The Firebird Trilogy by Nick Green reviewed by Julia Jones

I've just read the three parts of Nick Green's Firebird Trilogy as one big book. It's been a terrific experience and I'd happily go back to the beginning and start again.

Leo Lloyd Jones is a teenage joy-rider from Salford who is picked – accidentally, he assumes – to be part of an elite group of youngsters who might be required to rehabilitate the world in the case of cosmic catastrophe. This is Project Firebird. Now I don't normally do much in the way of cosmic catastrophe and my appetite for dystopias is distinctly limited. But I love adventure and stroppy teenagers and their capacity for moral decisions and courage and emotion and idealism and that's what Project Firebird gave me.

Leo's quality is leadership, the indefinable sort which is something quite different from ambition or the desire for power. Most of the time he's completely unaware of it but when push comes to shove he's usually able to make the right choices and find the words to inspire others. On his first day at Project Firebird he is sitting next to fourteen year old Rhys Carnavon, the fit, good-looking ' natural leader' who has just trekked back from Antarctica after witnessing the death of his scientist father. The shifting relationship between Leo and Rhys is a main plot strand running throughout the trilogy. It's complex, does not allow for second guessing and has a resonance beyond the individual characters. It's one of the reasons I'd like to read the trilogy again.

Plotting is excellent throughout. For me the books really began to sing at the shift between volumes one and two, Project Firebird to Firebird Dawn. The shock at the beginning of the second volume was, I thought, brilliantly managed – especially when an unexpected twist and additional layer of complexity was revealed later in the book. Another welcome moment was the emergence into the open air. Nick Green seems to be particularly good at evoking effects of light on landscape and glistening natural beauty. Not that the post-disaster countryside is uniformly lovely: there are methane flares from pockets of rotting garbage and a glimpse of a survivor spending his (short) life melting down abandoned plastic. One imaginative insight I especially enjoyed was Leo's occasional sense of his 'own' landscape – Salford, Manchester, the M6 motorway – buried a thousand years below the landscape on which he and his friends are struggling to survive.

There's cruelty and loss in this second volume but I feel somehow that it's the most human of the three. That's a descriptive not an evaluative point. The mainly female Blackwater village, the ruthless Dustral raids are small scale in comparison with the brutalities and stark struggles for existence in the final volume Firebird Radiant. That's fine. I think trilogies should work rather like symphonies with themes introduced, developed and brought to some resounding climax. AS such, however there the obvious danger or predictability and one of Nick Green's clevernesses in his third volume is to counterpoint the megalomaniac’s bid for global domination with the intimate domesticities of broken nights and nappy changing.

There are thrilling action sequences, delicate moments of relationship and some extraordinarily fine descriptive writing throughout the trilogy. There's also plenty of intellectual content and much to reflect on and discuss in our management of the natural world. I rather hope that we are sufficiently co-operative to establish a Global Seed bank to preserve crop varieties – currently I hear more about fragmentation and restrictive patenting. These books could be offered to consumers of The Hunger Games or Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Instead each volume is available for £1.85 on Kindle. I don't think this is ideological statement: I think this is 21st century publishing's failure.

