road (see picture 1) and am forced to break hard, coming to a halt in the shallows.

On getting out the car and inspecting the severity of the flooding, it is apparent that it is too deep to attempt to drive through.

Though the Welney area is liable to flooding in the winter I have never seen the road covered or such extensive flooding along The Old Bedford (see below).

With my plans scuppered I head back on the route from which I came and with little to do I decide to make a stop for an early lunch in the Fenland market town of Downham Market, a place that I have visited periodically throughout my life. Overlooking the market area is the town’s most famous landmark, the black and white clock tower (see picture), which was erected in 1878.

The only other site that I can conceive of being of potential interest is St. Edmund’s church (see picture).

Diagonally opposite the church is Downham Tandoori (see below), my favourite Downham eatery, though admittedly the only place I’ve dined in the town in recent years. Downham Tandoori has a picture of the iconic clock on its menu. As I will be dining here this evening I decide to find alternative arrangements for lunch.

The next eatery I stumble across is the Chinese take-away Tasty House (see picture), a name which is supposed to whet the appetite but with premises that certainly do not.

Virtually next door to Tasty House is Millennium Pizza & Kebab, which utilises an abundance of colour in its depictions of the food items presented on its exterior (see picture). They are so bright however as to be virtually luminous, evoking thoughts of chemicals and radiation. At any rate the darkened exterior shows little sign of life and I move on.

In the pedestrianised shopping area near the town centre, I come across this Greggs (see picture), by far the largest member of the chain I have ever seen. Typically and until this moment I assumed universally that Greggs were always small establishments catering only for take-away, but this Greggs has a large dining area attached.

For those not familiar with the baking behemoth, Greggs are located throughout the land and offer an abundance of sandwiches and baked items, including but not limited to sausage rolls, steak bakes and tuna melts. I enter the bakery and purchase two sausage rolls, a packet of salt & vinegar crisps and a coca-cola, which I plan to eat in the dining area, but after discovering that the dining area is a place that hope deserted a long time ago, I make the decision to eat the items on-route to the car.

A Review of Flaubert in Egypt

Feb 01 2013

This week resident book reviewer Adam reviews Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert.

Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert

(Translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller)

In 1849, the twenty seven year old Flaubert read out the first draft of his hallucinatory masterpiece The Temptation of St. Anthony (see earlier review) to some friends. Less than encouraging, they urged him never to publish it. With only a couple of short stories to his name, but possessing the sort of fierce literary ambition incompatible with his mother’s suggestion that he find ‘a little job’, he set out with one of them, the writer and photographer Maxime du Camp, on a six month tour of Egypt, taking in Cairo, the Nile, the pyramids of Giza, the temples of Karnak, the Grotto of Samoun (a bizarre pit of mummified humans and animals), and numerous bordellos and bathhouses along the way.

The result is a vivid, sensuous account of a travel experience, as Flaubert pays attention to details that lesser writers would cast aside as insignificant: a handshake between a man on a camel and a man on the ground; a monkey pleasuring a donkey in the street; a boy offering his mother for five paras and wishing him a ‘long prick’. These last two demonstrate the largely lubricious tone of proceedings. Street rapes by locals are dispassionatley reported, brief homosexual encounters in steam rooms are casually averred, while his brothel experiences are meticulously set down, particularly his fondness for the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, whom he visits multiple times.

As sleazy as this sounds, akin to the wanderings of a Burroughsian sex tourist (see review of The Soft Machine), it could perhaps be viewed as part of a wider literary sensibility. Flaubert was apparently bored by du Camp’s painstaking photographic work in the temples and tombs, and his descriptions tend less towards apprehending the ruins of antiquity than the life of the people in the streets. However, his fascination with the ancient world is in evidence, for example in his rapturous, almost fearful prose upon seeing the Great Sphinx rise out of the desert at Giza, a statue that he would have known only from drawings.

Flaubert’s eye for scatological detail can be seen later in his brilliant classical epic Salaambo. No doubt this trip was a major inspiration. A visit to a hospital provides ample material, such as, not wishing to be too graphic, the anal chancres of a group of syphilitic Mamelukes. Perhaps, that was too graphic.

From copious letters and journals, Francis Steegmuller has edited a coherent and palatable account, providing useful explanatory notes along the way. Although it is certainly a book of interest for Flaubert fans, there is enough piquant material to make it a lively read. If you like things like anal chancres, of course…