Divided Loyalties by Dennis Hamley ... reviewed by Julia Jones

Dennis Hamley has set himself a challenging task -- republishing the first two volumes of his 'Ellen' Trilogy within a month of each other while still at work on the final part -- Unfinished Business.  Ellen's People came out in August and has been reviewed both here and on the ABBA site: Divided Loyalties appeared on schedule earlier this month (September).
   It's possibly not quite as ambitious a programme as Author's Electric Nick Green who bought out all three volumes of the Firebird Trilogy on a single day  but I would guess it still means that Dennis will have been foregoing some of the gentler pleasures of retirement. Will he be yearning for the uber-professionalism of Walker Books, the original publishers of Divided Loyalties?  Possibly, when engaged in fruitless negotiation about cover designs and managing all the nitty-gritty jobs that seem almost as demanding as writing. Certainly not when they then pulled out of publishing the concluding volume. I believe Nick Green suffered a similar let down in the final stages of a previous series.
   So here we have two authors, free to make their own choices about timing the release of their work. Neither chooses the book-a-year model of corporate publishing: one goes for broke on a single day, the other is publishing in monthly parts, making the readers wait but not asking them to wait too long. I used a six-month time scale for my 'Strong Winds' trilogy, though that was as much to suit my own circumstances as to attract / retain an audience. And still, three years on, the first volume outsells the other two by a margin that seems to replicate the worst features of primogeniture. Will Nick and Dennis find the same or will their alternative timetables even things up?
   It seemed to me that the second volume was the hardest to write -- how quickly could I move on, how much sign-posting and reiteration would be necessary? How to conclude without actually completing? I was correspondingly fascinated to see how Dennis Hamley could ensure that Divided Loyalties was not eclipsed by its successful older sister? By writing a completely different book -- both structurally and thematically. Divided Loyalties is independent from chapter one.
   When I reviewed Ellen's People  I mentioned that I was looking forward to following Ellen in her post-war future as she and her German husband, Matthias, attempted to settle back into their possibly depressed 1920s village. I think I'd expected some sort of fictional Akenfield. Not a bit of it! Hamley leaps the reader forward more than a decade and Divided Loyalties opens in 1935 with Ellen and Matthias's stroppy oldest son, Walter, blasting away at clay pigeon targets and wishing they were his equable, understanding father.
   Ellen's primary role in this novel is as the loved and loving mother: most of the fictional interest lies with the next generation. Walter is troubled, angry, confused and it's a strength of Hamley's characterization that he doesn't offer the easy reconciliation that this reader, at least, was longing for. There is also Helmut, the Nazi cousin, Paul and Anna the younger and more conventionally talented children. They've had an easier upbringing as Matthias and Ellen have prospered -- though Matthias will discover that even twenty years' blameless residence may not be enough to spare him when England and Germany go to war again.
   In my review of Ellen's People I  mentioned that it didn't tell me anything much about WW1 that I didn't already know (I hope I made it clear that this was an observation not a criticism -- and might, anyway, only be personal). Divided Loyalties, the WW2 novel, has taken me onto less familiar ground -- such as the forced evacuation of internees to Canada. I enjoyed being RAF ground crew, then a rear-gunner with Walter and a tank commander in the Russian campaign with Helmut. This is a novel with strong male characters and Hamley portrays their lives on active service with authority.
   Plot-wise it's a pleasure to have known Ellen in her younger days and there are some back references to Ellen's People but it's certainly not essential.  In fact I can imagine young male readers going straight for Divided Loyalties with never a glance behind them. I wonder what the third volume will hold -- I'm certainly not going to attempt any predictions!

Divided Loyalties by Dennis Hamley was first published by Walkter Books in 2008 and has now been reissued by the Blank Page Press

The Storm Bottle by Nick Green

Reviewed by Susan Price.

I’ve heard consistently good things about Nick Green’s novels –

'The Storm Bottle' by Nick Green

and I know him to be a witty blogger – but this is the first book of his I’ve read.

It’s a beautiful, transporting fantasy, set in Bermuda. The heat, the seas, the colours and scents, the sea-breezes of the island are a constant, and wonderfully evoked. I’ve never been to Bermuda, but after reading this book, I felt I had a sense of it. There’s one phrase, describing the aftermath of a tropical storm – the ‘shaken tin-foil glitter’ of the bright sun shining on the wet island. I could see it.

The book concerns characters who are out of place. The engaging heroine, Bibi, has felt out of place for her entire life. She’s a tom-boy, and bound up with the grief she feels for her dead mother is the knowledge that she was never the girlie-girl her mother wanted.

Her relationship with her rich father is amiable rather than close. So long as they can talk about sailing and boats, they get along fine. But Bibi rather scorns her father’s big, expensive boat. She prefers the little sailing boat belonging to her Bermudan friend, Hal, because sailing it brings her closer to the winds and currents. She loves Bermuda and its seas passionately.

Her father has married again, and this marriage has provided Bibi with a step-brother, Michael. He has been ripped from his scholarship-place at choir-school, from his friends, from Britain – and is truly out of place in hot, bright Bermuda. He is sulky and resentful.

Bibi does her best to befriend him, trying to interest him in sailing and her pirate games, but he is unresponsive until, out sailing on Hal’s boat, they see a wild dolphin. Michael is so excited by the thought of swimming with it that Bibi almost likes him. Both of them dive in and, to her surprise Bibi, who has swum all her life, finds that Michael is the stronger swimmer.

This leads him into trouble, however. Despite Hal’s warnings, he ventures too far from the boat and is caught in the current.

Bibi thinks he is lost when, ‘Foam unzipped the waves and Michael’s pale body washed up into the sunshine…[Bibi] saw a crescent fin, a glass-boulder forehead. The dolphin…had returned.’ A 'glass-boulder forehead' - Nick Green has a knack for hitting on the perfect descriptive phrase.

But the dolphin has done more than return Michael to the surface. To save his life, it has exchanged souls with him.

If you can make this imaginative leap, whether young adult or older adult, you will love this book. If you can’t, you probably won’t. If you think all fantasy is daft, then you’ll think this daft too.

Fantasy is like any other genre. It can be written simplistically, as nothing but wish-fulfillment or gimmickry – and that sort of writing tends to be daft, whether it’s written in the Romance genre, or Crime, Science-Fiction or Thriller.

Or, as with any other genre, Fantasy can be written thoughtfully. It can be used as a way of alienating us from the everyday world we take for granted, so that we have to re-examine and re-evaluate it. Storm Bottle does this.

After the accident, the book follows Bibi on shore, and Michael in his new life.

On shore, in hospital, Michael is in a coma, and when he wakes, his confusion is assumed to be caused by brain-damage. His desperate mother smothers him with protective love. His new step-father withdraws, unable to cope – just as he withdrew from Bibi after her mother’s death, becoming an amiable but distant workaholic.

Only Bibi tries to understand the boy on his own terms. It is she who realises that the boy is not a brain-damaged Michael, but someone - something - else altogether.

Meanwhile, out at sea, Michael is also coming to terms with a whole new body and way of  life. He finds himself swimming with a dolphin pod – two males, Pedro and Sancho, and an injured female, Jill, who is considered, by the males, to be their ‘property.’

The story may have fantastical elements, but the account of dolphin life is based on reality. These dolphins are not the cute, winsome mascots of New Age Harmony seen on a thousand posters, mouse-mats, t-shirts, pendents etc. They are predators, hunting and killing prey, and being hunted as prey by others.

They are intelligent, and they communicate – their clicks and whistles are translated into words for our benefit. But their intelligence is mostly used for catching fish, fighting with other dolphins, escaping from sharks and killer-whales – and capturing females, because the more females a pod has, the more status it has.

The chapters about Michael’s dolphin life are fascinating and often beautiful. The dolphins call themselves ‘rainvoices’, because the sounds they make are like rain falling on the ocean’s surface. They teach Michael how to use his dolphin-body’s ‘voice-eye’, or sonar.

Jill, the injured dolphin, is the sister of the dolphin Michael has become, and looks to him for food she can no longer catch for herself. Her injury has been caused by a fishing line which has wrapped itself round her tail, drawing tighter and tighter until it has sliced off a fin. Michael, with his human understanding, is able to see how to unravel it, and saves her from further injury – and from the endurance of constant pain.

Whereas his step-sister on land, Bibi, was tough and, in many ways, braver and more knowledgable than him, he now finds himself with an adoptive sister who, though more knowledgeable about life underwater, is also more helpless. In taking over as her protector and helper, he becomes close to her. In short, the sulky boy has to dolphin-up – but doesn’t always succeed. After all, as the dolphin Jill observes, ‘You are just a child, aren’t you?’

Michael seeks a way back to his own body and life on land. The other dolphins don’t know how to help, but lead him on a journey to consult ‘The Tidings.’ Michael understands this as some sort of archive, and is puzzled as to how such a thing can exist – until he discovers it to be the long, long memories of Humpback Whales, known to the dolphins as ‘Deep Singers.’

‘The humpack whale was too far ahead to see, even with his voice eye. Yet its song built majestic architectures around him, pillars of tone and melodious arches, bearing the weight of words.’

The whales remember a similar exchange of souls in the distant past, and give Michael hope that he can return to his own body.

Meanwhile, on land, Bibi and Rodrigez, the dolphin-in-human-form, have devised a way to send a message to Michael, using ‘a message in a bottle.’ Bibi sacrifices her beloved collection of antique bottles, throwing them into the sea with a one-word clue. They hope that the sea-borne Michael will find one of the bottles, decipher the clue, and so meet them at a certain cove where, perhaps, they can swop bodies again.

But their plans are disrupted when Michael’s mother leaves Bibi’s father. She intends to take her son home to Britain.

This forces the two young people to run away, and camp out on one of Bermuda’s off-shore islands, while the police search for them.

The finale brings together dolphins, human children and a great storm. I don’t think it will be giving away too much to say that Michael succeeds in returning to his human body – but Nick Green bravely resists the neat ending. He goes beyond that, and provides a more original ending, but one that is right for the book, and the characters.

A beautiful, invigorating fantasy, full of sea and sun, and deep, cool waters.

But also a fantasy which, by distorting reality, looks at how, if you are at odds with your surroundings, and feel you don’t fit, you can grow into your situation – or, with courage, break free of it and follow your own way.

The Storm Bottle